The most startling shift has been, of course, in the railway men's organizations, which have changed from a pronounced conservatism to an advocacy of a socialistic plan of railway nationalization under the Plumb Plan. The Plumb Plan raises the issue of socialism in its American form. In bare outline the Plan proposes government acquisition of the railroads at a value which excludes rights and privileges not specifically granted to the roads in their charters from the States. The government would then lease the roads to a private operating corporation governed by a tri-partite board of directors equally representing the consuming public, the managerial employes, and the classified employes. An automatic economy-sharing scheme was designed to assure efficient service at low rates calculated to yield a fixed return on a value shorn of capitalized privileges. The purpose of the Plumb Plan is to equalize the opportunities of labor and capital in using economic power to obtain just rewards for services rendered to the public. In this respect it resembles many of the land reform and other "panaceas" which are scattered through labor history. Wherein it differs is in making the trade unions the vital and organized representatives of producers' interests entitled to participate in the direct management of industry. An ideal of copartnership and self-employment was thus set up, going beyond the boundaries of self-help to which organized labor had limited itself in the eighties. But it is easy to overestimate the drift in the direction of radicalism. The Plumb Plan has not yet been made the _sine qua non_ of the American labor program. Although the American Federation of Labor endorsed the principle of government ownership of the railways at its conventions of 1920 and 1921, President Gompers, who spoke against the Plan, was reelected and again reelected. And in obeying instructions to cooperate with brotherhood leaders, he found that they also thought it inopportune to press Plumb Plan legislation actively. So far as the railway men themselves are concerned, after the Railroad Labor Board set up under the Esch-Cummins act had begun to pass decisions actually affecting wages and working rules, the pressure for the Plumb Plan subsided. Instead, the activities of the organizations, though scarcely lessened in intensity, have become centered upon the issues of conditions of employment.