connection with any plan of solution, while no plan will bring all the benefits hoped for by its more optimistic adherents.  Moreover, under any healthy plan, the benefits will develop gradually and not rapidly.  Finally, we must clearly understand that the public servants who are to do this peculiarly responsible and delicate work must themselves be of the highest type both as regards integrity and efficiency.  They must be well paid, for otherwise able men cannot in the long run be secured; and they must possess a lofty probity which will revolt as quickly at the thought of pandering to any gust of popular prejudice against rich men as at the thought of anything even remotely resembling subserviency to rich men.  But while I fully admit the difficulties in the way, I do not for a moment admit that these difficulties warrant us in stopping in our effort to secure a wise and just system.  They should have no other effect than to spur us on to the exercise of the resolution, the even-handed justice, and the fertility of resource, which we like to think of as typically American, and which will in the end achieve good results in this as in other fields of activity.  The task is a great one and underlies the task of dealing with the whole industrial problem.  But the fact that it is a great problem does not warrant us in shrinking from the attempt to solve it.  At present we face such utter lack of supervision, such freedom from the restraints of law, that excellent men have often been literally forced into doing what they deplored because otherwise they were left at the mercy of unscrupulous competitors.  To rail at and assail the men who have done as they best could under such conditions accomplishes little.  What we need to do is to develop an orderly system, and such a system can only come through the gradually increased exercise of the right of efficient Government control.

In my annual message to the Fifty-eighth Congress, at its third session, I called attention to the necessity for legislation requiring the use of block signals upon railroads engaged in interstate commerce.  The number of serious collisions upon unblocked roads that have occurred within the past year adds force to the recommendation then made.  The Congress should provide, by appropriate legislation, for the introduction of block signals upon all railroads engaged in interstate commerce at the earliest practicable date, as a measure of increased safety to the traveling public.

Through decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States and the lower Federal courts in cases brought before them for adjudication the safety appliance law has been materially strengthened, and the Government has been enabled to secure its effective enforcement in almost all cases, with the result that the condition of railroad equipment throughout the country is much improved and railroad employes perform their duties under safer conditions than heretofore.  The Government’s most effective aid in arriving at this result has been its inspection service, and that these improved conditions are not more general is due to the insufficient number of inspectors employed.  The inspection service has fully demonstrated its usefulness, and in appropriating for its maintenance the Congress should make provision for an increase in the number of inspectors.