Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Transportation Building Dedication Addresses [PAGE 58]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

seven billion dollars, deposits in saving banks - most reliable barometer of national thrift - increased in a as great, and public debt decreased from substantially two billion dollars to less than one billion dollars Now we are entirely too practical to harbor the thought that all this just naturally happened. We know,

for instance, that no new sources of wealth have been created during this period, but simply that existing resources have been developed; and when we find that railroad mileage has increased in almost exact ratio with the increase in national wealth, we cannot escape the conviction that a very close relationship must exist between these two conditions. In the retrospect, it seems impossible that these conditions should not be hightly satisfactory: and, in viewing the matter abstractly, one might wonder what the railroad problem really is — why all this confusion, this

threatened confiscation of property, the abuses, criticisms and restraints heaped upon and thrown about the railroads at an ultimate expense so great to the people. It is indeed

very difficult to believe that the conditions under which these marvelous results have been produced could possibly be so radically wrong as we are led to believe. Other nations, in adopting our representative form of government, believing that it contains the secret of national success, unconsciously and sometimes unwittingly