Another difficult problem with which the Tennessee company had to contend was that of labor. The large majority of the common labor supply in the South is made up of negro labor and, while the colored man often makes a satisfactory worker if properly “bossed,” he is unreliable and too often has as his motto “never do to-day what you can put off until to-morrow.” Given assurance of enough to eat for a day or two and a dollar in his pocket, he is likely to refuse to work until again urged by the spur of necessity--childlike, his vision of the future is limited. And this disposition to take life from day to day is, to put it mildly, trying to the manufacturer who needs a full force to get out tonnage. And even when the negro is reliable he is seldom fitted to take positions of responsibility, so that workmen must be brought from the North to undertake the skilled work or that requiring managerial ability. And as the opportunities for such men are greater in the North, the keeping of an efficient organization together means a constant struggle on the part of the manufacturer, becomes an ever-present and pressing problem. The expansion of the steel industry in the South is further limited by the fact that it is an agricultural, not an industrial, section. A steel mill does not, in the main, make products to be sold direct to the ultimate consumer. Its output must be manufactured by other companies into machinery, locomotives, and a thousand and one other things. Its customers are other industries, and there are comparatively few industries in the South. Thus it would seem that the formation of a great southern steel merger or the expansion of the Tennessee company to a size sufficiently large to cause apprehension to the “Steel Trust” was a very remote contingency. It might not be out of place here to point to the significance of the fact that the Republic Iron & Steel Co., which owns important tracts of ore and coal lands in the South just as conveniently situated to its furnaces as are the Tennessee’s holdings, has not made marked use of the supposed advantages which it obtained from its southern properties. The company’s expansion since 1907, under John A. Topping’s able management, has been great, but it has been almost entirely in the North.