ask, "Why do farmers and the public often show such
venom against the railroads?" The people of the
country who use the roads know better than anybody
what enormous advantages they get from these cor-
porations, and yet these chronic outbursts succeed
each other in every part of the country. They break
out among the most peaceable and hardest-worked
portion of our population -- the farmers, though this
is the class most dependent upon transportation. "In
every row you get into," he once said, "ask first and
answer it if you can, 'Am I in any way at fault in
this?'" He applies this to the more general situation:
"What fires have the railroads started, to choke the
air with all this smoke?" His conclusion was confi-
dently and candidly spoken that the railroads were
themselves chiefly to blame. They had too uni-
formly flouted the public interest. In their haste for
quick speculative returns, they had ridden rough-
shod over recognized public privileges.

This did not come to him at once. He began by
preaching lustily that doctrine dear to the capital-
istic heart: "the identity of interests between em-
ployer and employed." Baldwin continued to use
and to believe in the "identities" between master
and man. But he early learned the larger truth, that
interests between the management and the laborer
are one and the same only as both sides honestly
try to make them the same. This harmony does not
come of itself, nor is it to be taken for granted. All

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