In the meantime, in those slowly moving eighteen months, what came to pass? In San Francisco, in Portland, in Seattle, in half a dozen other west coast cities where the wages of unskilled labor had reached an abnormally high figure, the railroad switching-crews had the exquisite pleasure of shunting cars at $4.50 for an eight-hour day into shipyards and other industries where the commonest and most unskilled forms of labor were receiving six and seven and eight dollars a day for the same amount of labor. I do not maintain that shifting box-cars is a particularly expert form of labor. Yet at the least it is a fairly hazardous one. The actuaries of the insurance companies will assure you as to that. And it is a fairly responsible one too. The claim agents of the railroads themselves will bear full witness as to that. They know to their own great sorrow that a box-car filled with breakables cannot be batted back and forth like a gondola of coal or a flat filled with steel angle-iron. "Responsible, did you say?" snorted the brotherhood engineer of a switcher to me one day, a year or two ago out in the Mid-West. He shouted across his cab as he poked into a siding and pulled out one of John Ringling's long circus trains. "You'd think it was responsible if you'd see the amount of signing off I have to do for this trick before I can cart her out of the roundhouse. They're right too. She may be eleven years old--you can see by the maker's plate there over the steam-chest--but she's still worth a good fifteen thousand dollars in the open market to-day. And I'm responsible for her. For five dollars. While the fat-heads that are up on the main streets of this town manicuring the cobblestones for the city fathers are getting six dollars--and no responsibility whatsoever." Here are two of the reasons why I have just called the walk-out of the railroad switchmen one of the simplest and the most logical of all the strikes in the country. The eighteen months of inexcusable procrastination in coming to a decision in this railroad wage matter was a third and a far greater one. Yet remember that the switchmen were not the only aggrieved parties to this situation--this seemingly impossible situation that has quickly become an actuality. Other forms of railroad labor suffered quite as much if not more from official procrastination and official indifference. A passenger trainman rode with me a year or two ago across northern Idaho. "Don't you go putting any pieces in your paper," said he, "saying that all of the train-crews are making the big money. A few are. But they are mighty few."