A profound change--would that it were already complete!--is coming about in this great field of transportation business. It is perceived that many of the evils to which I have alluded were incident to the speculative periods of construction and development in a new country. The better leaders in the business of railway administration now see clearly that it is the duty of the railroads to work with and for the public and not against it. The railroads are gradually passing out of the hands of the stockjobbers and speculators, into the control of trained administrators. It is to be remembered that in a country like ours, the largest single branch of organized administration is that of the railroads. We have reached a point where their relations to all the elaborate interests of the community are such that their public character becomes more and more pronounced and evident. It was only the other day that a brilliant railway administrator, Mr. Charles S. Mellen, recently president of the Northern Pacific, and now president of the New York, New Haven & Hartford system, made some statements in an address to the business men of Hartford at a Board of Trade meeting. With much else of the same import, he made the following significant remarks:
"If corporations are to continue to do their work as they are best fitted to, those qualities in their representatives that have resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the background.
"They must come out into the open and see and be seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what they want and no more, and then be prepared to explain satisfactorily what advantage will accrue to the public if they are given their desires, for they are permitted to exist not that they may make money solely, but that they may effectively serve those from whom they derive their power. Publicity should rule now. Publicity, and not secrecy, will win hereafter, and laws will be construed by their intent and not killed by their letter; otherwise public utilities will be owned and operated by the public which created them, even though the service be less efficient and the result less satisfactory from a financial standpoint."