Nor has the steel worker been lost sight of. It is admitted by all familiar with the subject that the Steel Corporation has been responsible for the steady and decided advance in wages in the industry that has been witnessed in the past nineteen years. Wages have been increased voluntarily and without demand from the men whenever trade conditions made increases possible. At the same time the Corporation has steadily set its face against reducing wages in times of stress. And what is more important it has spent immense sums of money in sanitation, education, and other ways of bettering the wage earner’s lot, has helped him to save and invest his money by offering special inducements for so doing, and has set an example in industry generally that has done more for the cause of common labor than has been accomplished by the labor unions themselves. [Illustration: J. Pierpont Morgan] It may seem absurd to accuse the management of the Steel Corporation of socialistic leanings. But among the 160,000 stockholders of the big enterprise more than one third are men who work in its furnaces, mines, mills, and offices, and these have become stockholders under the plan that permits employees to acquire stock on the instalment plan and offers a premium as an inducement to hold it. Does the history of the industrial world contain another so striking instance of a step toward ownership of the product of labor by labor itself, toward the highest and best socialism? CHAPTER III EARLY HISTORY AND GROWTH--1901 TO 1907 It was perhaps natural that the early years of the big new corporation were not entirely without their troubles. The work of bringing together and making into one harmonious whole a number of different companies, with the smoothing out of mutual jealousies and dispelling of distrust, was a far greater task than the actual financial organization. And it was only with the passage of years that this was successfully accomplished. It will be remembered that Schwab, in his speech at the Simmons dinner, had pointed to the advantages of integration which would be possible in a big steel merger, and the fact that a concern like the Steel Corporation, and such a concern alone, could successfully invade foreign markets and develop, in competition with European manufacturers, a permanent outlet for American steel. This was the same thought held by Gary when he had previously urged Morgan to finance a big steel combine. Briefly, these were the principal reasons for the Corporation’s existence; and these were the objects which its founders immediately set themselves to attain.