with some additional ones. In 1902, the electric road carried approximately three million passengers; well over three times as many as were carried in 1899, while the steam road, recovering from its low-water mark of 71,755, carried 91,761. Although the comparison is only approximate, on account of the additional points reached by the electric road, it at least serves to show what has become of the short-haul traffic.

The really significant part of such figures is not the traffic lost by the steam roads, but the entirely new traffic created by the electric lines, seemingly out of nothing. The results which followed the opening of the Detroit, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor & Jackson electric road between Detroit and Ann Arbor furnish a striking example of this. Ann Arbor is forty miles from Detroit, on the line of the Michigan Central Railroad, and had at the last census a population of less than 15,000, exclusive of the large transient residence at the University of Michigan. Before the electric road was built, the purely local business of the Michigan Central between Detroit and Ann Arbor was estimated at about two hundred passengers a day. During the first summer after it was opened, the electric road averaged approximately four thousand passengers a day between the same points, and although some part of this travel was doubtless due to novelty, the steady winter and summer business of the electric line has been running from ten to twenty times as great as the maximum traffic ever enjoyed by the Michigan Central.

These surprising increases in what may be called the visible business of a locality are due in part to the extension of the suburban residential territory of each city, following improved means of getting "there and back." But the entirely new feature which the interurban roads have introduced into the traffic situation is the promotion of what may be called the traveling habit.

There are citizens of New England today who can remember when prayers were offered in the churches for the hardy traveler of Boston who proposed to undertake a trip to New York; steam communication has lessened tenfold the minimum amount of urgency which would induce a trip of a hundred miles, but it has remained for the electric road to keep people constantly traveling short distances, impelled by motives which would not have been sufficient to start them, even five years ago. A twentymile journey on a steam railroad requires as much preparation as a twohundred-mile journey, but the interurban car, leisurely traversing the streets of the town to collect its passengers, at frequent intervals, is such a convenient, lazy way of getting around that it seems not to require much in the way of plans or of packing. To choose between the morning train at 8.13 and the afternoon train at 3.57 required decision, to catch the train required forethought; while nowadays, if at 10 A. M. it seems casually advisable to go to Jonesport, all that is necessary is to wait for the hourly interurban car to pass the door. It has been proved repeatedly that these elements of convenient access and frequent service are more of an attraction than the lower rate of fare, although in some localities where local railroad rates had been high, the considerable reductions made by the electric roads have seemed to the community to constitute a bargain in transportation, so that people traveled frequently and perhaps needlessly, through a feeling that they were saving money. Fares on the interurban lines are seldom in excess of two cents a mile, and usually amount to about a cent and a half, for round trip tickets, where local railroad rates ranged, before the opening of the competition, from two and a half to four cents a mile.

The steam railroads vary greatly in their attitude toward electric competition, but it has been almost the uniform

experience of railroad managers, East and West, that rate cuts to meet electric competition are quite futile. Electric transportation handles traffic in small units. The power house is the locomotive, and it can haul ten single cars as easily as it can a train of ten cars coupled together, more easily, in fact. more easily, in fact. But in steam service, to reverse the figure of speech, each transportation unit must have its own power house. Disregarding technical refinements, it may be said that it would cost a steam railroad five times as much to run an hourly, single-car train during a fifteen-hour day as it would to run three five-car trains. That is the primary reason on the side of absolute cost which makes it impossible for a steam road to compete with an electric road for light shorthaul traffic.

But the peculiar difference in the legal status of the two kinds of transportation gives the electric roads an advantage far greater. The charter of a steam railroad requires private right of way, fenced in, with a problem to be met in the ultimate disposition of every town or city grade crossing. The electric road buys, begs, or steals a franchise which permits it to run on the side of the highway, except where it better suits its convenience to go across lots, and then by a sort of Jekyll and Hyde transformation, the car that just now dashed across the country in the guise of a locomotive, proceeds sleepily down the main street in the character of a street car. No steam railroad can build a terminal to compete with service of this character, in the inducements it offers to a public which is willing to travel, but does not have to.

What, then, should be the attitude of a steam road toward its electric competitors? The best opinion seems to be that it should leave them alone, so far as direct competition is concerned. The traveling habit that the electric roads further does not confine itself to their own lines, and the steam roads

find that their alert rivals are coming more and more to act as feeders for long-haul business, which is the natural and profitable traffic of a steam railroad. The interurban car which collects passengers in country hamlets, and marshals them at the larger stations of the steam railroad, performs a service similar to that of a local car line within a city. An officer of one of the large Eastern railroads much subject to the competition of electric roads estimates that although his company loses about sixty-five per cent of its local short-haul business as soon as the interurban competition becomes active, the lost earnings all come back again in the form of new through business. This statement, however, applies only to main line competition; the effect of an electric parallel on a branch line must be considered separately.

The passenger earnings and economic services of a branch line arise in part from short-haul local business originating and terminating on the branch, and in part from the services of the branch as a feeder for the main line. The interurban line is certain to take the short-haul business, or at least the profit of it, and itself performs the other part of the work, that of a main line feeder. Hence much of the most bitter competition has been in branch line territory, as, for example, along the shore of Lake Ontario, east of Rochester, where the Rome, Watertown & Ogdensburg branch of the New York Central has made an ineffectual effort to keep its passenger business away from the Rochester & Sodus Bay electric line, within the forty-mile competitive radius. The steam road runs from half to three quarters of a mile from the centre of the towns along the route; the electric road uses the highway for the greater part of the distance, and runs down the main streets. The cars have a baggage compartment, and make a special feature of delivering the trunks of commercial travelers at the doors of the local hotels,

saving the cost of transfer, and although the electric road charges slightly higher fares than the steam road, it gets probably ninety per cent of the business.

The only apparent way for steam railroads to manage electric competition is through control, or partial control, of the territory. The New York, New Haven & Hartford, with a local business unique in its importance when the extent of the system is considered, has done some pioneer work in this direction, working in general to secure links which will prevent the welding together of the diversified electric lines in New England into competing parallels. Electrification of portions of the steam roadbed has also been tried on the New Haven road, and is just now being quite extensively experimented with in England, where it might almost be said that all the passenger traffic is local, in view of its controlling importance. The line of the Mersey Company, converted from steam to electric traction last May, was the first instance of this in Great Britain; on September 27 last, the first electric train was run over one of the Newcastle lines of the North Eastern, and electrification of the Lancashire & Yorkshire between Liverpool and Southport is now in progress.

But although transportation can be economically conducted in small units, on an electrified steam railroad, the tremendous advantage possessed by electric roads through their terminal facilities in the city streets is not affected, and still leaves the interurban roads in a competitive position which is almost unassailable. The alternative method of setting a rogue to catch a rogue, and building independent electric lines where needed to take care of competitors in the same field, and to act as main line feeders at the same time, seems more promising. Such lines, besides building up the territory, bringing business to the steam railroad, and constituting a defense, should be able, in

most cases, to take care of themselves and earn an independent profit.

The freight and express business done by interurban roads has been a separate growth, starting somewhat later than the passenger business. There is still a wide divergence of opinion among electric railroad managers as to the expediency of trying to develop anything more than a limited package service. The Rochester & Sodus Bay road maintains a regular freight service, handling such bulky articles as coal and lumber in five-car trains, and believes in it, while the Detroit United lines, aggregating some three hundred miles of interurban trackage, hold the opposite view, and take only a slight interest in light package business, refusing to haul heavy freight at all. The most rational point of view is probably that expressed by the president of the Detroit, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor & Jackson road, who believes that interurban lines have a useful and legitimate field in collecting and delivering all kinds of package freight, and even garden truck and milk, in the rural districts, but that freight business ceases to be profitable to an electric road as soon as it begins in any way to retard or interfere with passenger traffic. Even apart from the matter of interference with the steady business of the road, a trolley line is as ill adapted to move freight trains in large units as a steam railroad is for handling light local passenger traffic in small units. But certain electric roads, such as the Hudson Valley, running north from Troy, the Cleveland lines, and others, have been very aggressive in their package freight business, running express cars several times daily, and instituting a system of free collection and delivery in wagons. Here again, by the combined elements of low rate, frequent service, and flexibility in the place and manner of collection and delivery, the electric roads have in many

cases been able to secure almost the entire business of a locality, and to

considerable number of simultaneous renewals will sooner or later arise. The allowances out of earnings for maintenance and depreciation have undoubt edly been too small; net earnings have been kept as large as possible, and it is to be feared that nothing short of extraordinary traffic gains and unusually careful management, during the next four or five years, will keep many electric properties from urgent need of new capital at a time when it will be exceedingly hard to find.

The interurban roads have grave

problems to face. They are likely soon to feel the restraint of the complex legislation, both wise and unwise, which hedges about the steam roads; they are certain to undergo a period of foreclosure and reorganization during the next decade. But it seems wholly logical to expect that at the termination of readjustments, and after extensive development of the field and methods of electric transportation, which is still in an elementary stage, they will become the natural and profitable short-haul passenger carriers of the country.

Ray Morris.

THE strangest monument a man ever had in sacred memory, a pair of old boots. For a token of respect and admiration, love and lasting grief, just a pair of old river-driver's boots hung on the pin-knot of a pine. Big and buckled; bristling all over the soles with wrought steel calks; gashed at the toes to let the water out; slashed about the tops into fringes with the tally of his season's work, less only the day which saw him die; reddened by water; cracked by the sun, worn-out, weather-rotting old boots, hanging for years on the pine tree, disturbed by no one. The river-drivers tramped back and forth beneath them, a red-shirted multitude; they boated along the pond in front and drove their logs past, year after year; they looked at the tree with the big cross cut deep in its scaly bark, and always left the boots hanging on the limb. They were the Governor's boots, Joe Attien's boots; they belonged to Thoreau's guide.1

--

The pine tree had seen the whole. It was old and it was tall. Its head stretched

1 Thoreau spells the name "Aitteon; "I have preferred the form found on his tombstone, 66 'Attien," "because it indicates both the pronun

up so high that it could look over the crest of Grand Pitch, tremendous fall though it is, right up where Grand Falls come churning down to their final leap into Shad Pond. It had been looking up the river in the sunshine of that summer morning, and had seen the whole, — the over-loaded boat that set out to run the falls, the wreck in the rapids, the panic of the crew, the men struggling among logs and rocks, the brave attempt at rescue, and the dead, drowned bulk, which had once been the Governor, as it was tumbled down over the Grand Pitch into the pond below. The pine tree had stood guard over it for days, and when, after four days in the grave of the waters, it rose again, the pine tree still kept watch over it, until, on the sixth morning, the searchers found it there. "And when they found his body, they cut a cross into a tree by the side of the Pond, and they hung up his boots in the tree, and they stayed there always, because everybody knew that they was the Governor's boots."

ciation and the derivation. For it is not Indian, but the French Étienne, or Stephen.