ir active business-lives
successfully, and after retirement, are, in the minds of some,
eminently fitted to adorn a director's chair. Never was there a
greater mistake. What is wanted for a railway-director is an active,
clear-headed man, who has not outlived his term of activity. We want
railway-directors who know how to reduce the operating-expenses per
mile, and not men who oppose their bigoted ignorance to everything
like change or improvement, who can see no difference between science
and abstract ideas. It would seem that the only question to be asked
with regard to the fitness of a man for being a director is--Is he
rich and respectable? If he has these qualities, and is pretty
stupid withal, he is in a fair line for election. We tell our
railway-readers, that, if they desire to make their property valuable,
and rescue it from becoming a byword and a reproach, they have got
to elect men of an entirely different stamp,--men of practical
experience, in the best sense of the term, who have intelligence
enough to know and apply all those vital reforms upon which depends
the future success of their undertakings,--the men of the workshop,
the track, and the locomotive. And we shall yet see the more
intelligent of them taking the place, at the directors' board, of
the retired merchants, physicians, and other respectable gentlemen,
who now lend only the names of their respectability to perpetuate a
system of folly that has reduced our railroad-management below
contempt. As at present constituted, our boards are a very showy,
but very useless piece of mechanism. The members attend at meetings
when they feel just like it, and sign their names to documents and
statements which have been prepared for them by others, without much
knowledge of what the contents are; their other duties consisting
chiefly in riding over their own and connecting roads, free of charge.

Why should railway-directors work for nothing for the stockholders?
Ah, Messrs. Stockholders, you little know in reality how fat a
salary your directors make to themselves, by nice little commissions,
by patronizing their favorite builders of locomotives and cars, and
by buying the thousand and one patents that are so urgently
recommended! Do you carry your broken watch to a blacksmith or to a
stone-mason to be mended? Neither, we think. Why, then, do you leave
the management of a work which engineers, machinists, carpenters,
masons, and men of almost every trade,