The important testimony of Mr. W.M.  Acworth, an English authority upon railroads, which he gave by invitation before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce at Washington, has not been fully appreciated by American public opinion.  The National City Bank of New York rightly stressed the importance of this testimony in one of its bulletins during the year 1918.  Mr. Acworth was in this country during the early part of 1917 as a member of the special Canadian Commission on Railways, and he told the Senate Committee that “while American companies have revolutionized equipment and methods of operation, Prussia has clung to old equipment and old methods.  This is typical.  In all the history of railway development it has been the private companies that have led the way, the State systems that have brought up the rear.  Railroading is a progressive science.  New ideas lead to new inventions, to new plant and methods.  This means the spending of much new capital.  The State official mistrusts ideas, pours cold water on new inventions and grudges new expenditure.  In practical operation German railway officials have taught the railway world nothing.  It would be difficult to point to a single important invention or improvement, the introduction of which the world owes to a State railway.”

Is it not a rather significant fact that with all their boasted advance in science and learning, the Germans have failed utterly in the two realms of politics, as shown in the preceding pages, and of railroading?  And these are the two most extensive fields of the influence of German Socialism.

The American citizen has before him in clear outline the sure result from a continuation of governmental ownership or control as a permanent policy in the United States after the war.  As regards railroad personnel, if the positions from top to bottom were filled with Mr. Bryan’s “deserving Democrats,” as was the case with our diplomatic and consular service in 1913, the results would be as striking, though perhaps in a different and even more serious way.

Of course the Civil Service, which has been a solid measure of reform and one from which we dare depart only at our peril, would probably be called into use and be evaded in exactly the same way as it has been in the past.  And even if it were not evaded, we must remember that the Civil Service examinations and rules are not a guarantee of efficiency or excellence.  The best that can be said for them is that they are a protection against absolute incompetence and, to a certain extent, against political spoiling.  But in a positive sense, the Civil Service is merely a guarantee of mediocrity.  And mediocrity never yet made a success of a great transportation or productive system such as our railroads or industrial corporations.  The political possibilities of a “railroad vote” of several million employees of the government need only be referred to, to be feared.