Not only should permanent employees be entitled to retain their position during good behavior, but they should also look forward to the continual bettering of their condition. That is, apart from promotion, seniority in the service should carry with it certain rights and privileges. Take the case of conductors, brakemen, engineers, machinists, and the like; there seems to be no reason why length of faithful service should not carry with it a stipulated increase of pay. If conductors, for example, have a regular pay of $100 a month, there seems no good reason why the pay should not increase by steps of $5 with each five years' service, so that when the conductor has been twenty-five years in the service his pay should be increased by one-quarter, or $25 a month. The increase might be more or less. The figures suggested merely illustrate. So also with the engineer, the brakeman, the section-man, the machinist. A certain prospect of increased pay, if a man demeans himself faithfully, is a great incentive to faithful demeanor. This is another fact which it would be well not to lose sight of. There ought likewise to be connected with every large railroad organization certain funds, contributed partly by the company and partly by the voluntary action of employees, which would provide for hospital service, retiring pensions, sick pensions, and insurance against accident and death. Every man whose name has once been enrolled in the permanent employ of the company should be entitled to the benefit of these funds; and he should be deprived of it only by his own voluntary act, or as the consequence of some misdemeanor proved before a tribunal. At present the railroad companies of this country are under no inducement to establish these mutual insurance societies, or to contribute to them. Their service, in principle at least, is a shifting service; and so long as it is shifting the elaborate organizations which are essential to the safe management of the funds referred to cannot be called into existence. A tie-up, as it might be called, between the companies and their employees is a condition precedent. Were this once effected the rest would follow by steps both natural and easy. For a company like the Union Pacific to contribute $100,000 a year to a hospital fund and retiring pension and insurance associations would be a small matter, if the thing could be so arranged that the permanent employees themselves would contribute a like sum; and permanent employees only would contribute at all. Once let the growth of associations like these begin, and it proceeds with almost startling rapidity. At the end of ten years the accumulated capital on the basis of contribution suggested would probably amount to millions. Every man who was so fortunate as to become a permanent employee of the company would then be assured of provision in case of sickness or disability, and his family would be assured of it in case of his death.