Evening star., 1920-01-04
NEED OF EFFICIENCY
IN RAILROAD SOLUTION
Continued from First Page.

from loans a return of 10 or even 20
per cent is fair one from an uncer-
tain venture which helps to develop
the country.
Some investors bought real estate,
while others invested in railroads.
Real estate has in many instances in
creased in value a hundred fold, while
railroad stock has rarely enjoyed such
a phenomenal enhancement in value.
Scarcely anything is said about the
profits of those who invested in real
estate and waited for a profit, yet
fault is found with the profits de-
rived from the railroads built by hard
work and brains. to which the nation
in many ways owes its wonderful
progress.
Had investors imagined that re-
turn of 90 per cent would have been
disallowed by the government on rail-
way investments many of them would
never have invested in the uncertain
ventures to which this country owes
its advancement, and the achievement 1t
Of it's present industrial conditions
would have been retarded many years.
Question of Efficiency.
Whatever might be the advantages
OF government ownership of the rail-
roads, doubtless all logical people
will agree that 1t would be of far
greater advantage to the nation to
have them conducted efficiently with
small freight a ndpassenger rates. by
officials chosen by the stockholders,
at - reasonable profit, than to have
them owned by the government and
conducted inefficiently by government
officials with high passenger and
freight rates at a loss.
The railroad question is so COM
p1etely bound up with the question of
wages that any study of railroad con-
ditionS which did not consider the
hn nj
After several thousand years of in
dustrial growth. conditions make it
possible for laborers to obtain a
larger re,urn for their labor than
ever before. BY changing the present
system, the purchasing power of
wages would doubtless be greatly re-
duced and the standard of living for
the laborer now obtaining in this
country seriously deteriorated.
Any increase in wages necessarily
means an increase in the price of
commodities produced by the laborers
obtaining the increase and a corre-
spending decrease in the purchasing
power of the wage. This results in
an increase in the cost of living and
through the arrangement of eco
nomic conditions the prices of COM
modlties are further advanced than
the scale of wages, thus frequently
causing the burden of the increase in
wages to fall upon the laborers who
obtained the increased wage. These
are stubborn economic facts which,
cannot be successfully controverted
by the sophistical arguments Of those
VINO would deceive for the purpose of
trying to prove fallacy.
Dollars' Purchasing Power.
The purchasing power of the dollars
the laborers receive as wages is of
vastly more Importance to them than
the number Of dollars they get per
day. A laborer receiving s6 a day is
not as well off as he was when he got
81 a day and the dollar would buy
twice as much.
In order to raise the wages of the
railway employees, already well paid,
passenger fares and freight rates af,
fecting the public must be raised. In
the language of the federal Constitu-
tion, private property cannot be taken
without just compensation. If the fed
eral government can force the rail-
roads to raise the wages of railroad
employees and at the same time pre-
vent the railroads from raising pas
senger fares and freight rates to
meet the increased expenditures thus
entailed, it could bring about a con-
dition which would be more unjust to
the owners of railroads than confis-
cation, which the Constitution for
bids.
"Brains'' is the force which has
moved the world in an upward path
through the ages to an ever higher
form Of civilization. It was the lack
of them which was chiefly RESPONSE
BILE for the recent war that deluged
the world in blood and put it back
many years. It is the lack of brains
and also the lack of economic wis
dom on the part of the labor leaders,
which is responsible for their de-
mands for an unreasonably large in
crease in wages, which, were they
granted, would inevitably lead to a
corresponding increase in the wages
of other employees in other kinds of
employment, and thus decrease the
purchasing power of money by rails