The result of it all is a system of speeding, unceasing and relentless, seldom equalled in any industry at any time." According to the same acknowledged authority the Steel Trust employs also regular secret service men whose duty it is to spy on the workmen and to report to their superiors any agitation looking towards the formation of unions or organized protests against the twelve hour day or other working conditions. At various times also successful attempts have been made, under direction of the central office in New York, to dictate the political action of the workmen. May, 1908, for instance, the Pittsburg Survey reports that the superintendents of the Edgar Thompson plant at

In

Braddock,

Pa., were ordered to line up the men in favor of the Penrose candidates for the legislature, the point being made that the first duty of the men was to the Steel Corporation and that the Corporation needed Penrose in the United States Senate.

But it must not be taken for granted that

the mills of the Steel Trust, he must sign an agreement releasing the corporation from liability for any damage to his person. In a single year two hundred workmen have been killed in the steel industry in the mills of the Pittsburg district alone and that takes no account of the other hundreds more or less seriously and permanently injured. But in this whole matter of affording better protection to its workmen, it is a pleasure to report that the United States Steel Corporation is taking an aggressive and enlightened interest.

In 1903 the Steel Corporation instituted its so-called "profit sharing" system, unIder which shares of the preferred stock of the corporation are sold to workmen on the installment plan. The annual offer of stock has been usually oversubscribed by the men. The stock is paid for in ten monthly installments, which are deducted from the wages in amounts fixed in advance by the subscribers. In addition to the regular dividends, paid to all holders of the stock, the men are promised that if they hold the stock for five years and during that time "show a proper interest in the welfare and progress of the Company," they will be paid an extra dividend of $5.00 and to such of them as "the corporation shall find deserving thereof" a still other and larger gift or bonus.

the managers of the Steel Trust, having the power entirely in their own hands and not at all hampered by the fear of strikes or labor unions, have no realizing sense of their duty and responsibility towards the men.

Under the direction of Judge Gary, Chairman of the Board of Directors, and his subordinates, many broad-minded and humane policies have been inaugurated. Committees of Safety have been organized to develop the use of safety appliances in the various plants. That work of any kind in the steel mills is recognized as dangerous is shown by the fact that before a visitor is admitted to any of

As a result of this sorting process, the 26,399 workmen who originally subscribed for stock in 1903 dwindled to 5,409 when the first extra dividend was paid in 1908.

The feeling is general among the workmen that the stock selling system, with its extra payments, at the will of the Company, to those who are tractable and

one of sullen restraint and
half-fearful, half-angry repression.

"The workingmen of Pittsburg or any other American community could not be roused over night to the point of serious, premeditated, revolutionary violence," says the Pittsburg Survey. "Agitation alone, however persistent, could never accomplish it; but if the treatment that the steel companies are now employing toward their workmen be indefinitely prolonged, it will be hard to predict the ultimate action of the workers. Under such circumstances, if there should ever be a

tion:

"The treatment accorded by our Corporation to its employees compares favorably with that of any line of industry in this country or any other country at the present time or any period in the history of the world."

Between the two views, there is a wide divergence of opinion. They can never harmonize. That is impossible in the very nature of things. It would seem to be the duty of every citizen to study the facts and make up his mind which is more nearly correct.

T did not take long for Sabetha, Kansas, to build its own public utilities. While the newspapers were printing frosty messages, last winter, about weather thirty degrees below zero, coal shortages, and shivering families, this little town of 2,100 inhabitants, in Nemaha county, was the most comfortable place in the state. It had its own pure water supply; it owned an excellent electric light plant; it had a perfect system of sewage disposal; and, more important than all, in the winter, it had a municipal steam heating outfit that made it independent of everything and everyone on the frozen, snow-covered earth excepting, only, the powers that produced the fuel oil for the furnacesand it had a good supply of that.

Sabetha had no injunctions to fear, last winter. It had no franchise grabs to fight, no coal trust to fear, and not one lawyer within its peaceful limits. This doesn't mean that Sabetha has an embargo on lawyers. It means, only, that a man in that profession would starve to death there -and so would the honorable police judge, appointed as a necessary part of the town's corporation, if he were not above want, for he never holds court. It means, too, that Sabetha has been wise enough to profit by the

mistakes of

other towns and cities, and, in view of the record to date, it must have had much to learn. It is, without a doubt, the one town on the American continent so self-satisfied that it is not particularly interested in the commission form of government, although some of its progressive citizens are urging this further improvement, while admitting it is not especially needed. It is in a class by itself, too, in that it has fewer than 125 negative votes in a total registration. of about 700 home-owners. And even this timid opposition to things taxable is weakening, thawed out, and warmed into smiles and good nature by the grateful radiation that comforted everyone while the outside world was wrapped in gloom.

But there are no ward bosses in Sabetha, and, as I said a moment ago, no lawyers.

There never was an engineer, I suppose, who did not, at some time in his life, try to figure out a way to use waste steam, especially when he learned that only about twenty per cent. of the amount created actually did any work. This problem stuck in the mind of George Edward Johnson, Sabetha's city engineer, for years. It had been there a long time. He didn't solve it, either; let me put that down now; but he learned how to use the

steam he created, instead of letting it float away into the

Kansas sunshine, and he

told Sabetha

what to do and how to do it, a raw, young fellow whose chief technical training had been gained in a hurry-up course in the Armour Technological institute, in Chicago. While some others in the profession, marooned in small towns, were content to draw their salaries, Johnson, helped by a wife-a Chicago girl-who was a graduate civil engineer, figured out the way, learned the lesson, and gave the town what few towns have, in this or any other country, a municipal heating system that heats.

It isn't an easy task to unravel the municipal business negotiations of the average American city or town. There is always so much. to hide. But you can see the books in Sabetha. They are as clean as the drinking water. They show that the town began its "Uplift Movement," in 1901, when it spent $19,000 for a lighting plant. To cover this indebtedness the town issued $10,000

THE THERMOFIER

255

tract for fuel oil at 2 cents a gallon. This was two years ago. Citizens of Sabetha bought $30,000 worth of those bonds, and if the law had not required that the whole public have a chance at them they would have bought the entire issue, the bankers say.

Being an inland town, a no-river settlement, Sabetha had to dig for its water. Most towns would have bored

the wells and let it go at that. But Sabetha's wise men did more. They pestered the state board of health until its experts journeyed to its borders, and marked the best site for four wells. The site chanced to be on a man's farm-all the land out there is on some one's farm so Sabetha bought the two acres for $1,000, put a well, 140 feet deep, steelcased, at each of the four corners, and promptly planted the tract to alfalfa. Now alfalfa, you must remember, is the golden egg of Kansas. In this case the crops, four or five in number, cut from the town. farm, pay the interest on the investment. And the electric light plant, down town, does the pumping.

in four per cent bonds, and issued six per cent warrants for the remainder, to be paid out of earnings. The bonds, of course, were paid out of the taxes, at that time eight mills on the dollar. Now the tax rate is six mills.

When a town of 2,000 population gets electric lights its people, ordinarily, consider themselves as near Heaven as any rural inhabitant has an every-day right to be. But in Sabetha's case this improvement was only a beginning. True, it dragged along for seven or eight years rather discouragingly contented, but then came the demand, one day, for water, pure water, and lots of it. So Sabetha, with its customary unanimity of public opinion, remarkably infrequent in American communities, voted some more bonds, $65,000 worth, at 41⁄2 per cent., rebuilt its light plant, put in oil-burning apparatus, erected a storage tank for oil, a tank that holds 22,000 gallons, constructed a smoke stack that cost $1,400, and made a con

Sabetha seemed, by this time, to be proceeding rather more smoothly on its municipal career than observers in the near-by towns had believed, or, in some instances, hoped; but Engineer Johnson wasn't quite satisfied. The electric lightwater plant was not doing enough work, and the town needed heat. The old problem about steam came back. It worried him to see that white cloud mounting, hour after hour, into the blue. A big hospital was being planned for the town -on the lines of the Mayo brothers at Rochester, Minn.-and there was talk of heating it with steam. Why not do this for the whole town, Johnson demanded? He knew, now, just what he needed; a simple little attachment for the radiators, a little attachment with a big name,