This last, however, seems to be much easier planned than actually accomplished. Months are slipping by and some of the outrageous and expensive agreements still stand, along with some others which are neither outrageous nor expensive. The very worst of the lot, the meticulous arrangements under which a small job on a locomotive headlight (to make a single possible but rather typical instance) required six or eight men because each was a specialist and no man could infringe upon another's specialty, are going now and going rather rapidly. There is an apocryphal story around one Eastern railroad town to the effect that the changing of an air-hose connection on a Pullman sleeping-car one day more than a year ago cost the railroad forty dollars--a small job which two ordinary capable mechanics would have been glad to perform for but two or three at the most. Instances such as these have been multiplied. A farmer's boy who lived close to a railroad in the Middle West and who received five dollars a month and an occasional trip-pass to Chicago and back for oiling and watching an automatic electric pump at an obscure siding saw himself rated as an electrician and in receipt of $185 a month (standardized wage) without having lifted one finger toward the bonanza. It was heyday for the rank and file. The Lane Commission, which really did much scientific work on this wage question despite the exceedingly great time pressure and the war crisis under which it worked, started the ball rolling, yet in what seemingly was a very fair and reasonable fashion. It was after that, even after Mr. McAdoo's actual term of office as director-general, that the real damage was done. The pendulum swung then, and swung far. From a point where the wage-scale was unfair to the railroad employee it came toward a point where it was unfair to the railroad investor. This was particularly true in the case of the shop-craft men. They seem to have been the real offenders in the situation. With the position of the men in the train service, the members of the brotherhoods, I can have little else than great sympathy. Their plight at this moment is deplorable. At the best, they catch the hard end of railroading, the long, unconscionable hours, the stress of bad weather, the nights away from home, all the other difficult conditions of life upon the road. I do not believe that there have been many times when these men have been seriously overpaid. The score is far more apt to lie upon the other side of the table.