How much of the export trade secured during the war years can be held permanently is entirely a question of opinion. Undoubtedly, Great Britain and Germany will strain every effort, when they get over their present difficulties, to regain the business they lost to us between 1914 and 1918. They are already starting to compete. And France, having recovered the vast ore deposits of Lorraine, may become a steel exporter, too. On the other hand, some authorities are of the opinion that manufacturing costs of steel in England and Germany at the time this is written are higher than in the United States, and that the European producer will never regain the advantage of low labor costs he once enjoyed. Time alone will settle these questions. But with the steel trade of the United States as a whole devoting its energies to cultivating and holding foreign markets the probabilities are that at least a substantial portion of the gain in exports shown in the war period will be maintained indefinitely. The Steel Products Company has not sought merely to increase the gross tonnage of its business. In the years preceding the organization of the Steel Corporation the steel exports of this country consisted very largely of the cruder and less profitable materials, particularly iron ore, pig iron, billets, and steel bars. It will readily be seen that the most important business is that which shows the greatest profit, that in finished rather than in raw or semi-finished material, the finished product meaning not alone larger profits to the shipper, but more employment and a higher rate of remuneration to labor. The higher degree of finish to the products manufactured the greater the wages paid to the worker. In exporting iron ore, pig iron, scrap and cast iron, only the cheapest materials are involved, the lowest paid labor engaged. It is a question whether such exports, particularly those of iron ore and pig iron, are of any real benefit to the country as they involve the sacrifice of natural resources usually at such unremunerative prices that from the standpoint of conservation it might appear wiser, to economists, to withhold these reserves for domestic rather than foreign consumption. And the policy of the Corporation in developing its world trade has been in harmony with this thought; its efforts have been consistently to decrease the volume of its foreign sales of the less-worked-up materials and to increase sales of the more highly finished products.