Charles DeLano Hine

“ Can we afford to manufacture relatively fewer of our own appliances than that comprehensive organization, the Standard Oil Company? These questions cannot be answered easily or by a simple yes or no. They all depend upon time and circumstance. Our trouble has been a fundamental error in reasoning, a dogmatic generalization from too few particular cases. Stagnation is usually death to business. As we cannot back up, it would seem wise to be ready to move forward in power and influence. ”

“ You may not live to see electricity displace steam for heavy motive power, but you had better not gamble all your life insurance on such a proposition.
The tendency has been to limit all the utilities of a railroad to transportation. Before long we shall, for a time at least, be going to the opposite extreme. Some of us have entered the pension and life insurance business, some own coal mines directly or indirectly. Should we not manufacture our own ice at various points as needed and cut out some haul? Should we not control the banks in the cities and towns where we disburse so much money? ”

“ We have been meantime training another man for any vacancy in the grade that may occur. By the same token, we shall by and by consider it a privilege to get back in our official family a man whom we trained to our ways in youth, but who has been broadened by service with different roads. We shall get over considering him as having lost his rights, as an unpardonable offender against our sacred civil service. There is never any affection stronger than our first real love. ”

“ Through all the improvements, real or imaginary, through all the changes that the years may bring, bear in mind the human element. Although the race grows better all the time, the old Adam and Eve will be ever present in all of us. ”

“ Ours is a high destiny. The railway officials of the future will never be without knotty propositions to tackle. They will not have to work as long hours as we, but their problems will be more intense. ”

“ As we grow in liberality we shall feel proud to lend one of our men to another road for a few months at a time to do special work or to introduce some new idea that he has developed. The other road will be glad to pay the man a good salary, and he will return to us all the broader and more valuable because of service elsewhere. ”

“ Invite the storekeeper out on the road with you; drop in frequently at the storehouse and see if you cannot help him out of his difficulties. We all have our troubles. Do not proclaim your own inefficiency and narrowness by writing the general superintendent that your failure has been due to the store department falling down on material. ”

“ The morals inculcated are hardly acceptable in this better age. The manners taught, the art of pleasing so attractively set forth, have a value to-day, have made the term Chesterfield a synonym for grace. ”

“ High explosives, armor plate, modern weapons, modify the conditions of war, but as the Japs and Russians are teaching us to-day we can never do entirely without the individual initiative, without the courage necessary for the hand-to-hand conflict. ”

“ The thought is that our organization should provide automatically, as in the army and the navy, for the next in rank available to assume the duties of an absent or incapacitated official. A superintendent has to be sick or absent for quite a long time before we designate an acting superintendent. ”

“ When we so protect our trains by block signals or other devices that to send back a flag is an absurdity, our trainmen will become starters, and perhaps collectors, with duties not dissimilar to those of guards on elevated roads. ”

“ We want to have our data in such good shape that they will not misinterpret. As they count our Australian ballots, it is important for us to know how to put the cross opposite the eagle or the rooster. ”