FOUR YEARS' RETROSPECT. During the last four years the American railroad has been in a seething cauldron of publicity; a good deal of refuse has risen to the surface and has needed to be skimmed off,--but I think I do not violate any confidence in saying that not all of it has come from the body of the railroad. Part of it seems to consist of political bacteria and defunct statutes which attempted to violate the voice of the people,--the Constitution which legislators had sworn to support. And in this connection, perhaps I ought, in passing, to say a word which has rarely been spoken in defense of the railroads, by pointing out the shame of putting them to the great cost of proving in the courts the unconstitutionality of statutes which ought never to have been enacted because they were never valid. In the last four years there has been much noise; the air has been filled with shouts and cries, and more or less dust. Hysteria and virtue, although really not at all alike, became confused, and a very large percentage of the public absorbed the idea that the railroad highways are public property, forgetting that all of us are absolutely dependent upon private capital for the American railroad of today. Again, we seem to have been upon a storm-tossed ocean. Fortunate are we that through it all has run the Gulf Stream of our wonderful American resources. If it were not for that, we should all have been ruined. We have survived, but the pity of it is to think how much better off we might be, if "We, the People of the United States," would, in financial legislation, railroad regulation and other matters, only exercise our wisdom as much as we do our power. Legislation has been restrictive, not constructive. There is very little in it, thus far, to help the railroad. Nearly everything seems to have been thought of, except provision for money or for improving credit so as to command cheap money. The country has been flooded with conflicting laws and still the cry goes up for more bureaucratic power and more statutes. It reminds me of an immigration meeting in Mississippi: The court-house was filled with an assemblage of white people, and when the meeting adjourned an old darkey asked one of the gentlemen who came out of the court-house what the meeting was for. The reply was that it was an immigration meeting. "What is dat?" asked the darkey, to which the gentleman responded, "We want to get more white people from the North and East to settle here." Whereupon the darkey said, "Foh de Lawd's sake, Majah, dars moh white people in dis county now dan us niggahs can support!"