The question is not, Are these leaders honest? Let that be conceded. The question is, Are they true to the working class? If their official attitude does not square with the working class as a whole, then they are not in line with the true interests of their own union and are not _in fact_ the friends, but the enemies of labor; not serving, but betraying those who trust and follow them. * * * * * In saying this and making the further statement that the existing railway brotherhoods are of far more actual benefit to the railway corporations than they are to the employes who support them, and that in some essential respects they are a positive detriment to their members in teaching them to venerate a “grand” officer, subjecting themselves, bound and gagged, to his “official sanction,” and in keeping them in economic ignorance—in saying these things, it is possible that Grand Chief Stone of the Engineers, and other “grand” officials will take issue; and here let me say that nothing would please me better than the chance to meet Mr. Stone before his engineers, or any other grand official before his followers, at any time, or in any public place, to prove every assertion herein made, and more, too; and I shall not object if the grand officers invite their friends, the railway officials, to occupy their accustomed seats on the platform, but I will not guarantee that the menu will be as agreeable to their corporation palates as that served at a recent Chicago banquet of the Order of Railway Conductors, or at the average brotherhood convention. * * * * * Now to another branch of the question: According to the report of the interstate commerce commission there were, for the year ended June 30, 1904, a total of 1,206,121 employes on the railways of the United States, as against 1,017,653 in 1900, an increase in four years of 278,468. How many thousands of unemployed there are, ready to take jobs when they are offered, in event of a strike, or otherwise, the reports do not say. Since 1904 there has been great increase in railroad activities and it is probable that the total has since reached 1,400,000. In 1894 the number was 779,608. That was during the last period of “hard times.” In the ten years since, from 1894 to 1904, from “panic” to “prosperity,” the number of railway employes has been almost doubled, the actual increase being 620,392, an average of over 60,000 a year. Fully five hundred thousand (500,000) new railroad men have been made in that time, and they have swelled the brotherhoods to unprecedented limits. * * * * * Now keep your eye “peeled” for the signal for the return trip from “prosperity” to “panic.” That is not a matter of guess, but of arithmetic. It may not come next month nor next year, but it will come, and the longer it is coming the longer will be the backward trip.