In the final analysis, this figure will be increased, as the Corporation under normal conditions encourages and assists companies manufacturing its products into machinery, cars, locomotives, etc., to expand their exports, by giving price concessions on steel purchased for that purpose. This re-export business gives work to a substantial number of the Corporation’s employees. The building up of the vast export sales organization maintained by the Corporation has been a Herculean task, but it has been well worth the effort. By establishing its name and its product all over the world the Corporation has not only added to its profits and to its markets but it has helped to relieve the pressure of over-production which the industry feels from time to time, and thus it has conferred a substantial benefit on the steel trade as a whole. CHAPTER VII THE SPIRIT OF THE CORPORATION To one interested in social and industrial questions a tour over the vast properties and plants of the United States Steel Corporation can hardly fail to be of great educational value. It has been the writer’s good fortune to be able to make such a tour on more than one occasion. He had expected to be, and was, impressed by the various processes whereby iron ore is converted into steel ingots and then into rails, tubes, structural shapes, plates, bars, wire, nails, tin plate, and other products; by the monster machines used for loading and unloading ore; the blowing furnaces, pools of molten metal; the great rolls through which the red-hot steel is passed on its way to becoming a finished article of commerce; the mining of coal from the bowels of the earth, and the thousand and one other sights of what is probably the most spectacular of all industries. But the more lasting impression was made not by the mechanical apparatus but by the human factor, the manner in which the vast human machinery that makes the Corporation was handled; the organization that made it possible for an army of more than a quarter of a million men to work in complete harmony and to a single end. In a word, the spirit of the Corporation. As one becomes more and more familiar with the great company’s activities at first hand, more and more does it become plain that the entire organization is permeated with this spirit. From Judge Gary, its chairman and chief executive, and James A. Farrell, its president, who directs the manufacturing and commercial operations, down through the heads of the various constituent companies, and so through the subordinate officials, through those whom we may call the non-commissioned officers of the steel army, the foremen and mine captains, and finally among the men, both skilled workers and common laborers, there is evidence nearly everywhere of a universal sentiment of loyalty, of personal interest in the fortunes of the big company and of the will, on the part of each man, to give the best in him for the general result.