=The Church and the Workers.= Another feature incident to the life in the steel-mills is the apathy that develops in the workers themselves. Their attitude toward life is characterized by a dumb, brutish fatalism. The editor of a paper in one of the steel cities when discussing this attitude of mind remarked: “A Finlander cares less about being killed in the mill than I do about having my tooth pulled.” It is almost impossible to enforce the necessary precautions. Life becomes of little value to the worker pressed as he is for production. This thing called steel looms big and human; life looks small in proportion. Jesus, appealing to the rural-minded people of his day, said that man is more precious than a sheep. The church in our great steel centers must often and persistently preach the gospel from this text which interpreted in modern times will be, “Man is more precious than a bar of steel.” =Progress Toward Justice.= The process of adjustment between manufacturing, the cost of labor, and the selling price of the material is a difficult one. Labor conditions have been such, and competition so keen, that it has been very difficult to safeguard the men employed in this industry. Union labor has had a hard time to establish itself. Nearly all of the mills and factories are run as open shops. Of late years, however, it has been found that there must be closer cooperation between the management, the owners, and the workers; and certain concessions have been made and new elements have been introduced into the system which are bettering conditions. It is now possible for the workers to have shares of the common stock of the United States Steel Corporation. The workers are suspicious of this scheme as well as of all other forms of profit-sharing and welfare work because they believe that it leads to a deepening of the dependence of the worker upon the concern for which he works, and thus hinders the coming of industrial democracy. It must be said, however, for a plan which makes it possible for the employees to buy stock in the concern, that it is a step toward democracy if it is democratically carried out. The difficulty at present is that only the better paid, higher class of laborers in the steel-mills can or will take the stock. Until the wages of all the laborers are increased to the place where each one can have a decent home located in a desirable part of the city, and a degree of leisure so that he can give some time and attention to other things than the mere process of making steel, the distributing of stock will not go far toward settling the labor difficulties that so often embarrass the great steel companies.