injury preventing the performance of one or more important daily duties pertaining to a regular occupation.”  In other words, to secure the indemnity for total disability, the insured must be disabled from performing any regular labor whatever.  In the railway organizations total disability is so defined as to cover inability of the insured to continue in his position.  Secondly, the disability insurance offered by the regular insurance companies is joined with accident insurance affording a weekly indemnity during the period of illness due to accident.  The railway employee, if he insures against totally disabling accidents, must also insure against temporarily disabling accidents, since the companies do not separate the two forms of insurance.  The inclusion of all accidents in one policy necessitates a heavy premium.  For example, to secure accident insurance including, besides a weekly indemnity of $20, provision for the payment of $1000 in case of death or total disability resulting from accidents, an engineer must pay an annual premium of $50.40 or $56 according to the section of the country over which he runs, or the system by which he is employed.  The combination of life with disability insurance meets the need of the ordinary railway employee better than any other combination.

The formative period of the two older organizations furnished opportunities for a study of the disability benefit and showed its usefulness in strengthening the national unions.  These organizations, however, experienced grave difficulties in their attempts to administer disability insurance.  The Engineers included “totally disabled members” among the beneficiaries of the fund provided for in 1866.[40] The by-laws of the insurance association founded by the Brotherhood on December 3, 1867, provided for assessments of 50 cents per member for the benefit of each totally disabled member—­one half the amount assessed in case of death.[41] The history of this benefit was tersely summed up by General Secretary-Treasurer Abbott in his address to the Engineers’ Association, December 3, 1871:  “The Baltimore convention, 1869, adopted a disability clause, the Nashville, Tenn., convention amended it, and the Toronto, Canada, convention, 1871, repealed it.”  At St. Louis, 1872, the Brotherhood formed a separate association, known as the “Total Disability Insurance Association,” for furnishing insurance against disability to members.  An entrance fee of $2 was required and the assessment was fixed at $1.[42] In 1876 the convention dissolved the Total Disability Insurance Association, and the Engineers did not succeed in establishing a satisfactory system of disability insurance until 1884, when the prosperous condition of the association enabled the convention to carry out its long-cherished plan and to make provision for the payment of the same benefit in case of total disability as at death.[43] In the call of the Conductors for a convention to effect a permanent organization issued in November, 1868, the