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American from Vermont who made good in Minnesota, was translated by chance into better jobs in Baltimore and New York and Chicago, and finally has become officially the head of the Baltimore & Ohio and unofficially the spokesman of the railroad world. That job, and what Mr. Willard seems to be trying to do with it, make up the rest of this record. To be the president of the Baltimore & Ohio is a large task; but to be the chosen "leading man" in American railroad administrative politics makes a much larger story.

It is well to say here, because misunderstandings are so easy to create, that the comment in this article on railroad matters and policies does not come from Mr. Willard, nor from any other railroad head. It expresses no official ideas or opinion. It is a layman's plain comment on a subject of national interest.

The railroad world in the United States is in a dilemma. That is, of course, largely its own fault. Railroad policies and railroad politics in this country contained, during the last twenty years, so much that has been arbitrary, unjust, extortionate, and crooked that the railroads, as a whole, lost the confidence of the people and became objects of distrust. At times the people seemed bent upon destroying them, and it seemed almost impossible for the railroads, either individually or as a collection of companies, to get a hearing at all before the bar of public opinion.

The result has been a state of uncertainty in the railroad business. Most of the old leaders of the railroad world, the men who made the policies and dictated the railroad terms of ten years ago, are discarded. The public cares little what they do and less what they say. It is taken for granted that their policies and purposes are purely selfish, born of a desire for larger dividends, larger salaries, and larger emoluments. The public is almost savage in its attitude toward these men and toward the things they are supposed to represent. That temper finds expression in a dozen great revelations of railroad mismanagement, in bitter speeches in the legislatures of the country, and in hundreds of bills intro

duced and passed in all the halls where the lawmakers of the Nation gather.

The natural result in the market-places of the world has followed. The credit of the American roads has sunk to the lowest level, not only here but in Europe, that it has seen since the great panic of 1893. Some of the weaker roads have already sought the refuge of receivership. American railroads are engaged in ar effort to rehabilitate their character and their credit.

Always, in such a crisis, whether in .nation, railroad, industrial company, firm. church, or State, new men arise to lead the forces that fight for new things When the last great critical battle of the railroads took place it was fought through to the bitter end. It was, however, a civi war, in which railroad sought to destrov railroad and succeeded. It was a bitter war of rates, rebates, discriminations, tricks, and subterfuges. It wrecked more than a third of the railroads of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. and created the ruins from which were built the fortunes and the empires of the passing generation of railroad kings.

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At the end of it, when nearly all the smaller and the weaker roads had fallen. and when the giants of the railroad kingdom alone stood fairly firm upon their feet. there came a man who led the way out of war into peace, and out of ruin into prosperity. He was a man strong enough to command the attention of his peers. and big enough to do the task he set himself. He was the president of the most powerful railroad, the Pennsylvania. He did not, of course, dominate the railroads. He merely led them, bringing them together to common policies for the interest of all, holding them firm when they seemed to waver, establishing common policies for all, mending broken heads when he had to, and breaking heads anew if the interest of the whole demanded it.

The leadership of Mr. Cassatt fifteen years ago cannot be repeated in kind to-day. There is no need for it. To stop the civil war in which the railroads were destroying themselves, he had to strike out a policy that practically put such competitors as the Pennsylvania, the Balti

ore & Ohio, and the Norfolk & Western to one pocket and kept them there. he youngest clerk in the legal department f the Pennsylvania would know that such thing, if done to-day, would bring down he terrors of the Sherman Act upon the ead of the railroad that did it.

The task to-day is not to reconcile one ailroad to another, to level up discordant nd competitive rates, and to eliminate ebates and discriminations. The law as done all that. Rates are now level nd non-discriminatory. Rates are pubished, and must be kept. The railroads re not quarreling among themselves. They are very far from it.

To-day's task is to reconcile the railoads and the people. It is a statesman's ob. It has to be done from the ground

ip. There are no codes and rules by vhich it may be done. The man who eads the railroads' cause to-day and tonorrow must first of all make for himself the methods by which he will get a hearing. Then he must get the public to come and reason it out with him, like two good lawyers debating right and wrong. He must be cool, not disturbed by rumors, abuse, misunderstandings, petty bickerings, and irresponsible talk. He must be quiet and well-balanced, slow to reach great conclusions, but steadfast when he reaches them. Above all, he must be honest and straight; and all men who meet him must know it when they meet him.

Unconsciously, the railroads are pushing forward to this task Mr. Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio. He hardly knows it. If he happens to read this article he will probably be inclined to deny it. Let us look at the facts:

A year or more ago there arose a great dispute between the engineers of the Eastern railroads and the roads. The men wanted more money. The roads did not want to pay it. They appointed a big committee of workers, railroad men, economists, and college professors and arbitrated the dispute back in a circle to the place it started from. Then came another dispute with the conductors on the same railroads. This time a little committee arbitrated and did a little better, perhaps. Next came the train

men, a great army making similar demands. This time, one man was pushed forward from the executive army to speak for all the railroads. It was Mr. Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio. He can talk to trainmen in their own language. He has been everything from day laborer on the track to president. He knows how a fireman lives, because he was a fireman. He knows how it feels when an engineer's pay won't go all the way around, for he was an engineer out West when hard times came twenty years ago. Undoubtedly Mr. Willard is the man to fix up this big labor trouble for the railroads.

Later on, a new plan was devised. Instead of the badly balanced rate advance proposed, and beaten, three or four years ago, the railroads came forward to ask for a general advance of 5 per cent. in freight rates. The hopes of railroad salvation are pinned on that. If that goes through, all is saved. If it does not, they believe that the fat is in the fire.

All men recognized that the freight rate advances of four years ago were beaten by the voice of the public. Public opinion damned a scheme that proposed to lay the whole burden of rate advance upon a very small part of the freight that is moved. Public opinion had to be shown that the proposed advance of 5 per cent. is fair, is good public business, is necessary, and will not give any great amount of wealth to anybody who does not earn it.

Quietly, and without any official badge upon his coat, Mr. Daniel Willard of the Baltimore & Ohio again emerges from the crowd of railroad heads and gets down to the business of getting that 5 per cent. rate increase before the court of public opinion and getting a verdict in favor of it. Of course, other men talk; but Mr. Willard is the man who must do the real work. The public has come to know that Mr. Willard is no magnate, trying to "put something across" that will net him a big return on a little investment of money and time and labor. He is the man who fits the job. He is the man who looks fairly inside and out and all around a public question the honest man whom, maybe, the public may trust.

Therefore, these days, you may by chance find Mr. Willard anywhere between Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, and New York. He is the busiest railroad man in the United States. It is not the Baltimore & Ohio that keeps him busy. It is the American railroad system, on trial for its life, with Daniel Willard as chief advocate.

His argument is extremely simple. It runs something like this: "Transportation is a necessity of the business life of the United States. Efficient transportation is one of the biggest elements in efficient business. We have furnished efficient transportation. We have been able to furnish it because we have had a certain margin of profit on every ton of freight we have carried and on every passenger we have carried. We cannot furnish it without that margin.

"That margin is in immediate danger of being destroyed by forces over which we have no control. We cannot stop wages from rising because they rise on account of the cost of living, which is as far beyond our control as are the movements of the planets. We cannot help paying more for material and fuel than we have paid because they, too, are made by higher powers than our own. We have to furnish many additional and expensive comforts, both for our own men and for the public, because new laws demand it. Our taxes mount up just as the public's taxes do. We pay them, just like the public. Our interest rates climb, because all the world wants more revenue to meet the cost of its living. We pay that added interest, just as the merchant and the manufacturer pays it to his bank. Every item of expense has risen. We did not make them rise. They rose in spite of us.

"We manufacture transportation for the shippers and travelers of America. We sell it. Since it costs us more to make it than it used to cost, we ought to get more for it. We don't; we get less. We cannot raise rates one by one; and if we get together to do it we are immediately stopped by the law.

"Since we cannot stop the expense from rising, and cannot, of our own accord, raise the price we charge for service, we come to

the proper authorities and ask the pe mission of the shippers of the Unite States to raise the rates under which k do business to a point where the essent margin of efficiency can be maintained We do not say we are going to raise rate we ask that the Interstate Commerce Crmission and the people talk it over wi us, look at both sides of it with us, give us a fair answer. Whatever th people, through their representatives, is right we shall do. If they say, finall that it is right to push many of our ra roads into bankruptcy, that will be done. When it is done, we shall operate the ro and furnish service just as well as we can but we cannot guarantee the quality the service, as we can if the living marga is left to us."

That is about the way the railroads to-day asking for the right to raise t rates 5 per cent. Of course, they back up with masses of figures. It is eas enough to prove that the cost of ever thing has risen; for there are the vouch to prove it. It is easy enough to pro that the rate of pay for transportati has gone down, for there are the sw. figures to show it.

Yet the argument is incomplete; a the public is only half disposed to hear let alone to grant it. The people hav one answer, and only one. It is that. spite of all that can be said, most of t big railroads of to-day are paying th biggest dividends they ever paid. It the sweeping argument that was put it the hands of all the people on the day. 1906, when the board of directors of the Union Pacific raised the dividend to per cent. and made the Harriman syster a perpetual cause of seeming offense to the people of the United States who th about these things.

Of course, that is not a true argument Mr. Willard and his fellows in the railnc business are not thinking about what w happen so long as tonnage crowds tracks and passenger trains run in S tions. No big railroad is going to ha trouble maintaining its present dividends long as it keeps on increasing its tonna year by year. What they are think about is the inevitable day when th

volume of tonnage will shrink instead of expand. All men know such times must come some time. No man knows how soon or how late they will come; but every man carries on his own business having in mind the ancient German proverb that no tree ever grows quite to the sky. What Mr. Willard and his people are fighting for is the right to be ready for contraction of trade, for shrinking tonnage, for dwindling passenger traffic.

This article does not discuss the pros and the cons of the rate question. All that has been said has been said simply to illustrate what kind of a job Mr. Daniel Willard has on his hands at the present time. It is not a transportation job at all. It is an administrative job somewhat similar to that of Mr. Bryan in the dispute between California and the Nation over the Japanese question.

seems to be able to tell. If the railroads get their increase and if the country goes on producing big business on a normal scale, of course there will be an era of prosperity and Daniel Willard will probably become a great big figure in the railroad world. If, on the contrary, no increase is allowed, and still the country keeps on producing the tonnage, the railroads will continue fairly strong and Daniel Willard will continue to be a pretty big railroad official doing a pretty big job on a pretty big system.

If the worst comes to the worst, and there is no increase in the freight rates, and the tonnage falls, it seems a fair assumption that Daniel Willard, a man of fifty-two or thereabouts, may still find opportunities for greatness. No matter what happens, Daniel Willard is one of the most interesting figures in the railroad world

What the upshot of it will be, nobody for the public to watch.

WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO

TO ESTABLISH A NEW RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE COUNTRY BANKER

AND THE FARMER

BY

B. F. HARRIS

(VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CHAMPAIGN, ILL.)

T WILL soon be impossible to say of
the typical American banker that he
has not the sympathetic friendship of
the people.

He is being thoroughly awakened to the fact that, in allowing people to think of him as a mere money changer, a mere percentage taker, he is unfair to himself and to everybody else. He is being made to realize that, after all, he is among the most important men in his community; that he ought to be the bravest man in town, and the least afraid of criticism. He is being taught that it is all-around good business for him to come out of his shell of exclusiveness, and to take interest in other people, as well as from them in short, that the surest way for him to do his job in the world is to enlist himself as a militant campaigner in the field of public welfare and good citizenship.

It has been my privilege, with my colleagues in the Illinois Bankers' Association, to be a pioneer in the work that has resulted in a nation-wide impetus to this great reform movement, which I believe bids fair to have a more wholesome effect upon this Nation's prosperity than has almost any other movement on foot to-day.

As a banker with an inherited love for the soil and, therefore, with the interest of the farmer always at heart, my theory from the beginning has been that the banker's greatest opportunity for genuine service lay in the direction of a betterment of agricultural methods, and of a solution of the problems of rural life.

Everybody agrees that the soil and the man on the soil are the essential and final assets of the Nation. Yet most of us, for one reason or another, have either remained in ignorance of the rapidity with which

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It has long been settled beyond all discussion that the reason why relatively so few farmers have won a competence from the soil and have little, if any, profit to show, besides that which arises from an increase in the value of their farms, is that most of them have been going on capitalizing the fertility of the soil without adding to its assets.

Some experience in farming on my own land in central Illinois demonstrated to me at first hand a few years ago that the intelligent use of such information about better methods as has long been available to every farmer who took the pains to get it out of cold storage in the agricultural schools meant the difference between a bare living and a net profit every year, besides the conservation of his one big asset the soil.

From what I saw for myself as a farmer it became one of my convictions as a banker that my good brothers everywhere might profitably do a little less thinking and talking about their dormant, unearning cash reserves, and a good deal more about the large, dormant, unemployed soil fertility and the possibilities of greater crop yields in their communities.

But it was obviously necessary to prove how such an idea would work out in actual practice before advocating its general adoption as a banking policy. Accordingly, the First National Bank of Champaign, Ill., decided to set forth in a series of advertisements what its officers believed could be accomplished for the community if the farmers knew exactly what they were doing and why they did it; if they went about their daily tasks. guided by definite purpose; if they made some serious and organized effort to become ters of their craft.

The point upon which we laid special emphasis in this advertising campaign was that the bank was owned and managed by farmers; that, therefore, our interests were identical with those of the community; and that we believed we and the farmers ought to coöperate to secure better methods, better yields, and better values the basis of all future and permanent prosperity, and the things that are required to bring better roads, better rural schools, and more farm life comforts and conveniences. One of the early bulletins that we issued said:

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Four hundred dollars an acre is what this bank is working for in our farm lands. We must rotate and diversify our crops to increase the fertility, to bring the yields that will finally result in $400 land prices. We ought to feed more live stock. Watch the University Farm experiments. Send us your name if you are not regularly getting their free bulletins. See our own crop report.

Another bulletin read:

A farmer said, in speaking of agricultural conditions and methods of improvement, “i never knew until to-day that one dollar and a half's worth of phosphate, rightly applied to the soil of my farm, was the difference between fifteen and fifty bushels of corn an acre." In this case, that dollar and a half's worth of phosphate was the price of success; it made the difference between a meagre crop and an abundant one. The knowledge of how to use it was the thing that counted. It's the same

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