My Dear Boy:--You ask what I mean by the rack of the comparative statement. I mean that, figuratively speaking, we are all pretty securely fastened to the corresponding month of last year. What was originally intended as a tavernkeeper's tab, as a rough check on operation, has become a balanced ledger, a rigid standard of efficiency. Time, even a short period, brings a sacredness to all things. If we make a so-called better showing on paper than a twelvemonth previous, we shake hands with ourselves and forget how rotten we were considered just one short year ago. The ball team that wins the championship and takes the big gate receipts is the one whose members play for the side rather than for high individual averages. The tendency is for our owners to expect us to make base hits rather than send in runs which win games.
If in April and May we have a lot of ties on hand, we may not be allowed to put them in the track because they will be charged out before June 30, and make too heavy a showing of expenditure for the fiscal year. So, with labor comparatively plentiful and the weather comfortable, we wait until the new fiscal year comes in, until the sun shines hottest on the track. Then, with farmers paying harvest wages we have to offer more money. If we get the extra men the heat lessens their efficiency. It is true we have probably had to pay the producer for the ties, but if we fail to charge them to the final account, we have a childlike confidence that they have not yet cost us anything. The little matters of failure to utilize the full life of the tie, of interest on the money invested, we dismiss with the thought that trifling losses must be expected in the conduct of large affairs.
Maintenance of equipment as well as maintenance of way suffers from too much comparative statement. Some new official pulls our power to pieces to show us how they used to build up train-mile records on the Far Eastern. The crowded rip tracks reflect the tractive power of the big engines. Bad orders, the bane of a yardmaster's life, the teasers of the traffic man's tracers, block our terminals. Our shopmen and our car repairers, despairing of full time, move away. Yet withal we are serene, for are not we operating just as cheaply as they did at this time last year?