At nine minutes after seven last evening Sever 11 was filled with an audience of residents of Cambridge and students eager to hear Mr. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., lecture on "The Management of Railroads as a Profession for College Graduates."

Every man owes his success in life to "catching the step," either by observation or by instinct. Thirty years ago, a college graduate was expected to go into the ministry, law, medicine, or engineering. Now the world is changed. There is at present, too, a spirit of organization. As Tennyson says; "The individual withers, and the whole is more and more." The presence of this spirit makes the difference between our own times and those of our fathers. Combinations of capital were the first to arise. Those of labor now confront them. The two must be harmonized, and the railroad will have a great share in doing it.

Forty years ago the Old Colony R. R. was founded. It had at first 4 engines. They ran from Boston to Plymouth. From $1500 to $2000 was earned in a week. Now in every great railroad, there are five departments, - the financial, the construction, the operating, the commercial, and the legal. As in the national government at Washington, there is the president. His cabinet is composed of a treasurer, an engineer, a superintendent, a general traffic manager, and a lawyer, all of whom are heads of departments.

In the Union Pacific Railway, smaller than the Pennsylvania and other roads, there are 5,000 miles of track running through 6 states and 4 territories. It has a capital of $270,000,000 in securities, an income of $25,000,000 a year. It carries in a year 7,000,000 tons of freight and 2,500,000 passengers. It has 550 locomotives, 12,000 cars. It uses 25,000 steel rails a year and 2,000,000 ties. This is the growth of but 40 years. What will it be in 60 years? The laws of aggregation and consolidation are just beginning to reach their results; trained, educated men are wanted as heads of corporations. Within five years, after a man enters railroading, he will be as far advanced as though he had entered a learned profession, provided he is equally devoted, industrious, abstinent and tenacious. Of the five departments, all of which lead to the top, the construction department gives a man an out-door life, the legal, on the whole is, perhaps, most congenial to the college-bred man.

Life should not be all work. There is a period when a youth wants an active life. This craving was gratified for us in the army life of twenty years ago. When Pierce and Buchanan were consuls, we wanted to go west. Now, too, boys want to be cowboys. The constructing and engineering departments of a railroad will gratify this desire in a more natural and better way.

But it makes little difference what profession a man takes, as long as he is not a round egg in a square hole. Be the man who, when he is told to do a thing, goes and does it. Have temperance, perseverance, self-control. Remember Horace's "Ne cede malis," and Holmes' verses beginning "Stick to your aim."