The choice for the presidency of a new export organization fell upon James A. Farrell. He was suggested and his appointment advocated by the chairman. He was the man fitted preëminently for the job and his selection was more or less inevitable. It is generally recognized that no individual in the steel industry possessed so wide a knowledge of the extent, character, and requirements of world markets as he does. In 1903, when he became president of the Corporation’s new export subsidiary, the country’s foreign trade in iron and steel was a little more than 300,000 tons. In 1917 it was 6,268,514 tons. For many years, during which there had been little disposition on the part of American steel makers seriously to cultivate markets abroad, Farrell’s entire time and energy had been devoted to that end. A man with the genius that is “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he had developed a thorough knowledge of competitive conditions affecting steel in every part of the world where the metal was used. He had become, and still is, a walking encyclopedia on all matters relating to the exportation of steel, carrying in his head details of freight rates, steamship facilities, duties, and so on, at and between all important and many unimportant points. His facility in reeling off from memory these facts and figures, as displayed when he was called as a witness for the defence in the Federal suit since dismissed by the Supreme Court for the dissolution of the Steel Corporation, earned him the soubriquet of “the man with a head full of figures,” a not inept title. And indeed, no more striking exposition of the wide scope of the export market for steel made in America which has been developed within the past sixteen years has ever been given than was embraced in his testimony on the occasion mentioned. His statement which, incidentally, consumed nine days, was a remarkable story of business achievement. He showed that the exports of the Corporation were of a variety as miscellaneously wide as was their distribution, ranging from cotton ties for Egypt to highway bridges for Iceland; from wire products for the Holy Land to light rails and pipes for the diamond mines of the Transvaal; from galvanized sheets for the houses of the Borneo natives to the steel skeleton work for some of Buenos Aires’ large and beautiful buildings; in fact, everything made of steel was shipped “from Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand.” Farrell is one of the men of which the steel trade furnishes so many examples, men who have worked their way up from the foot of the ladder to the highest places in the industrial and commercial world. Born at New Haven, Conn., on February 15, 1863, he started his working career as a laborer in a wire mill in his home town while yet in his teens--at the age of fifteen and a half. But it was not long before he was doing skilled work, and from this it was, for Farrell, an easy step to a more responsible position.