And if they ever go out on strike, particularly the B. L. E., their own former members, victimized by them, will rise up to smite them. The other day I met a man who had an official position that paid him $5,000.00 a year. Said he to me: “I will quit this job for but one thing, and that will be to take an engine when the B. L. E. go out on strike.” He used to be a member. There are any number of men scattered over the country—most of them its own former members—waiting for the B. L. E. to strike, and the day is not distant when that union will reap the harvest it has sown. _Third_—You are kept apart from other workers, for it would be dangerous if you affiliated with them and got an idea above the round-house or caboose or cab you work in. Besides, you might get class-conscious and that would endanger your slavery. _Fourth_—You spend hours in the lodge room, “riding the goat,” getting the secret work “down fine,” giving “passwords” and “signs,” and unpacking job-lots of “secret work” that any railroad official in the country can have any day he wants it. These are but bibs and rattles for mental babies, and the more time you amuse yourselves with them the less danger there is of your thinking about anything that will break your chains and set you free. These are a few of the things; I have not space for more. The hundreds of columns of stale stuff rehashed for years in your journals that might be called goose gossip would, perhaps, be excusable in the official organ of some feeble-minded asylum, but it is woefully out of place in a working class publication. Now let me say a few more things—and space will allow only a few of the many that might be put down—that you may think about at your leisure. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers is forty-two years old and has never won a strike of any consequence in all its career. It is called a success because the corporations make some concessions to it so as to use it as a battering ram against other employes in the service; and this is substantially true of all the “brotherhoods.” * * * * * Then, again, the brotherhoods are used against each other. The union switchmen on the Denver and Rio Grande, at Pittsburg and other places; the engineers on the C., B. & Q.; the telegraph operators on the A. & P., M., K. & T., Great Northern and Northern Pacific; and the machinists on the Santa Fe are but a few of the long list of victims of the “dog-eat-dog” unionism, a quarter of a century behind the times. But the grand officers of the several unions attend one another’s conventions and join in solemn chorus in telling the delegates of each other’s union what wise grand officers they have, how kind the corporations are to them, and how proud they ought to be of their noble brotherhoods.