THE LEGAL AND FINANCIAL DEPARTMENTS
FUNCTIONS OF GENERAL COUNSEL, AND THOSE OF GENERAL ATTORNEY--A SHREWD
LEGAL MIND'S WORTH TO A RAILROAD--THE FUNCTION OF THE CLAIM-AGENT--MEN
AND WOMEN WHO FEIGN INJURY--THE SECRET SERVICE AS AN AID TO THE
CLAIM-AGENT--WAGES OF EMPLOYEES THE GREATEST OF A RAILROAD'S
EXPENDITURES--THE PAY-CAR--THE COMPTROLLER OR AUDITOR--DIVISION OF THE
INCOME FROM THROUGH TICKETS--CLAIMS FOR LOST OR DAMAGED
FREIGHT--PURCHASING-AGENT AND STORE-KEEPER.
At the very elbow of the railroad president stands the general counsel. He
is shrewd, resourceful, diplomatic. He has quick perception and action,
the faith and the loyalty of a friend. In many cases he is a personal
officer of the president--in the highest sense. If there is a change of
administration of the railroad, there is apt to be a change in the office
of the general counsel. If B----, who has been guiding the destinies of
the T. & S., goes to Transcontinental, he is apt to take Y----, his
general counsel along with him. For except in the case of some exquisitely
organized roads like the Pennsylvania, for instance, the general counsel
is in every sense personal to the president. He advises him privately,
urges him to this step, cautions him from that.
On the other hand, the general attorney is more apt to be the legal
officer of the railroad. Like the general counsel he has an old-fashioned
pride in his profession that makes him hesitate at accepting a
vice-presidency; he likes the ring of "general attorney" or "general
counsel" in his own ears. Railroad history and tradition both go to prove
that. He will hardly drop those titles for anything less than that of
president.
The general attorney, unlike the general counsel, in most cases will
make his offices in the railroad's headquarters. He will handle its
litigation, and if in half a dozen years he can bring down its verdict
costs from $1,250,000 to $750,000 for an average twelve month, as one man
did, he will be well worth the large salary that he demands and gets. And
his salary will be only one of many of the heavy expenses of the legal
department. When that functionary asks for money he gets it and without
many questionings. The operating department, the traffic department, the
engineers, may have to give sharp account for their appropriations; the
legal end of the railroad is trusted to accomplish accurate results,
without detailed accounting. In some cases it might prove embarrassing.
* * * * *
You want to know the value of the shrewd and perceptive legal mind to a
big railroad? Here is a case that proves his worth:
A certain transportation company in the East had a legal vice-president
who many people supposed was a political heritage to the road, a man for
whom it was supposed a berth had been made by the owner of the property,
who was something of a politician himself. A quick turning of the wheel of
fortune had thrown one political party out of business at the capital, and
another in. The man was given a place in the railroad offices, and a
little later was made a vice-president. It so happened that the
vice-president knew more than supposers might even imagine; but he was a
quiet man, and sometimes some of his own clerks wondered why he drew his
big salary. After he had been at his desk a dozen years they found the
reason.
In gathering up a number of railroad properties to make the parent
company--after the fashion of modern railroad practice--one of the most
important of these old-time units was found to be in woefully shabby
physical form. It was a valuable road in the consolidation. The new parent
was willing to guarantee an annual rental of 10 per cent on its stock;
but as a railroad it fairly shook at the knees. It stood in dire need of
reconstruction, and the men who were offering it a high rental made that a
provision of the deal. The old road finally agreed to spend $12,000,000 in
revising its line and in buying new locomotives, cars, and bridges. With
much ado it accomplished its revision, and brought itself up closer to
modern standards of railroading.
A decade later when the governmental supervision of the railroads had come
into the full flush of its authority, the quiet vice-president had an
armful of State commission reports and vouchers brought to his desk. He
locked himself in his room, and in a week he had made from them a
20,000-word abstract in long hand. Then he took his report in to the
president of the road.
The acute mind of that general counsel--you see that he was vice-president
in this particular case--searching here and there and everywhere, had
discovered a mouse-hole. The old-time road had not fulfilled its part of
the contract. It had found that it could revise its lines at a cost of a
little less than $9,000,000 and had quietly pocketed the change. The big
rent-paying consolidation went into the courts, after its cool, impassive
way. The case went to a referee and the referee took four years to hear
the case and decide it. There were 5,000 exhibits offered in evidence and
8,000 closely written pages of evidence, making a case nearly equal to
that of the receivership of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New
York City, which fills twenty pudgy volumes of some 800 pages each.
The referee decided in favor of the parent company, and rendered a verdict
close to $6,000,000, principal and interest. The case was appealed, and
sustained. That vice-president had proved his worth. The president of the
defendant road came to him.
"We simply can't pay," he pleaded. "We've no reserve fund."
"Then we will take it out of your rental," was the emotionless reply of
the quiet vice-president.
That type of man stands forth as a possibility to every one of the dozens
and dozens of young men who make the main staff of the railroad's legal
department. Those fellows come to the railroad fresh from the law schools.
Their salaries are small but their experience and their opportunities are
enormous. It is a far better career at the beginning than a briefless
existence in one's own office, even though one's own name is emblazoned in
brilliant gilt letters upon the door. A young man coming into the legal
department of a large railroad has a diversity of work offered him. He
draws up the simplest of papers at first, acts as assistant to a trial
lawyer, then finally comes to the time when he will alone fight the
railroad's case in some minor cause in a small court. After that the
causes get bigger, the courts more important, he begins to delve into law
libraries and to write briefs. Gradually he emerges into a full-fledged
lawyer. He may eventually become general attorney or general counsel, and
he may find himself welcome to the partnership of some really important
law firm. He has knowledge that may be of value in fighting the railroad;
whether he will use that knowledge in afterwards fighting his employer is
a matter for his own conscience to determine.
There are special departments under the main heading of the law
department. Counsel, the ablest of counsel, is retained at each important
point reached by the railroad, and these counsel must act in conjunction
and coöperation with headquarters. Special tax counsel have an important
office by themselves, for the railroad sometimes finds itself in a
difficult position. In its pride it may announce to the world, through the
newspapers, that the new Bingtown depot has cost $400,000, but when the
Bingtown appraisers come around, possessing in their bosoms no inherent
love for the railroad, those newspaper clippings in their hands, the tax
counsel begins to earn his salary.
In these days of Federal and State supervision and regulation of railroad
management, with now and then an aldermanic chamber or a county board of
supervisors trying its hand at the game, there is sure to be special
counsel, generally known as the commerce or commission counsel, assigned
to the complaints and hearings. For intricate, involved, or unusual cases
the road may go outside of its own ranks and hire special counsel--lawyers
who are specialists in the very thing involved.
Just as the big and tactful attorney stands back of the railroad's
president, so there crouches at his feet the claim-agent of the company,
who is its watch-dog and its scenting hound. Back of this claim-agent, who
must have achieved a reputation for keen-sightedness and marked ability
before receiving his position, is a busy company of claim agents, at
headquarters and every division headquarters upon the system. Together,
these form a militant organization that stands with the legal department
to defend the railroad's treasury against indiscriminate raiding.
Sometimes, because the work dovetails in many ways closely with that of
the operating department, these claim-agents work under the order of the
general manager and the division superintendents. A sly old fellow who
once headed a big road in the Middle West once explained the reason
why--in the case of his property--without even a trace of a smile.
"John says," he was speaking of his own general counsel, "that a
claim-agent can't be yanked up before any of these touchy bar associations
and charged with unprofessional practices if we can show cases--that
they're just railroad men and not lawyers, at all."
That was an exaggerated case. As a rule, the young claim-agent has
abundant need to be upon his mettle. The public, with an inborn itching
against the corporation, keeps him upon that mettle. The man who has had a
slight bump upon a railroad train--to make an instance--hunts out the
claim office at headquarters. He gets quick treatment and mighty courteous
treatment. If he can prove himself in any way entitled to a reimbursement,
he gets it--in cash upon the spot. Likewise he signs a release--a most
ponderous and impressive document. When his "John Smith" goes upon that
document he has, in its own magnificent phrasing "in consideration of
money received" released the railroad company from all obligation to him
from the beginning of the world, the fall of man and the decline of the
Roman Empire up to the very moment of the signing.
He goes home, pretty well satisfied with himself. It was only a little
bump at that. A twenty-five cent bottle of arnica had made him physically
himself once again; and as for his suit, well, that was pretty well worn,
anyway, and three dollars to a tailor would make it a good "second best"
for next winter. He feels that the ten dollars that the railroad gave him
was pretty abundant compensation.
But wait until he sees his neighbor. The neighbor almost froths at the
mouth when he hears of the transaction--of the impressively worded release
that was signed.
"You're a chump," he says. "You could have gone to bed, stayed there a
week and they would have been glad to give you a hundred."
After which the man looks upon his ten dollars with contempt and a feeling
of injury, and becomes a corporation hater. Or perhaps he was really hurt
and had some sort of a bill from his doctor and his druggist, lost time to
be compensated at his job. The railroad has figured these together and
paid him the sum, with the signing of the release as a necessary feature
of the transaction. The thing was not very serious, we will say, in this
instance also, and the hundred dollars that he received was really a fair
compensation. Now watch the neighbor, who it happens is a pretty shrewd
attorney:
"Let me take the case, even now," he urges slyly. "I'll get a verdict of
five thousand for you, if you are wise, and we will divide the proceeds."
"But I've signed their release," groans the other.
The shyster laughs in his face.
"You were drugged," he whispers, "drugged, and we will prove it."
That is not an exaggerated case. It is the sort of thing that the
railroad's claim-agents are combating every day of the year; and then
wonder not, that some of them finally lose the fine sense of honor,
themselves.
And beyond this class of folk, is another--nothing less than criminal.
There are men and women in this broad land who make a business of feigning
injury, and make it a pretty astute business, too, so that they may dig
deep into the strong-boxes of the railroad. The most dramatic of this
particular brand of "nature fakirs" has been Edward Pape, the man with the
broken neck. Pape has a most remarkable deformity and has not been slow to
avail himself of it as a money-making device far beyond the figures that
might be quoted for him by circus side-shows or dime museums. Pape makes a
specialty of the trolley companies. He can so alight from a car, coming
slowly to a stop, that he will fall and go rolling into the gutter.
Instantly there is excitement and a group of men to pick up the prostrate
form. He is found to be badly injured and is hurried to a hospital. There
the internes discover that he has a broken neck. A marvellous set of X-ray
photographs are made, and the railroad is usually willing to settle a
large cash sum rather than stand suit. Within a week he will probably be
away and practising his trick on some unsuspecting railroad.
"There was a time over in Philadelphia that was hell," Pape once told the
writer. "I'd just finished my fancy fall, and they got me into the
sickhouse and rigged out most to kill. They put hip-boots on me there in
bed, with their soles fastened to the foot-board and a rubber bandage
under my chin and over my head. They put seventy-five pounds in weights
on a cord and a pulley-jigger to that bandage and it nearly killed me all
day long. At night I used to wait until it was dark and then I'd haul up
the weights and put them under the blanket with me. Otherwise, I don't
know how I'd 'a' got my sleep."
[Illustration: THE FREIGHT DEPARTMENT OF THE MODERN RAILROAD REQUIRES A
VERITABLE ARMY OF CLERKS]
[Illustration: THE FARMER WHO SUED THE RAILROAD FOR PERMANENT INJURIES--AS
THE DETECTIVES WITH THEIR CAMERAS FOUND HIM]
Little things like the discomfort of hospital treatment and searching
examinations by railroad surgeons do not seem to discourage these
criminals. They take these as necessary hardships that go with their
profession. Inga Hanson, the woman who impersonated deafness, dumbness,
blindness and paralysis to win a heavy verdict from the Chicago City
Railway Company, and who was afterwards convicted of perjury, was wheeled
daily into the court-room in a chair apparently nothing more than a
living, inert, shapeless mass of humanity, exquisitely trained to enact
her role of deception.
Sometimes the claim-agents, working in conjunction with the railroad's
secret service, have used the camera to great advantage. A farmer who
lives in New Jersey drove into a seaboard city with a load of produce. At
a grade crossing, a switch-engine overturned his craft, about as gently as
such an accident could be accomplished. The farmer was lucky in that he
was bruised, rather than seriously hurt. Then he saw a lawyer and learned
that he was incapacitated for life by severe internal injuries. He entered
suit for $25,000 against the railroad.
There was a case for the secret-service bureau of the railroad, and it
took little time to find the right detectives, husky enough to get out
into the fields and work for four long weeks as farmhands. When the Jersey
farmer began haying that August, he found less trouble than he had ever
before experienced in hiring low-priced help. He was able to get two big
lads, who were hard workers.
It was a big hay year and the farmer was not averse to turning in to do
his part of the work. He liked to be with the boys he had hired and one of
them had a camera that he could take "great" pictures with. He showed him
some of the pictures that he took those August days on the Jersey farm.
The farmer liked them immensely.
He liked them rather less when his attorney came down from the city one
day, with prints of the same pictures that had been sent him by the law
department of the railroad. The farmer was given a chance to withdraw from
the limelight or else stand a criminal trial for perjury, with the
penitentiary's gray walls looming up behind. He took the chance. Few of
the dishonest claimants will proceed after such evidence has been put
before them. As for the railroad, it usually works better through getting
signed confessions of guilt than by going through the somewhat intense
workings of a criminal trial.
The secret service stands just back of the claim-agents. It has greater or
less recognition in the case of different railroads but its work is
generally much the same. It is police. Sometimes it is organized like the
police department of a small city, with captains and inspectors at various
division headquarters, and at other times its very existence is denied by
the railroad heads. But its work is much the same. Its men, generally
chosen for fitness from city police or detective staffs, sometimes root
out tramps or small thieves along the line and in the freight-yards,
sometimes in gay uniform patrol the platforms of crowded passenger
terminals, sometimes work with greatest secrecy in "plain clothes"--which
in this case may be jeans or overalls--to detect theft or treason among
employees, and sometimes they receive their greatest laurels in connection
with the "fake" suits that are brought against the railroad.
The secret-service works night and day. Its members, with the
claim-agents, are at the scene of a serious accident as quickly as the
wrecking-train itself. Together with the railroad's own corps of surgeons,
retained in every important town, and chosen for absolute honesty and
integrity, they form an important adjunct of the personal injury claim
service.
* * * * *
The financial officer of the railroad is, of course, the treasurer. It is
he who receives its earnings--running possibly into a hundred millions
dollars in the course of a twelvemonth--and disburses them for supplies
and for wages, for taxes and for bond coupons, and, it is to be hoped, for
dividends. He works through appointed banks; and the bank president who
can go out and capture one or two good railroad accounts for his
institution has earned his salary for several years to come. The selection
of the banks is one of the dramatic phases of the inside politics of
railroading; it is a cause of constant wire-pullings and heartburnings.
"Do you see that whited sepulchre down there?" a big railroad head laughs
to you as he points to a white marble skyscraper closing the vista of a
city canyon. "This road built that temple of business. Our account is its
backbone. Sometimes we deposit a million dollars a day and it is no
uncommon thing for our balance there, approaching coupon or dividend times
to reach sixteen or seventeen million dollars."
He laughs again, then grows confidential.
"We're in a bit of a hole," he admits. "Some of the big manufacturers
downtown are organizing a bank, and it looks as if it was going to be a
pretty solid sort of institution. They want a big account from us, and our
traffic people are urging their cause. In the long run they'll get the
account."
Then he explains to you that the railroad endeavors to hold down its bank
accounts, although it must have them in a large number of different
cities, to avoid the long shipments of large quantities of money. The
agents and the conductors will, following a carefully arranged system,
send their receipts to the nearest designated banks, mailing memorandum
slips of the deposit both to the treasurer and to the comptroller. The
bank in its turn, sends receipt slips to both of these officers, so the
deposit transaction is hedged about with a sufficient degree of formality
and detail.
When it comes to pay out its money, the railroad has no lessened degree of
formality and detail. For the wages of its employees--generally the
greatest of all expenditures--the railroad has proper system and order.
The paymaster makes out the voluminous pay-rolls, they are each properly
attested by the heads of departments; and for his pay-roll totals, the
necessary vouchers are issued to him by the treasurer. He may pay the
railroad army by check or he may send his deputies out over the system in
the pay-cars.
The pay-car is one of the pleasantest of the surviving old-time railroad
customs. The shriek of the whistle of the engine that hauls it is the
pleasantest melody that can come to the ears of the man out upon the line.
To shuffle in a long line up to its platform window where the railroad's
money is being paid out in tiny envelopes, as each man signs the
impressive roll, is one of the greatest joys that anticipation can hold
out. As the car makes its routine trip over the line each month or each
fortnight, it draws its money from the various repository banks, or else
the cash is forwarded to it at division points from headquarters.
But, like many old customs, the pay-car is disappearing. The railroads are
more and more paying their men by check. It is a better system in many
ways. It avoids the handling of large sums of money, and many of the men
prefer not to have a roll of bills thrust into their hands. The old
prejudice among them against checks is practically over. The checks are
constant incentives toward saving, the small banks in the little town are
shrewdly reaching for the accounts of the thrifty railroaders. There may
not be much for the bank in just one of these accounts, but they can
quickly multiply into considerable sums.
We have already spoken of the comptroller; he is called the auditor upon
some of our railroads. The comptroller is the most passionless and
unemotional of all railroad officials. He measures the worth of his
fellows by cold mathematical rules, by addition, by subtraction, by
multiplication, by division. Even as big a man as the president may
shudder at the result of such coldly accurate measurings.
No moneys are received, none spent, without the knowledge and approval of
the comptroller. He is really a fine balance-wheel of the system, a
governor working in exact accord with the laws of the ancient and
wonderfully accurate science of numbers. By his computations men rise, men
fall. He is the keeper of the rule and keeper of the weight.
His office organization reflects his own measure of accuracy. As a rule,
an auditor of disbursements and auditors of tickets and of freight
receipts report are his chief assistants at headquarters. A corps of
sharp-eyed young men, each also having an almighty respect for
mathematical accuracy, will be up and down the line for him, catching up
careless agents on the one hand, and on the other gently showing them how
to keep their accounts better, and conform more carefully to the company's
established standards. Sometimes the car accountant, a man who watches the
mileage of the company's cars travelling over other roads, and the
equipment of other roads scurrying over the home system, reports to the
comptroller, oftener, however, directly to the operating department. All
these make a considerable office--an office which usually treads its
monotonous path and rarely becomes nervously excited; an office to be well
considered in the organization of the railroad.
The work of that office falls quite naturally into three channels--as we
have already indicated--passenger receipts, freight receipts and
disbursements, and general accounts. In the passenger receipts the
accounting has, of course, to do with the sale of tickets, and the cash
fare collections made by conductors upon the trains. This would be simple
enough bookkeeping if a good many years ago the interline or coupon
ticket, entitling the bearer to ride upon several different roads, had not
come into popularity. To apportion the revenue of a ticket between the
half-dozen different lines upon which it has been used requires almost no
end of system and accounting. Once a month each road has an accounting
with its fellows, with whom it is engaged in selling through tickets. The
coupons themselves are the vouchers, and cash balances of a single
road--because of the freight as well as the passenger business--may be
kept standing in the treasuries of several hundred other roads. It is a
system quite as intricate, in itself, as the relations between city and
country banking and yet it is only a single small phase of the conduct of
the railroad.
The auditor of ticket receipts must also, through this staff organization,
make sharp examination of the tickets that are turned in by the conductors
at the end of each day's run. He must see to it that the conductor is
neither careless nor anything worse. In either of these cases he will
bring the matter quickly to the attention of the operating department.
In addition to the railroad selling its tickets there are also railroad
passenger traffic organizations, half a dozen or more important ones
across the country, which are engaged in selling various forms of railroad
transportation. In some cases this takes the shape of a mileage-book which
may be honored by fifteen or twenty different lines. The book will perhaps
be sold for $25.00 and will permit of 1,000 miles' riding at a saving over
local fares, if the purchaser comply with its provisions. If he has
complied with its provisions within the year's life of the book, he will
be paid $5 rebate upon return of its cover which has given him his riding
at two cents a mile. Sometimes these books take the form of "scrip" which
is silent upon mileage but which has its strip divided into five-cent
portions, sold at wholesale, as it were, at a fraction less than five
cents each.
In any case, there is more work for the auditor who handles passenger
receipts, and if the railroad is in New York State, for instance, where
there is quite a model law in effect regulating these things he will have
to be very careful how he handles the accounts for these peculiar mileage
books. The law tells him that he must not credit the whole $25 to
passenger receipts, for the law seems to point to even finer lines than
the comptroller. He cannot even subtract the $5 which will probably return
to the purchaser, and charge the $20 to receipts. The mileage-book sales
must be credited to a separate account, and only transferred to the main
receipts of the railroad as the strip is turned in for passage, a few
miles at a time.
Do you wonder then that the comptroller sometimes grows gray-haired, that
the vast routine of his office swells tremendously from year to year? The
passenger receipts are almost always less than half of the income accounts
of his offices. They are the A, B, C compared with the delicious tangle
that comes when the freight waybills come in by the hundred thousand, and
each little road must receive the last penny due to it. That feature alone
will sometimes keep 400 clerks scratching their pens in a single office,
will involve many, many more balances and cross-balances between the
railroads.
And beyond that complication is still another, the constant investigation
and settlement of freight claims that come pouring in against the
railroad. There is another job for a staff of competent men. If it is an
overcharge claim, the routine is comparatively simple. The audit office
should have information at hand sufficient to decline the claim or settle
it immediately. But if the claim is for lost or damaged freight, the thing
complicates. Before the freight claim department will draw a voucher
against the treasurer, it will have to assure its own conscience that the
claim is fairly substantiated by the facts.
From these receipts, combined with those from rentals of express or
telegraph privileges or the like, the railroad pays its bills--pays its
men, as we have already seen. It pays its taxes and its bond coupons and
its fire insurance, and apportions these as far as possible over the
twelve months of the year that it may keep a fairly even balance between
receipts and expenditures. The other bills are paid by properly signed and
attested vouchers, which are bankable like checks, and which are indeed
the very best form of check, because they are upon their face a receipt
stating the precise reason for which a certain sum of money was paid.
In recent years the comptroller, or the auditor, as you may prefer to call
him, has become more and more of a statistician. He prepares tables as to
locomotive performances, obtaining his figures from the mechanical
department; he can tell you to an ounce the average carload of the system
for any given month. He fairly seems to revel in his own development of
the science of numbers. Train and car statistics will probably show the
number of trains of different classes, the mileage of the same, the
mileage of empty and of loaded cars, and the direction of their movement.
Locomotive statistics run to mileage, consumption of fuel and of stores,
and the cost of labor and material for repairs. In addition to all these
the comptroller will probably prepare statistics of locomotive
performances--so many miles to one ton of coal and one pint of oil. Then
he will show the average cost of coal by the ton and of oil by the gallon,
for the railroad never forgets the cost.
It is cost that really makes the excuse for these great statistics; cost
and revenue, analyzed and reanalyzed in half a hundred different ways. The
statistics are the thermometers, the very pulse by which the health of the
railroad is acutely judged. Sometimes the statistics become graphic, and
the comptroller, through some of the keen-witted men in his office,
prepares charts, in which statistics become "curves of averages" or jotted
and wriggling lines, with each jot and each wriggle full of meaning.
"Government by draughting-board," sniffs the old-time railroader as he
sees these great "cross-hatched" sheets with their crazy lines of
intelligence spun across them, but it is "government by draughting-board"
that has made the old-time railroader--well, the old-time railroader. The
new-time railroader gives heed to those charts--the pulse readings of the
creature that he is directing--guides his course in no small way by them.
They are veritable charts by which he may pick his way quickly and safely.
Branching, as a rule, direct from the president's office and occasionally
from the general manager's, are the purchasing agent and the store-keeper,
many times one and the same, or the former acting as superior to the
latter. The purchasing agent has no easy role. If he is not above sharp
practices--the gift of a bit of furniture or a theatre box, in the least
instances--he will fulfil only part of the reputation of his office; and
if he is--as many, many of them are--absolutely honest down to the keenest
degree of an acute conscience, he will probably still be under the
suspicion of some querulous minds. His opportunities for deceit and guile
are many, so much the more must he be an honest man in every full sense of
that word.
He brings the modern railroad's passion for standardization down to the
purchase of its every sort of supplies; for his office goes out into the
market for anything, from a box of matches to a locomotive. The very fact
that his department is a non-revenue department, save for an occasional
sale of scrap-iron or discarded materials, only serves to put him the more
upon his guard. He must not yield to the wiles of crafty salesmen. He must
measure their wares by a single standard--economy, as expressed in
selling-price, in durability, and in cost of maintenance; and upon that
standard he must decide between them, as impartially as a justice upon the
bench.
He must be guided by standard. If it be typewriters, he must struggle
against the preference of this department or that for some particular
machine, and bring all to the test of his three-headed economy. The
successful machine will then be adopted for the system and brought as
such. No small responsibility rests upon his accuracy of judgment.
His store-keeper must see to it that there is no waste of supplies. He
must see to it, for instance, that the engineers are as careful in their
use of oils as the clerk in that of stationery.
"We use $4,000 worth of lead pencils alone in the course of a single
year," says one of them; "and if we didn't keep hammering at the boys,
that figure would jump to $5,000 or $6,000 without realizing it."
He keeps check on the supplies that he issues. His stock of blank forms,
alone, would do credit to a wholesale stationery house in a sizable city;
for the railroad is a liberal user of printer's ink in its own devices. He
must be thrifty and he must be economical; he must look to it that the
railroad's money is not wasted in the purchase and use of its supplies.
Together with the general counsel, the general attorney, the claim-agent,
the treasurer, and the comptroller, the purchasing agent and the
store-keeper stand as guardians of the railroad's strong-box.