“Mr. Edwards, that shall be done,” I replied.

It involved increased labor and a few more clerks, but that was a small matter.  The remark about high prices charged set me to thinking why the men could not open a cooeperative store.  This was also arranged—­the firm agreeing to pay the rent of the building, but insisting that the men themselves take the stock and manage it.  Out of that came the Braddock’s Cooeperative Society, a valuable institution for many reasons, not the least of them that it taught the men that business had its difficulties.

The coal trouble was cured effectively by our agreeing that the company sell all its men coal at the net cost price to us (about half of what had been charged by coal dealers, so I was told) and arranging to deliver it at the men’s houses—­the buyer paying only actual cost of cartage.

There was another matter.  We found that the men’s savings caused them anxiety, for little faith have the prudent, saving men in banks and, unfortunately, our Government at that time did not follow the British in having post-office deposit banks.  We offered to take the actual savings of each workman, up to two thousand dollars, and pay six per cent interest upon them, to encourage thrift.  Their money was kept separate from the business, in a trust fund, and lent to such as wished to build homes for themselves.  I consider this one of the best things that can be done for the saving workman.

It was such concessions as these that proved the most profitable investments ever made by the company, even from an economical standpoint.  It pays to go beyond the letter of the bond with your men.  Two of my partners, as Mr. Phipps has put it, “knew my extreme disposition to always grant the demands of labor, however unreasonable,” but looking back upon my failing in this respect, I wish it had been greater—­much greater.  No expenditure returned such dividends as the friendship of our workmen.

We soon had a body of workmen, I truly believe, wholly unequaled—­the best workmen and the best men ever drawn together.  Quarrels and strikes became things of the past.  Had the Homestead men been our own old men, instead of men we had to pick up, it is scarcely possible that the trouble there in 1892 could have arisen.  The scale at the steel-rail mills, introduced in 1889, has been running up to the present time (1914), and I think there never has been a labor grievance at the works since.  The men, as I have already stated, dissolved their old union because there was no use paying dues to a union when the men themselves had a three years’ contract.  Although their labor union is dissolved another and a better one has taken its place—­a cordial union between the employers and their men, the best union of all for both parties.