Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1921-12-10
Serp;ce Is Profit
~ OBSTRUCTIVE criticism and sug-
I gestions are invited

@ONSTRUCTlVE criticism ana sug-
gestions are invited
Time was when these words at
the bottom of a railroads advertisement
would have struck the common reader as
passing strange if not keenly satiric. Criti-
cism the carriers were receiving in album
dance, while suggestions poured in like shrap-
mel upon an enemy's trench; but they did not
invite the one nor profit by the other Ad-
ministered, in many instances, without re-
gard to public opinion, they incurred i'll will
which need never have been, and provoked
antagonism which might have been averted,
had the directing heads Of those days been a
hundredth part as interested In human
nature as they were in dividends and STRAIT
egems of high finance.
But wiser and happier regime has come.
Hundreds of thousands o. persons whose in
terests bring them into contact with the Cen
trail of Georgia Railway, to take one of d.
vers apt examples, are reading with goodwill
a series of bulletins which that company is
publishing in the communities along its lines
and which even conclude with the sentiment:
Constructive criticism and suggestions are
invited" They are not bulletins of propa-
ganda, save insomuch as all appeals to pub
lie interest are propaganda, but rather of
education. For instance:
"a modern locomotive contains more
than forty-two hundred parts, not in
Guiding rivets and bolts all of which
must be inspected daily and kept in
perfect condition. The public sees
an engineer and fireman in charge of
a locomotive 1t sees comparatively lit
tie of all there is back of the actual run
ming of train-the executive and gen.
eral officers, the train dispatchers, the
signal msintainers, the foreman, the
skilled and unskilled laborers, the shop
men, the trackwalkers, the miners pro-
duc1ng the coal, the workers producing
the steel, the woodsmen producing the
ties, and the plants where the ties are
treated with preservative chemicals, the
mills producing the lumber, the refiner-
les producing the lubricants, the rock
quarries and the crushers, the gravel
pits and steam shovels, the thousand
and one other operations which enter
the production of railway transporta-
ton"
Further, matters of immediate concern to
shippers and patrons, to farmers and manu-
facturers and the public are discussed in
these messages from the carrier to the COM
munity, and always with the parting re-
minder that constructive criticism and sug-
gestion are invited"
An admirable spirit is this, and one that
grows apa in the world Of industry and
business, as well as in transportation. Those
sincerely embodying it are destined to sue
coed and survive, because they are fittest to
serve and therefore, fittest to live. The
fundamental interests of the railroads and
the people were never at variance, for all
lnstrumentalities of production and transport
are members of one great economic and So
cia1 body. It is only when those who direct
these instrumentalities misunderstood or are
misunderstood that trouble comes and the
wondrous efficiency of goodwill is lost To
the extent that service becomes their gov
erning ideal, institutions prosper and pro-
gress. 1t is true Of them because it is true
Of life. ..