“Among every hundred men who become firemen only seventeen
are ever made engineers,” says Warren S. Stone, chief of the
Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, one of the most powerful
labor organizations in the world. “Out of every one hundred
engineers only six ever get passenger runs. The next time you
see a white-haired man on the cab of a big passenger locomotive
don’t wonder at all at his white hair, but make up your mind
that he has the goods or he wouldn’t be there. It is a case of
the selection and the survival of the fittest. It takes nerve to
run the fast trains these days, for you sit at your throttle,
tearing across the country at the rate of more than a mile a
minute, and if any one of a dozen people, down to the man who
spiked the rails, has made a mistake you ride to certain death.”
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See NATURE’S AGGRESSIVENESS.