Several other matters of relatively lesser import were given some attention. Even the difficulty of jurisdictional conflict, the bugbear of the craft union, was known and struggled with in a labor body supposed to be jurisdiction-controversy proof. It was so ideally, but the compromises it was obliged to make with the craft form of union naturally made trouble. Slight changes were made in the system of dues; the preamble and constitution were both somewhat improved in diction and altered in a few other minor details, but they both remained fundamentally as worked out in the first convention, except for the abolition of the presidential office. The following officers were elected for the succeeding year: William E. Trautmann (to succeed himself as) General Secretary-Treasurer, and Messrs. Vincent St. John, A. Maichele, T. J. Cole, C. E. Mahoney and E. Fischer, members of the General Executive Board, and Mr. A. S. Edwards, Editor of the _Industrial Union Bulletin_. It was decided that the conventions be held the third Monday in September instead of the first Monday in May, and in Chicago unless otherwise specified. The convention adjourned on Oct. 3, 1906. The prevalent opinion at the time, and since, among the craft-unionists of the American Federation and among the party Socialists--in fact, among all those whose radicalism is comparatively conservative--was that this second convention marked the beginning of the end of the I. W. W., or at least that the loss of the Mining Department (probably the organization's most conservative element) was an almost irreparable loss. "That the I. W. W. received its death blow at Chicago and will gradually disintegrate" is a fact, according to Max Hayes, "that no careful observer of labor affairs will attempt to dispute."[304] But the I. W. W. continued to exist, and finally to do more than exist, in spite of the upheaval of 1906. It is indeed doubtful if the losses of that year were unmixed calamities. Though they did deprive the organization of its most reputable, best financed, and most respectable elements, their loss tended to give sharp definition and emphatic impulse toward a more revolutionary policy. This policy was now to be applied and tested among those forming the lower stratum of the proletarian mass--the unskilled and migratory workers. This clear-cut definition of policy and its point of application might never have been possible if the complete working-class hierarchy--from lumberjack to locomotive engineer--had been preserved. The I. W. W. became after 1906, and still more after 1908, an organization of the unskilled and very conspicuously of the migratory and frequently jobless unskilled. FOOTNOTES: [262] _Proceedings_, p. 309. [263] _Proceedings, Second I. W. W. Convention_ (1906), pp. 65-6. [264] Report of the General President, _Proceedings, Second I. W. W. Convention_ (1906), pp. 45-6. [265] _Ibid._, p. 423. [266] _Proceedings, Second I. W. W. Convention_ (1906), p. 252.