578 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The problem of railway management and operation has grown so 

 intricate ; so vast, so complicated and enormous, that it is a maxim 

 that no one man, whatever his habitude, knows "how to run a rail- 

 road." The executive officer, the auditor, superintendent or actuary 

 of twenty-five years' service, instead of having kept abi*east of his em- 

 ployment, finds that his service has outgrown him, not in fact alone, 

 but in proportion ; and that he can deal with remote details only 

 when concreted by his subordinates into results which in turn are his 

 details. He is himself only the pendulum of the clock-work, the 

 governor of the engine ; without his co-operatives and assistants he is 

 powerless, although at the outset of his quarter-century he may have 

 been equal to every item of his department. 



Take a single trunk line connecting the city of New York with 

 that Western focus to which, like Rome, all roads lead — Chicago. 

 Every one of its army of eighty thousand employes knows his duty : 

 his duty, often duplicated, perhaps, yet not duplicated, since every 

 item of circumstance must daily and hourly vary it. From the presi- 

 dent to the track-walker, no single individual could justify his em- 

 ployment for an instant, did he not, besides his routine, know pre- 

 cisely the single and only proper thing to do to save life and property 

 in any contingency, foreseen or unforeseen ; and, moreover, how in 

 the performance not to swerve one atom below or above his exact 

 prerogative. And if — in operation, the reciprocal duties of these 

 eighty thousand must be exactly and incessantly performed in order 

 that every passenger and every pound of freight shall reach its de- 

 barkation in safety — what single mind can grasp the relation of num- 

 berless such trunk-lines to the great public who trust their lives, 

 persons, and property to them all ? Add to this situation that this 

 public, having largely invested their fortunes in these very transport- 

 ing lines, arc dependent for its incomes from their prosperity. Does 

 not the great ramification strike us as one rather too enormous for 

 any single recipe to meet, or to be guided by any one infallible and 

 inexorable rule of constant and rigid procedure ? 



There is not a single criticism of railway management or outbreak 

 of popular anti-railway feeling which has not its own perfectly well- 

 known periodicity. As a rule, they lapse with time and disappear 

 without exposition. But that all these criticisms and complaints 

 should be carefully clipped, hoarded, pasted together, and sent out as 

 a monograph signed by one name, is an occurrence so exceptional that 

 its occasion might seem to warrant a replication to the array, once for 

 all. Such an occasion seems the appearance of a handsome volume 

 from an eminent press, which not only deals with the entire problem 

 above suggested as a whole (the " Railways and the Republic," by 

 James F. Hudson, New York, 1886), but impresses further as com- 

 piled by a gentleman who not only has never been engaged in the 

 management of railways, operatively or financially, but has never dis- 



