As it proved, the method adopted by Judge Gary in fighting the strike was the best. It consisted principally of permitting the public every opportunity of judging all aspects of the case and of standing pat on the fairness of the steel companies in dealing with their men. Had the Judge yielded one iota to the demands of the labor organizers this would but have convinced the radical element in labor that they held the whip hand over capital and would have encouraged them to further excessive demands. Had the Judge, on the other hand, attempted to fight the strike by meeting violence with violence this would have alienated public sympathy. And in the final analysis public opinion is the most important factor in settling industrial disputes. As an aftermath to the strike came the “investigation” by the Interchurch World Movement, an organization at the head of which were a number of bishops and other churchmen. A committee of this organization visited Pittsburgh and other points and presented a statement, but it was of a character entirely biassed against the Corporation, its members, in their investigation, having apparently given heed only to the arguments of Messrs. Foster and Fitzpatrick. In the report of this committee stress is laid on the long working hours of the man in the steel mill, ignoring the fact that steel companies generally have made great effort to reduce the average of daily work and that only a comparatively small percentage of the men work twelve hours. Further, the committee attacked the Corporation on the question of wages which it declared to be below the sum required for American standards of living, its statements failing to harmonize with the findings of other obviously unprejudiced investigators including the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, which found otherwise. In standing on a just basis and refusing to follow the easier way of compromise the Steel Corporation performed a service not to itself or to the steel trade alone. It performed a service to the whole country and even to the world. It gave the first decided check to the growing strength of radicalism which was then threatening to overwhelm America and prevented a situation which would have thrown the country into the same condition that has for some time prevailed in Russia. The evil of unchecked growth of unionism is illustrated by what is happening in England at the present writing. The Corporation saved this country from similar evils. By its stand it established the right of every worker to earn a livelihood whether or not he belongs to a union. CHAPTER XV HELPING UNCLE SAM WIN THE WAR When Uncle Sam, in the stirring days of 1917, was drawn into the vortex of the Great War he mobilized his industrial and financial strength just as truly as he mobilized the flower of his young manhood and called upon it to spare no effort or sacrifice to ensure that his standard should be carried, as it always had been in the past, to victory.