# Letters from an old railway official/Letter 8

LETTER VIII.
EDUCATION OF SEVERAL KINDS.
May 8, 1904.
My Dear Boy:—I happened to meet your general manager the other day, and the way he spoke of the good work you are doing warmed the cockles of my old heart. He said that you couldn’t rest easy until you knew more about the division than any other man. This, of course, is as it should be, but it is astonishing how many division superintendents are satisfied to grope along in the dark. Then some fine day the general officials come along on an inspection trip and unintentionally make the superintendent look like thirty cents by the sincere questions they ask about the division which he is unable to answer. If one’s memory has not been trained by education it is a good thing to condense information and have it in a notebook in the vest pocket. Some wise man has said that all education after we are twenty-five years old consists in knowing where to look for things.
​Another help that school education gives to an official is to broaden him so that he can use different methods on different properties. There are three main reasons why officials without much early education have succeeded and will continue to succeed. The first is native ability, which remains comparatively undeveloped without the second, which is opportunity. The third is the good luck to work under organizers and developers of talent. Training under the right sort of leaders is an education in itself. The danger of relying on such training alone is that one may copy too blindly the methods of his master without being broad enough to realize that the same master under other conditions of territory would adopt radically different methods. This is the reason why there are so many failures when a new man takes a crowd of his followers to reorganize a property. If all succeed, very well, but if one fails the most of the bunch go tumbling down like a row of blocks.
Again, the educated man from his knowledge of history is less likely to forget that what may go in fifteen-year-old Oklahoma will receive the icy mitt and the marble heart ​in three-hundred-year-old Virginia. Triples that are O. K. in cavalier South Carolina may be too quick acting in puritan Massachusetts. Commercialism, like patriotism, rests on certain fundamental principles. The application of these principles may be as uniform as a train of system cars; it may be as diverse as the cars in a train of a connecting line. Orthodoxy is usually my doxy.
The rough and ready efficiency of the West, which has developed a vast domain, has won the praise of the world. Our rough and ready brethren are finding that, as society rapidly becomes more highly organized, this old-time efficiency must be supplemented with technical education. So you find your self-made magnate giving his sons college educations. The only regrettable part is that to make it easy the old man raises the low joints for the boys and they do not always get bumpings enough to test their equipment thoroughly. Time will correct this, and more college men, more presidents’ sons, will fire, will switch, will brake, will become men behind cars as well as men behind desks. It is not only what you know, but what you make people believe you know, that counts ​in this little game of life. The American people never go back on a man who puts aside birth or education and stakes his all upon his manhood; who is willing to share the dangers and the hardships of his calling. Our military men have long since learned this lesson, and the son of the general must do the same guard duty, make the same marches, dig the same trenches, and face the same bullets as his fellows. His father knows that for it to be otherwise would be to handicap the son by the contempt of his comrades. Like the Spartan mother, he says: “My son, return with your shield or upon it.”
Did you ever consider how uncertain a quantity is opportunity, as inscrutable as the ways of Providence? In all ages and in all callings it has been one of the numerous mysteries that make life so attractive. There is may a veteran conductor, many a gray-haired station agent, who, if he could have had the chance to start, would have become a general manager. Some men have to go to another road to be fully appreciated. When a man is young he is criticized if he changes roads. When he is older his services are sought because of his varied experience with different ​roads. Human nature is prone to limit the length of everybody’s train to the capacity of its own sidetracks.
In the spring of 1861 there went from his tannery at Galena to the capital of Illinois an ex-officer, a professional soldier, whose gallantry and efficiency had stood the tests of the war with Mexico. Springfield was filled with commission seekers, natives of the State, and Illinois, like some railroads, did not wish to go off her own rails for talent. She needed trained clerks to make out muster rolls, to book wheel reports in the yard office, as it were. This humble employment the silent soldier accepted with better grace than has characterized some former railway officials under similar circumstances. The opportunity came in the shape of a mutinous regiment, which, like a mountain division, was hard to handle. Three years later the clerk had run around all the officers, was commanding all the armies of the Union, and the world rang with the military fame of Ulysses S. Grant. Strange indeed is opportunity. Some successful railroad men owe their official start to the seeming bad luck of being let out as an employe.
​Your general manager said that he had read some of my letters to you; threw me a warm jolly by remarking that you are a credit to such teaching. Then he confessed that he had asked the son if the old man always practices what he preaches. I am pleased to know from his own lips that you uncovered his headlight on that point.
Affectionately, your own
D. A. D.