For nearly a hundred years now we have been upbuilding the railroad structure of the world. America pioneered in its creation. Our fathers and our fathers' fathers cannot now remember the day when the call of the iron horse was not heard across the land. The railroad train has become part and parcel of our lives. And even though in these days with our motor cars at the curb we may have come to scorn the railroad train for our own short travels, we know full well that it brings the milk to our doorstep, the coal to our bins, the provender to our larders. It helps weave the fabric upon our backs, build the shoes upon our feet, form the hats upon our heads. At every corner, every turn, we are dependent upon the railroad. Therefore there is not a man or a woman in the entire United States to whom its present plight should not be of the keenest interest and importance.
We were promised a complete solution of our transport troubles with the hurried passage two years ago of the Esch-Cummins Bill, now known officially as the Transportation Act. Have we reached that solution, or anything like unto a solution?
You do not have to ask the average man twice for an answer to that question. He knows. If he is a business man he knows doubly well. He knows that for the last ten years our American railroad system has been in something of a decline. A decade ago it was at the zenith of its efficiency. For eighty years it had been climbing upward; for the last ten it has been slipping backward. Oh, yes, I do know its war record. It _was_ a fine record and one of which every American should be duly proud. There is hardly a physician, however, who has not seen a patient, terribly sick, under the stress of great emergency rise magnificently to a definite situation of supreme importance. So four years ago rose our sick man of American business. And now he has gone to bed more ill than ever before while many doctors quarrel about his case.
And still he functions. The sick-abed man of our American business still renders the all-necessary service that none but him really can render. Fortunately perhaps American business itself at this moment is not in the very best of health. One shudders to think what would happen if industry all the way across the land were again in its top notches of production. It is not the least of the perplexing phases of this all-perplexing railroad problem of ours--the question, when traffic shall again rise (as it certainly will) to normal volume, to say nothing of any abnormal volume, of how our weakened railroad structure will meet it.