Suppose the railroad was to begin with this absolute cost of living as a foundation factor. It would quickly add to it the hazard of the particular form of labor in which its employee was engaged expressed in dollars and cents--a factor easily figured out by any insurance actuary. To this again would be added a certain definite sum which might best be expressed, perhaps, as the employee's profit from his work; a sum which, in ordinary cases at least, would or should represent the railroad's steady contribution to his savings-bank account. To these three fundamental factors there would probably have to be added a fourth--the bonus which the railroad was compelled to offer in a competitive labor market for either a man or a type of men which it felt that it very much needed in its service. Only upon some such definite basis as this can a railroad's pay-roll ever be made scientific and economic--and therefore permanent. An instant ago and I was speaking of bonuses. The very word had, until recently, a strange sound in railroad ears. The best section foreman on a line may receive a cash prize for his well-maintained stretch of track; I should like to hear of a station agent like Blinks who knows that his well-planned and persistent effort to build up the freight and passenger business at his station, is to be rewarded by a definite contribution from the pay-chest of the railroad which employs him. Up to very recently there apparently has not been a single railroad which has taken up this question of bonus payments for extra services given. To the abounding credit of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railway and its president, Edward Payson Ripley, let it be said that they have just agreed to pay the greater proportion of their employees receiving less than $2,000 a year a bonus of ten per cent of the year's salary for 1916--a payment amounting all told to $2,750,000. The employees so benefited must have been employed by the Santa Fé for at least two years and they must not be what is called "contract labor." By that the railroad means chiefly the men of the four great brotherhoods whose services are protected by very exact and definite agreements or contracts. The men of the brotherhoods are hardly in a position to expect or to demand a bonus of any sort. And it also is worthy of record that practically every union man, big or little, has placed himself on record against bonus plans of every sort.