rintendent, and for
a long time in charge of the Harlem Railroad. He told me this
incident. We decided to put in effect as a check upon the
conductors a system by which a conductor, when a fare was paid
on the train, must tear from a book a receipt which he gave to
the passenger, and mark the amount on the stub from which the
receipt was torn. Soon after a committee of conductors called
upon Mr. Bissell and asked for an increase of pay. "Why," Bissell
asked, "boys, why do you ask for that now?"

After a rather embarrassing pause the oldest conductor said:
"Mr. Bissell, you have been a conductor yourself."

This half century and six years during which I have been in the
service of the New York Central Railroad has been a time of
unusual pleasure and remarkably free from friction or trouble.
In this intimate association with the railroad managers of the
United States I have found the choicest friendships and the most
enduring. The railroad manager is rarely a large stockholder,
but he is a most devoted and efficient officer of his company.
He gives to its service, for the public, the employees, the
investors, and the company, all that there is in him. In too many
instances, because these officers do not get relief from their labor
by variation of their work, they die exhausted before their time.

The story graphically told by one of the oldest and ablest of
railroad men, Mr. Marvin Hughitt, for a long time president and
now chairman of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, illustrates
what the railroad does for the country. Twenty-five years ago the
Northwestern extended its lines through Northern Iowa. Mr. Hughitt
drove over the proposed extension on a buckboard. The country
was sparsely settled because the farmers could not get their
products to market, and the land was selling at six dollars per acre.

In a quarter of a century prosperous villages and cities had grown
up along the line, and farms were selling at over three hundred
dollars per acre. While this enormous profit from six dollars
per acre to over three hundred has come to the settlers who held
on to their farms because of the possibilities produced by the
railroad, the people whose capital built the road must remain
satisfied with a moderate return by way of dividend and interest,
and without any enhancement of their capital, but those investors
should be protected by the State and the people to whom their
capital expenditures have been such