THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



MARCH, 1887. 



AEE RAILROADS PUBLIC ENEMIES? 



By APPLETON MORGAN. 



THE American Railroad, as an institution, is not immaculate. Its 

 general offices are no more insured against entrance of designing 

 and wickedly-minded men than is the pulpit, the Sunday-school, or 

 the strawberry-festival. Granted, however, that, like most human 

 concerns, the American railroad needs reformation, the very con- 

 siderable question arises, Where shall we look for the reformer ? It 

 has not yet come, perhaps, to be a principle in economics that the 

 safest and most expert administrator of a specialty is the one who 

 has bad the least practical experience thereof. But there nevertheless 

 appears to be, if not an exact enunciation of sucb a principle, a by no 

 means unusual tendency to sucb a practice. A great transatlantic 

 steamship, en route from shore to shore, or a limited express train, 

 with its costly freightage of packed Pullman, express, and baggage 

 carriages, easily represents millions in money value, besides its human 

 freightage. The captain, the conductor, the engineers, and crew are 

 picked men, raised to their several responsibilities through every 

 lower grade of drill and experience, adapted eacb to his part by long 

 usuetude : who have been intrusted with all this precious burden by 

 those who must answer with their fortunes, their liberty even, for the 

 waste of its loss. Let the great steamship founder, the limited crash 

 through a trestle — living or dead, these men will be found at their 

 posts. But there will never fail of gifted gentlemen, eminent con- 

 versationalists, ready writers to tbe newspapers, who happened to be 

 in their downy beds while these men were perishing, but who, never- 

 theless, will tell us exactly what this company and their picked em- 

 ployes should have done, and how the catastrophe might have been 

 avoided. The design of this paper is to call attention to a recent 

 capital instance of this tendency. 

 VOL. xxx. — 37 



