Dr.  Frank Aydelotte,

      The question which I have been asked to discuss with you this evening is “How Can the Railroad Supervisor Create Good Feeling Among the Public”.  For this discussion the Management apparently thought it advisable to choose a representative of the public, regardless of his ignorance of your particular duties, in order that you might get some idea what effect your work has on people who do not understand it but who are interested in benefiting by it in travel and in the shipping of goods.  At any rate, that is the point of view from which I am speaking. 

      I do not pretend to know anything about the railroad business.  I can only speak as a user of the railroads and I wish to say first of all that nothing is, in my opinion, so important and so fundamental in making a good impression upon the public as efficiency on your part in the doing of your own jobs. 

      What people want from the railroads is service and transportation with promptness, accuracy and safety.  I shall not dwell on that idea, but it must be taken as underlying the whole of my discourse.  I shall not dwell on it for the reason that I am not prepared to give you any useful suggestions on that subject.  I know when a train is on time and when it is late, but I do not know exactly what work is required to bring it into the station on time, though I imagine it takes a great deal more work than the public realizes.  I do not know much about the causes that make trains late, but I am prepared to believe that these causes are often more serious than the public realizes, and that trains do not run late simply because the engineer is cranky and has a desire to make the public miss their connections. 

      If you go beyond efficiency in the doing of a particular job, I should say that perhaps the next thing the public wants is some kind of an understanding of what the railroad is trying to do and of how it is trying to do it.  It is impossible for the public to appreciate justly service which it does not understand.  If the railroad supervisor has any time and energy left after he has performed his job properly, anything that he can do to explain to the public what he is doing, how he is doing it, or why he is doing it will be of value in teaching the public to understand the service of which they are getting the benefit. 

      Modern life is highly specialized.  We, all of us, come into contact one with another in highly specialized ways, and we do not realize what an immense ignorance there is, on each side of the barrier, of what the other fellow is doing on the other side.  Now the great means of jumping over the barrier of ignorance and misunderstanding is courtesy.  When you take pains to understand the other fellow’s point of view and to make him understand yours, you convey to him better than in any other way the fact that you mean well by him.  A courteous act, a courteous explanation, a courteous manner in listening to a question, a careful reply conveys an enormous amount more than the mere words in which it is couched.  A man asks you a question about a particular thing and you answer him carefully; the answer means something but the manner in which you answer it means a great deal more.  He understands by intuition of that here is somebody who is looking out for his interests.  If you have to refuse a request, he may not see just why the refusal is just; tied.  Nevertheless if the refusal is courteous, it conveys the impression which everybody appreciates that there is good will on the other side. 

      It is inevitable that all of us in our specialized functions in life tend to lose something of our humanity.  For example the great traveling public when they see a man in uniform behind the ticket window or on a station platform or in a train are likely to forget that that man is a human being just as we all tend to forget that policemen are human beings.  I do not know whether railroad officials realize that they make that impression.  I am told that college professors make the same impression on undergraduates, and what I have to say on the subject is applicable to my work in life just as much as to yours. 

      It seems to me that if either of us is to be a success in the performance of his duties, we must realize first of all that we represent to the public the organization by which we are employed; that the organization is supposed to speak through us; and that it is our responsibility to make the public realize that the organization we represent is human and not merely mechanical. 

      The railroad official is more or less mysterious to the public, and the public, I daresay, tends to be equally mysterious to the railroad official and no doubt equally annoying.  No official can deal successfully with the public unless he realizes this barrier, unless he realizes the ignorance and the fears and anxieties on the other side.  In order to make a good impression on the public, the railroad supervisor must know his job, must realize that he is speaking not as an individual but for the company and must understand something of the people with whom he is dealing. 

      When I outline that program I do not labor under the illusion that it is an easy one.  In enlarging upon it, I shall skip the first point about knowing your own job, and come at once to the second, to the representative character which every railroad man has to the public.  It is a great responsibility to represent an organization in any capacity; the greater the organization and the more important the situation in which you represent it, the greater the responsibility.  It would seem to me the duty of every official of the Pennsylvania Railroad to ask himself the question whether, in dealing with the public as a representative of the road, he is qualified to represent it adequately.  It would seem to me that the first qualification a man would need would be as full and complete an understanding as possible of the railroad for which it is his duty to speak.  Getting that understanding is a matter of education.  It is not the old kind of education that is acquired in school, but it is just as important and just as real.  Education is not a development that begins at six years of age and ends at fifteen or twenty or twenty-five.  It must go on throughout a man’s whole life, and the best part of any man’s education must inevitably be obtained outside the schools and colleges.  As a matter of fact, I have always noticed that men who get an education for themselves without much schooling usually get a better education than the average person who has the advantage of school or college training, The reason is very simple.  Education is a thing which every man must get for himself just as truly inside school or college as outside.  It is easy for the person who gets his education outside to realize this.  He knows that he must depend on his own efforts.  But sometimes the individual inside the educational institution does not realize it.  He sits back passively and thinks he will let the institution educate him.  That is something which no institution can do; if the individual does not make an effort he may nevertheless get a degree but he will not get an education. 

      The understanding of a great railway system would be in itself a very fine and liberal education.  The getting of it would be more than work for a life time, and I dare say the rewards which would come from it would be far greater than any salary which a man could get for his work no matter how high that salary might be. 

      Such an understanding ought to begin with a man’s own particular daily job.  The most illuminating symbol I know of a good education is the parcel post maps which they used to have in all the postoffices when the parcel post first started.  These maps were covered with concentric circles, the center of all the circles being the particular office in which the map was located.  In the Harrisburg postoffice the center of the circles was Harrisburg ; in the Chicago postoffice it was Chicago ; in the Kalamazoo postoffice it was Kalamazoo.  In this way the map was different for every office, just as every man’s education ought ideally to be different from every other man’s, centering in his own specific work.  Further.  more, each map not merely centered in each particular office, but it showed the relation of every other office to this one: in the same way a man’s education ought to widen in concentric circles so as to show him the relation of as many other things as possible to his own work.  The nearer these different ideas are to his work, the more he ought to know about them.  The further away they are, the less important they are for him. 

      If the railroad man would undertake in this way to understand the corporation by which he was employed, he would properly want to know first of all everything relating to his own job.  He would study next the way in which his work fitted into the department to which he belonged, and the relation of this department to other departments of the organization.  Thus his studies would lead him finally to a kind of picture of the whole organization with its various inter-related parts-but he could not stop even there.  An organization like the Pennsylvania Railroad is so vast, its relations with other industries so important, its economic effect upon the country so great that it could not be understood properly without some understanding of all these related industries and of the economic life of the territory which it serves.  From this point of view, I think there is, no exaggeration in saying that the railroad is a great university and that a man who understands it must get for himself a very fine and very broad education. 

      I do not mean to imply that in seeking such an understanding of a railroad in order that he might represent it properly in his dealings with the public that the railroad official is necessarily going to make a speech about the railroad every time he sell sells a ticket or every time he ships a car-load of freight.  It is a common saying about a college professor in lecturing to his classes that the things which make his work good are the things which he knows and says nothing about.  It is very much the same, as I conceive it, with the railroad man in his dealings with the public.  The fact that he understands the railroad.  which he represents enables him to say just the right thing at the right time without necessarily implying that in a given moment he should tell all that he knows about it.

      If the railroad supervisor is to create good will among the public, it seems to me that it is necessary not merely for him to understand the railroad but also, as I have said, to understand the public.  The responsibility for understanding the public is a responsibility which an expert instinctively tries to evade.  The expert tends to shut himself up in his own subject, to devote all his attention to dealing with it, and so long as he is satisfied that he is right his tendency is to let the public think what it likes.  That is a perfectly possible view for those few men whose work is entirely, independent of public opinion, but if the expert wants to get the public good will, then he cannot ignore the public’s point of view but must know what the public wants and ought to have.

      This business of giving the public what it wants is the heart of modern industry.  A great deal of what is best and a great deal of what is worst in our modern life come from people who are trying to give the public what it wants.  Our worst newspapers are as bad as they are because they think they are giving the public what it wants.  The same thing is true of our worst movies, our worst plays, and our worst books.  Our best newspapers are as good as they are for exactly the same reason, as are our best movies, our best, plays, and our best books.  The attempt to give the public what it wants has similar contradictory results in politics, in education and, indeed, in every modern activity. 

      I have thought a good deal about these contradictory results of the effort to please the public in so far as they affect education.  The solution in that field, it seems to me, applies to all the others.  In my opinion, the public will want what it ought to have if it can only be made to understand that a given thing is good for it and that another thing is not.  If that is true, it follows that the business of the man who is trying to give the public what it wants is to understand what the public ought to want, what the public needs, and to give it that.  But he must also explain to the public that what he is doing is the best thing for the public good.  If he can do that and make a success of it, then and only then has he solved the problem. 

      That kind of solution of the problem is not easy in education, nor in any other field.  As it is applied to the solution of the railroad problem, it involves consideration of the part which the railroads play in industry and in modern life.  It involves a campaign of education on the part of the railroads to show the public what value the railroads have, what value they ought to have, how they ought to be run and why.  It involves, of course, if a man goes far enough, consideration of the ultimate end of our whole industrial civilization. 

      In thinking of the question from that point of view, a man gets into the field of religion.  The more a man thinks about it, the more inevitably it seems to me, will he be driven to the conclusion that the whole purpose of industry is not material at all but that the material products of industry are by-products, that the most important product is something spiritual-that the reason you are in the railroad business is to add something to the sum total of human welfare. 

      The Pennsylvania Railroad can justify its existence in the last analysis only by its contribution to the welfare of the people who serve it and of the people whom it serves.  A great railroad is not merely a material fact, not merely something that you can see and survey and measure and buy and sell, but it is a spiritual fact, a human organization of, hands and brains to meet human needs.  I don’t know that a railroad supervisor will have very frequent occasion to explain all this to the public, but I do believe that no railroad supervisor can represent the railroad adequately unless he realizes the truth of these statements. 

      Men work for various reasons.  They want bread and butter and whatever additions to it they can get.  They want houses to live in, they have ambition to rise in the world, they want all sorts of things and they work to get the money to buy them.  But the thing that men want more than anything else .  and after everything else is that kind of self respect which comes from the consciousness of doing their part in the work of the world.  Every man has some notion, crude or fine, of advancing civilization, of helping to subdue the earth to the uses of men, of leaving the world a better place for his having lived in it.  I am not telling you what men ought to want; I am telling you what they do want.  This is not something that merely ought to be true ; it is true.  You can reward a man by paying him wages; you can reward him in a better way by giving him a chance to do work that is significant, and by showing him that it is significant.  I do not mean to say that a man can live on the consciousness of the significance of his work alone.  He must have his material wages first and an adequate conception of the spiritual significance of his work will hardly be possible unless he feels that he is getting a square deal in regard to the material wages.  But the fact remains of that deep-seated desire on the part of all of us to do our part in the world and to use our abilities for its good. 

      This is the root of that sense of trusteeship which we call the professional spirit, and which is so splendidly exemplified in the older professions.  If a doctor discovers a cure for some disease which has ravaged the human race for centuries, it would be perfectly legal for him to get a patent on this cure, and there is no doubt that he could make very large sums of money by doing so.  But when a doctor discovers such a cure he does not patent it; the ethics of his profession forbid it.  Instead he publishes an article about it and soon every doctor in the land is able to make the same cure by the same means as the discoverer.  The ethics of the medical profession which demand this kind of conduct are based on the theory that the members of the profession are trustees for the interests of the community.  Their first duty is not to make high salaries for themselves but to care for the health of other people. 

      In the old days, higher than business, because the business man was not supposed to be actuated by any but selfish motives.  He was not supposed, as a business man, to concern himself with the public good. 

      But business today has advanced a long way from that point of view.  The point of view of the modern railroad official has much more resemblance to that of the professions than it has to that of the old fashioned retail merchant.  The railroad official is likewise in the position of a trustee.  He is a trustee of the interests of the laborers who work under his direction, and who want high wages and short hours.  He is a trustee of the interests of the stockholders who own the railroad and who want high dividends.  He is a trustee of the interests of the public who patronize the railroads and who want good service at low rates.  How can he mediate between these conflicting interests? There is only one possible way to do it successfully.  in the long run, and that is by striving to do the just thing as between the various interests, that is by taking the attitude of a trustee, that is by bringing into business the professional spirit. 

      I may repeat what I said to you a few moments ago, that the program which I have sketched by which the railroad supervisor can earn the good will of the public is not an easy one, is not one which perhaps any man can follow perfectly.  It does, however, seem to me the only program which can be permanently successful, and it seems to me, furthermore, that the man who tries to follow it will not merely do the best thing for the railroad company or the best thing for the public, but also the best possible thing for himself.