We already have reviewed some of the salient features of that situation; we have seen, of organized labor, the engineer and the conductor at work; and of unorganized labor, the section-boss and the station agent. We have seen the equality of their work and the inequality of their wage. It is futile now to attempt to discuss what might have happened if the pay envelopes of all these four typical classes of railroad employees had been kept nearer parity. As a matter of fact the disagreeable and threatening situation between the railroads and the employees of their four brotherhoods is largely of their own making. If, in the past, the railroads had done either one of two things there probably would be no strike threats today, no Adamson legislation, no president of the United States placed even temporarily in an embarrassing and somewhat humiliating position. The railroads, in the succession of "crises," as we have already studied them, must have foreseen the inevitable coming of the present situation. They could have fought a strike--and perhaps won it--at any time better in the past than at the present. The brotherhoods have gained strength and the efficiency of unison more rapidly than the railroads. And even if the railroads at some time in the past had fought the issue and lost it, they at least would have had the satisfaction of having fought a good fight and an honest one. Institutions are builded quite as frequently on defeats as upon successes. Or the railroads might have sedulously recognized the nonunion worker in their ranks and by a careful devotion to his position and his pay envelope kept his progress equal to that of his unionized brother. True, that would have cost more in the first place, but it now looks as if the railroad would have to pay the amount in the last place--and the accrued interest is going to be sizable. It is not yet too late to do this last thing; it is a principle for which the railroaders should fight, into the last ditch. The greatest of the many fundamental weaknesses of the Adamson bill is the bland way in which it ignores this principle--the way in which, as we already have seen, it singles out the four great brotherhoods for the generous protection of the so-called "eight-hour day," and leaves all the other railroad workers out in the cold. Or is it a method of proselyting by which the four brotherhoods hope to force the other branches of railroad workers into organization?