Eggs, Kruttschnitt

THE RAILWAYS

There is no longer any question how to treat a goose that lays golden eggs: don’t starve it; don’t cut off its neck.

But the case of a goose that might lay golden eggs, but doesn’t, is less susceptible of deft solution. The railways are a whole flock of such geese. During the War they were seized and peremptorily ordered to lay twice a day. They could have as much food as they desired, but they might not leave the nest. And when the War was passed, this regimen had seriously impaired both the morale and the constitutions of the geese. The geese and the gooseherds cried for normalcy.

New treatment was devised, dubbed the Esch-Cummins Transportation Act. Still the geese fail to produce their golden fruit. There is a chorus of new proposals. Senator Cummins of Iowa, Chairman of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, and others of his group favor consolidation. They say in effect: ” Let us put all the geese into half a dozen large goosepens. Then those less inclined to lay will emulate those more inclined to lay, and we shall have eggs.” Radicals, such as Senator La Follette, favor drastic cuts in freight rates, saying: ” The geese are suffering from a plethora. A little dieting will restore their egg-laying qualities.” Railroad Labor is for outright cooking of the geese in the oven of Government ownership. The heads of the railways rise to hiss at all of these. ” Out upon you,” they cry, ” the geese are just recovering their robust physique. Cook ‘them, starve them, pen them up and they will never lay again! Yours for golden eggs.” This last was the attitude vigorously expressed last week by Julius Kruttschnitt, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Addressing 2,000 guests of the Railway Business Association in Manhattan, he said: ” There is no legitimate interest of the shipping public which will not be adequately protected during a fair trial of the Transportation Act as it now stands. The public wants adequate service. For such adequate service the railroads must secure a fair return. . . . The public is on trial to a greater extent than are the railroads.”

These opinions are fairly representative of the attitude of most railway executives. In their robustness the opinions are especially Kruttsehnittian. For Kruttschnitt is a man of the self-made type. He was the son of a New Orleans merchant ruined by the Civil War. Nevertheless he had a college education, at Washington and Lee University. His first railroad job was as an engineer building part of the line which is now the eastern end of the Southern Pacific. Today he is Chairman of the Road with a salary of $100,000 a year, ranking with Alfred H. Smith of the New York Central as one of the highest paid railway executives in the country. Between these periods his life was a matter of work; much of it, according to his own testimony, at the rate of 18 hours a day. He is the kind of a man who says and means: ” The only way I know in which anyone can have an easy life is to earn it by the hardest possible kind of work.”

He is just as much in earnest in saying: ” The public is on trial.” But Senator La Follette and all other politicians are forced to adopt, an attitude of comradeship with the public that bars any such expression, of opinion, even if they were naturally inclined towards it.