For thirty years he maintained his prestige and
became a national figure in the labor world. He died suddenly at
Winnipeg in 1903 while speaking at the dinner which closed the
general convention of the Brotherhood.
When P.M. Arthur joined the engineers' union, the condition of
locomotive engineers was unsatisfactory. Wages were unstable;
working conditions were hard and, in the freight service,
intolerable. For the first decade of the existence of the
Brotherhood, strike after strike took place in the effort to
establish the right of organizing and the principle of the
collective contract. Arthur became head of the order at the
beginning of the period of great financial depression which
followed the first Civil War boom and which for six years
threatened wages in all trades. But Arthur succeeded, by shrewd
and careful bargaining, in keeping the pay of engineers from
slipping down and in some instances he even advanced them.
Gradually strikes became more and more infrequent; and the
railways learned to rely upon his integrity, and the engineers to
respect his skill as a negotiator. He proved to the first that he
was not a labor agitator and to the others that he was not a
visionary.
Year by year, Arthur accumulated prestige and power for his union
by practical methods and by being content with a step at a time.
This success, however, cost him the enmity of virtually all the
other trades unionists. To them the men of his order were
aristocrats, and he was lord over the aristocrats.
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