But the management of the big company had the foresight to realize that a new day was dawning and, to help to make the morning of that day brighter, it adopted the policy of candid treatment of competitors, the principle of coöperation. Possibly its motives were not entirely altruistic. The Corporation itself benefited, as appeared later, from its course of action. However this may be, it sought to make friends rather than enemies of its competitors. In this it had no easy task, for the trade had too long been used to fear gift-bringing Greeks, to view with suspicion every unhostile act of a competitor, to believe that business could possibly be done on the higher plane adopted by the new consolidation. “Live and let live” was then unknown in business, or, at least, in the steel trade. But gradually the fears alluded to were overcome and the steel trade changed, or its methods did. The Steel Corporation was an evolution, the natural result of the integration in the industry that had been going on for many years. In it were concentrated into a single organization all the processes of steel making from ore mining to the manufacture of the most highly finished products of all kinds, including transportation. And the evolution was not merely a physical one. The new company stood for development along the lines of modern thought of business methods and practices. It was a fortunate thing that the Corporation from its organization had as its chief executive officer a man far-sighted enough to see that so vast an enterprise must avoid unfair practices and methods that, even if fair legally, were hardly so morally, if it would live itself; a man with sufficient acumen to realize that the Corporation’s very strength contained the germ of weakness, and to guide it clear of the dangers to which it might otherwise easily have fallen prey. In formulating its policies governing competition the Corporation had a difficult course to steer. The laws governing the actions of big business in the United States were by no means clear and for that matter, are not so to-day. On one side was Scylla and on the other Charybdis. To obey the law, the Corporation was bound to engage in active and sustained competition with other steel makers; at the same time, it had equally to refrain from any act which might be interpreted as an attempt to take advantage of its great size and resources and to overdo this competition. In endeavoring to avoid the legal rocks, the Corporation, perhaps naturally, did not meet with the most complete success. Indeed, to do so would have been impossible, as there is no true middle course between competition and coöperation--the best that can be hoped for is a compromise.