ost $1,250,000 and which
yields a substantial revenue besides housing the Brotherhood offices.

The engineers have, indeed, succeeded in forming a real Brotherhood--a
"feudal" brotherhood an opposing lawyer once called them--reestablishing
the medieval guild-paternalism so that each member is responsible for
every other and all are responsible for each. They therefore merge
themselves through self-discipline into a powerful unity for enforcing
their demands and fulfilling their obligations.

The supreme authority of the Brotherhood is the Convention, which
is composed of delegates from the local subdivisions. In the interim
between conventions, the authorized leader of the organization is the
Grand Chief Engineer, whose decrees are final unless reversed by the
Convention. This authority places a heavy responsibility upon him, but
the Brotherhood has been singularly fortunate in its choice of chiefs.
Since 1873 there have been only two. The first of these was P. M.
Arthur, a sturdy Scot, born in 1831 and brought to America in boyhood.
He learned the blacksmith and machinist trades but soon took to
railroading, in which he rose rapidly from the humblest place to the
position of engineer on the New York Central lines. He became one of the
charter members of the Brotherhood in 1863 and was active in its affairs
from the first. In 1873 the union became involved in a bitter dispute
with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and Arthur, whose prompt and energetic
action had already designated him as the natural leader of the
Brotherhood, was elected to the chieftainship. For thirty years he
maintained his prestige and became a national figure in the labor world.
He died suddenly at Winnipeg in 1903 while speaking at the dinner which
closed the general convention of the Brotherhood.

When P.M. Arthur joined the engineers' union, the condition of
locomotive engineers was unsatisfactory. Wages were unstable; working
conditions were hard and, in the freight service, intolerable. For the
first decade of the existence of the Brotherhood, strike after strike
took place in the effort to establish the right of organizing and the
principle of the collective contract. Arthur became head of the order at
the beginning of the period of great financial depression which followed
the first Civil War boom and which for six years threatened wages in
all trades. But Arthur succeeded, by shrewd and careful bargaining, in
keeping the pay of engineers from s