In the chapter on Welfare Work and in that on the Steel Strike two aspects of the Corporation’s policies regarding its relations with employees are discussed at considerable length. Broadly speaking, the Corporation’s attitude is that every worker is entitled to as large a wage as conditions in the industry and justice to investors warrant, decent living conditions, and the right to work when, where, and for whom he pleases. By encouraging the worker to invest in its stock it seeks to make sure his full coöperation in its activities and to bring home to him the realization that the interests of labor and capital are identical. Finally, we come to the Corporation’s relations with stockholders, its financial policy. For twenty years the big company has been steadily building up its assets with a view to making its common stock the safest investment of its kind in the world. It is not too much to say that it has now attained that eminence, and if its stockholders in the past have not always shared in profits as liberally as they may have considered their due, there is no question that their loss in the past has been much more than made up for by the security which the future promises. CHAPTER XIII STEEL FROM THE INVESTOR’S VIEWPOINT Although throughout the chapters of this history stress has been constantly laid upon the activities of the United States Steel Corporation in promoting better relations between capital and labor, in improving the working conditions of its employees, in introducing new and more honorable methods into competition, and in blazing the pathway for corporate publicity, it must be recollected that the Corporation has been a business enterprise first and last. In the final analysis it was and is a money-making institution. The paying of dividends to stockholders was the basic reason for its existence. United States Steel, both in capitalization and output, was the largest business in the world. But its management was not satisfied with this. It has always been the ambition of Judge Gary and his associates to make its stock the premier industrial security in the United States and, for that matter, in any country. Final decision as to the measure of their success rests with the investor; and he has decided and made his decision evident. To-day United States Steel common stock sells in the market at an investment yield lower than most, if not all, other industrial and railroad securities, a yield, in fact, that compares not unfavorably with that on securities of the Government of the United States itself. Nor is the reason far to seek. As the Corporation has earned and enjoys the confidence of its competitors, customers, and most of its workers, so it has earned the confidence of the great mass of the investing public which regards it, not without justification, as the principal bulwark of the country’s business.