All welfare work, in the end, whether it be the salvation of the worker from accidents, the teaching of individual or community hygiene, the care of the sick, financial compensation for the injured, the teaching of languages, trades, sciences, or the inculcation of thrift, has for its object the making of better men and women, the giving to the worker born under unfavorable social conditions the opportunity to lift himself above these conditions. And from this both the employer and employed must benefit together. But every other consideration aside, welfare work had paid in the satisfaction that the management and the stockholders of the great industrial enterprise feel in the knowledge that they have given the man who works with his hands, not in the Corporation alone, but industry generally--for where U. S. Steel leads, others follow--better working conditions, cleaner homes and communities, and better educational facilities for their children. In the satisfaction of knowing that, by this work, better citizens are being made, and finally, in the realization that it has helped to bridge the chasm that separates capital from labor. Sooner or later the time must come when it will be recognized that what is known as “welfare work” is a simple duty that industry owes to labor. If it is not freely accorded, the working man will eventually demand that his work and his home be surrounded with those conditions, tangible and intangible, that make for decent citizenship, for self-respecting manhood. If industry as a whole, as the Steel Corporation has already done, will recognize without compulsion these rights it will go a far way toward smoothing out the differences that exist between capital and labor, toward eliminating radical agitation and Bolshevism. It must offer this practical recognition of the workers’ rights as evidence of its claim that the real interests of the man who works with his hands and of him who pays him his wage are identical. Welfare work is the humanizing of industry. It may prove the salvation of industry. CHAPTER XI INVESTIGATIONS AND DISSOLUTION SUIT On March 1, 1920, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision acquitting the United States Steel Corporation from the charge of the Government that it was a combination in restraint of trade, bringing to an end litigation that had cost both the Corporation and the Government many millions in cash and had for nearly nine years thrown a threatening shadow on the steel industry and on American business as a whole. The decision, moreover, wrote the final chapter to a record of investigations of and political attacks against the Corporation that had lasted almost since its organization.