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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX. No. 1254 



nized a great duty to the fulfillment of whicli 

 we must devote ourselves and to whicli we gave 

 our national life and our nation's full re- 

 sources. 



But while our country entered on this task 

 with no thought of gain, we have, in the ac- 

 complishment of duty, received great gain, not 

 only in the spiritual uplift as a nation that we 

 must feel in the realization of what as a na- 

 tion we have done, but in the material bene- 

 fits that have come to us from the new condi- 

 tions forced by war necessities in our business 

 life. These conditions are so many and involve 

 such large and co^mplex issues that they are 

 staggering in their contemplation. Take the 

 railroad situation alone, and consider the im- 

 m.ense gain and enlightenment to the country 

 resulting from the far-reaching changes in the 

 government's attitude toward railroad man- 

 agement, necessitated by the war. 



For years — for a generation — thoughtful and 

 informed men have realized the want of logic 

 and of business sense typified and enforced by 

 national legislation in the Sherman Act and 

 by the countless restrictive impositions of 

 sftate legislatures on the proper and business- 

 like management of our railroads — ^preventing 

 pooling — forcing in the fierce competition for 

 business the routing of freight over unneces- 

 sarily long routes — -compelling absurdly low 

 rates for service — and other restrictions gen- 

 erally having their incentive in political ex- 

 pediency rather than in careful economic 

 study. 



- The public has erroneously been taught to 

 believe that drastic uneconomic competition 

 between our railroads, and also between our 

 industries, should be encouraged, and indeed 

 enforced as the law of the land, instead of tha 

 encouragement of wise economic cooperative 

 regulation and understanding, tending to se- 

 cure the best results at a minimum of waste in 

 efiort and money. 



The war came — urgent war needs in trans- 

 portation involving the transport of hundreds 

 of thousands of soldiers and of enormous 

 quantities of material, made essential coopera- 

 tive management of our transportation lines. 

 A Direetor-Gieneral of Railroads was appointed 



— and presto. In a night shall we say — all the 

 unnecessary and vexatious restrictions on co- 

 operative methods in our transportation sys- 

 tems were set aside — ^the government instinc- 

 tively adopted business methods in the man- 

 agement of business enterprises, the Sherman 

 Act was ignored, and the Interstate Commerce 

 Commission was relegated for the time to dig- 

 nified isolation and a condition of innocuous 

 desuetude. For years the railroads had urged 

 and shown the impossibility of keeping up 

 their plants and equipment and of rendering 

 due and proper service without proper and 

 adequate remuneration in freight and pas- 

 senger rates. The government, suddenly sad- 

 dled with the actual responsibility of operation, 

 and 'brought fact to face with a realization that 

 the railroads it had taken over could not be 

 run on air, brushed aside statute law and po- 

 litical criticism, and summarily, as a war 

 measure, raised the charges for passenger and 

 freight service, in reality a measure long 

 needed in peace — and the public accepted it 

 all — and labor benefited by increases in pay 

 which the public was forced to provide. In in- 

 dustry the same lesson was enforced by the 

 war. We were suddenly brought to an ap- 

 preciation of the fact that Germany's conser- 

 vation policy in her support of the practise of 

 cooperative effort rather than that of destruc- 

 tive competition had buUt up an organization 

 of economic strength that enabled her, from 

 her national resources at home, without out- 

 gide aid, to play the aggressive and enormously 

 strong part she maintained up to the very end 

 of the war. 



The war has, in transportation and in na- 

 (tional industry, taught and enforced on our 

 nation — quick to learn — these lessons of waste 

 in the past and of future economic manage- 

 ment by joint cooperative effort, and of all the 

 lessons of conservation of our resources taught 

 by the war, those of needed cooperative effort 

 in our railroad and indnstrial interests are 

 perhaps the most prominent and important in 

 a material sense, and the lesson has been one 

 not only to and for the public and our national 

 and state authorities, but one by which those 

 interests are directly benefiting. The railroad 



