The furnaces are fed literally mountains of ore every year. The families dependent upon the iron and steel trade for their living, if gathered together, would form a state more populous than Illinois. The steel business thinks its own thoughts, prints its own literature, and very largely makes its own laws. There is no trade on the face of the earth equal to it. The results of the present world war hang in the balance. The needs come back definitely to the steel industry. If we can get more workers we can get more steel. If we get more steel, we can build more ships, and if we can get more ships, we can get more soldiers, more ammunition, and more food with which to fight the war for democracy. The year 1916 was the most prosperous one which the American steel trade has ever known; manufacturers especially were driven to the limit of their capacity. The purchases amounted to startling proportions. Wages were increased so that the workman shared in a measure in the general prosperity. Three advances were made, each time approximating 10 per cent. The workmen are paid on a sliding schedule thus benefiting by the rise in the value of the product they make. Never have workmen received such wages as are now being paid to the workmen of America. But over against this increase in wages must be considered the increase in the cost of living, and also the base line, or average wage in days before the war upon which these increases are figured. Hours are still very long and no process has been devised for making the work very much easier or less wearing upon the individual worker. Investigators who made their report in 1912 said that during the year 1910, the period covered by their investigation, 29 per cent. of the employees in the blast furnaces and steel works and rolling-mills ordinarily worked seven days a week; 24 per cent. worked eighty-four hours or more a week. This means a twelve-hour day seven days a week. These long hours were not confined to the men in the blast-furnace department, where there is a real necessity for continual toil, but to a large extent to the other departments, where no such necessity existed, except the necessity of making all the profits possible from the workers. When the shift was made from day to night work or from night to day work, the employees making the shift were required to remain on duty without relief for periods of from eighteen to twenty-four hours consecutively. No one can visit a steel-mill and not feel that there is something merciless in the way the workers are being goaded by invisible forces to keep their speed at the topmost notch. The very nature of the work is such that men are forced to labor at high tension. The mill stops for nothing either day or night. “You must draw or be dragged to death,” said one of the workers.