These were the days when the steel “pools” flourished. These pools were simply attempts on the part of the steel makers--who thoroughly realized that the killing competition just described could benefit no one--to protect themselves in times of stress by binding each other not to sell below a certain price or more than a specified tonnage, and by making it of no avail, from a viewpoint of profit, to do so. There were rail pools and wire pools, shafting pools and plate pools, structural pools, horseshoe pools, and in fact a separate and distinct pool for nearly every steel product made. These pools were merely treaties, but treaties in which no participant trusted the other and which consequently were usually broken by each as soon as the opportunity to get ahead of his fellow pool member presented itself--lest the other should get a similar opportunity first and take advantage of it. It is doubtful if a single pool agreement, and their number was infinite, was ever honestly kept. Old steel makers chuckle to-day as they relate how each representative of a company taking part in a pool sought to gain an advantage over his competitors while the agreement was yet a-borning. Listening to them one begins to wonder if these were indeed men who bore high and honorable reputations in the business world. According to the statements of men who themselves took part in pools it was no uncommon thing for a manufacturer to station a salesman outside the building where a conference was being held and, as soon as a price settlement was reached, to stroll casually over to a window and by pre-arranged signal indicate to him the level agreed on, whereupon the salesman would proceed to undercut the price which his employer was even then pledging himself to maintain. “Every man’s hand was against his neighbor then; we were all Ishmaelites, every one of us,” said John Stevenson, Jr., a veteran who had worked under Carnegie, in his testimony in the Federal suit for the dissolution of the Corporation. Mr. Stevenson then went on to relate the story of a wire pool conference at which a price of $1.50 a keg for nails had been agreed on. After the morning conference he went to the telegraph office to wire his partner and found one of his fellow conferees there. He waited until the other had handed in his message and walked away. While Stevenson was writing his own wire the operator, in mistake, handed him his competitor’s, asking him to decipher a word. And Stevenson discovered that the message was an offer to a large consumer to sell him 10,000 kegs of nails at $1.40! Whereupon he tore up the paper and substituted a bid of his own at the same price and got the order!