Soon after the Steel Corporation was organized Perkins was elected a member of the Board of Directors, and later, on the resignation of Robert Bacon, became chairman of the Finance Committee. His experience with the New York Life had peculiarly fitted him for the position he now held, for Perkins was first and last an organizer--a worker with men, not with money. Although a member of the largest private banking house of the country he was not a banker. “In the ten years I was with Morgan’s I never went behind the counter or examined into the bookkeeping end of the business,” he declared; “my job was to assist in the physical organization of the great industrial combines which Mr. Morgan was then engaged in financing.” Like Gary, head of the Steel Corporation, Perkins looked rather to the ultimate results of an action or a policy than to its immediate effects. Like Gary, moreover, he was a believer in corporation publicity and in the square deal to the worker, so it was natural that he should have favored these ideas in the Corporation. Perkins at the beginning, it is true, did not fully endorse all Gary’s policies but he early became an ardent supporter of them, and his assistance in the turbulent early years was a great help to the Judge in his efforts to have his policies endorsed by the Corporation’s board. Perkins was particularly identified with the Corporation’s bond conversion plan, explained in an earlier chapter. It was largely his idea. When the subject of raising more working capital came up after the organization of the big company it was he who suggested the scheme by which the cost of securing the new capital needed would be paid back in a few years by savings in interest charges, one which would also eventually reduce the Corporation’s fixed charges materially. He believed that the Corporation should build for the future and that it was a matter of small moment if the immediate cost of a course of action was high if the ultimate results were toward economy. And when the plan was opposed in the courts by some of the stockholders it was an affidavit presented by Perkins that did more than anything else to induce a favorable decision and to make it possible to proceed with the conversion. In 1911 Perkins retired from the Morgan firm, at the same time retiring from all active business except his directorship in various companies, chief among which were the Steel Corporation and the International Harvester Co., of which latter he was chairman of the Finance Committee. After that time he devoted his energies until his death to semi-public work.