no
common head, and by this have invited the criticism from those who
believe... that only in one 'big' union can railway employees hope for
improved working condition.... That in union there is strength, no one
will deny, but in any confederation of forces there must be an exchange
of individual rights for this collective power. There is a point in the
combining of working people in labor unions where the loss of individual
rights is not compensated by the increased power of the masses of
workers."

In the cautious working out of this principle, the firemen have
prospered after the manner of their colleagues in the other
brotherhoods. Their membership embraces the large majority of their
craft. From the date of the establishment of their beneficiary fund to
1918 a total of $21,860,103.00 has been paid in death and disability
claims and in 1918 the amount so paid was $1,538,207.00. The Firemen's
Magazine, established in 1876 and now published from headquarters in
Cleveland, is indicative of the ambitions of the membership, for its
avowed aim is to "make a specialty of educational matter for locomotive
enginemen and other railroad employees." An attempt was even made in
1908 to conduct a correspondence school, under the supervision of the
editor and manager of the magazine, but after three years this project
was discontinued because it could not be made self-supporting.

The youngest of the railway labor organizations is the Brotherhood of
Trainmen, organized in September, 1883, at Oneonta, New York. Its early
years were lean and filled with bickerings and doubts, and it was not
until S. E. Wilkinson was elected grand master in 1885 that it assumed
an important role in labor organizations. Wilkinson was one of those
big, rough and ready men, with a natural aptitude for leadership, who
occasionally emerge from the mass. He preferred railroading to
schooling and spent more time in the train sheds of his native town of
Monroeville, Ohio, than he did at school. At twelve years of age he ran
away to join the Union Army, in which he served as an orderly until the
end of the war. He then followed his natural bent, became a switchman
and later a brakeman, was a charter member of the Brotherhood, and,
when its outlook was least encouraging, became its Grand Master. At once
under his leadership the organization became aggressive.

The conditions under which trainmen worked were far from satisfactory.
At that time, in the Easte