Has the public, which always pays the bill in the long run and whose interest is paramount, been injured? In the thirteen years from the Corporation’s organization to the beginning of the European war the tendency of steel prices has been downward, not only as compared with those of other commodities, which ascended, but on a dollar-and-cents basis. This tendency of prices will be discussed more fully in a later chapter. The war, it is true, brought about a decided advance in steel prices, but in comparison with other commodities they still show favorably. And there is no question that quality has improved. No better illustration of the Corporation’s price policy can be found than that afforded by a comparison of the weighted average of actual prices received by it for the past eighteen years on ten principal products with Dun’s index number of all commodity prices indicating the fluctuations in living cost for the same period. In this comparison 1903 is taken as the base because, in that year, Dun’s index number was 99.456, or as nearly as possible 100. =================================================== | DUN’S INDEX | CORPORATION’S | INDEX NO. YEAR | NUMBER | PRICE RECEIVED | BASED ON | | | CORP. PRICE -----+-------------+------------------+------------ 1903 | 99.46 | $37.56 | 100.00 1904 | 97.19 | 33.15 | 88.3 1905 | 98.31 | 32.89 | 87.6 1906 | 105.22 | 34.54 | 91.8 1907 | 113.66 | 36.59 | 97.3 1908 | 108.17 | 36.19 | 96.3 1909 | 119.02 | 32.52 | 86.5 1910 | 119.17 | 34.10 | 90.7 1911 | 118.13 | 31.88 | 84.8 1912 | 122.28 | 30.03 | 80.0 1913 | 116.32 | 33.25 | 88.5 1914 | 119.71 | 30.60 | 81.4 1915 | 124.96 | 30.67 | 81.6 1916 | 145.14 | 41.31 | 109.9 1917 | 211.95 | 60.08 | 60.0 1918 | 232.57 | 68.86 | 83.5 1919 | 233.71 | 62.66 | 167.0 1920 | 260.41 (nine mos.) 62.67 | 167.0 -----+-------------+------------------+------------ The ten classes of products used in arriving at the weighted average are: Heavy rails; blooms, billets, slabs and sheet and tin bars; plates; heavy structural shapes; merchant bars; bright coarse wire; wire nails; black sheets; merchant pipe and oil country goods; black plate. [Illustration: Andrew Carnegie]