town, Pennsylvania, authorized the construction of a new furnace. This action was entirely unexpected. Control of the company had passed to a new combination. Steel prices were soaring, European and American consumers were clamoring for supplies, and every plant in the country was working at high pressure. The profits on the product of a new 500-ton-a-day furnace were alluring. The order was given for quick action.

On March 12 the actual construction began. Incidentally, the first measurements for the foundations were paced by a giant civil engineer he had no tape at hand-and his paces proved so much longer than the regulation three feet that some six feet additional unnecessary excavation was done before the pacing operation could be checked up! Foundation holes had to be dug out, not only for the wide-girth furnace, which was to tower one hundred and forty-six feet in the air, but for four other brick-and-steel monuments in the form of hot "stoves," for a monster chimney, and for other minor struc

tures.

The engineering department was working day and night preparing detailed plans and specifications, for it had had no warning of what was required of it. Some one hundred and fifty huge drawings were devised at the highest pressure.

The word was passed around among all the workmen, including the Slav laborers, that the company was "out for a record." Every man Jack of them entered into the spirit of the thing, and operations were begun with a whoop.

In blast-furnace erection the custom had always been for one set of workmen to finish their part and get out of the way before another set started. A new system of teamwork was originated.

Bricklayers entered the excavation and almost trod on the heels of the excavators. No sooner was a foot of the ground dug out than the bricklayers plied their art. Steel workers, too, joined the beehive.

The foundation was finished on April 7, and twenty-nine days later, on May 6, the steel work was erected completely. That is to say, the whole steel monument, having a diameter of 24 feet at the base, or hearth, widening to 3034 feet at the "bosh," and tapering to 2212 feet at the "throat," had been reared to a height of 146 feet, or higher than the highest building New York could boast not many years ago.

As plate after plate was riveted in place by the steel workers, the bricklayers climbed after them, lining the great funnel with brick to an average thickness of 3/3 feet. To guard against falling material from above the men worked below a very strong roof, or scaffolding, which was built inside the furnace; and as the steel workers moved higher and higher other roofs were built below them, so that the bricklayers could creep up and up in perfect safety. So closely did the bricklaying follow the steel work that the entire structure was lined seven days after the steel workers had finished at the top. The one-half million and more bricks used inside the furnace were laid in twenty-eight days.

Meanwhile the four blast stoves and the 180-foot chimney, 9 feet 9 inches in diameter, were rising out of the earth. Two days after the excavators withdrew the laying of the foundations was completed. The steel work on the stoves was begun on April 4, and here also the bricklayers worked close behind the steel workers. The first pair were finished on April 28, and the second pair on May 12. When it is explained that these four stoves contain a total of some 1,600,000 bricks, most of them of special shapes, and 500 tons of steel, and that they measure 100 feet in height and 24 feet in diameter, it will be realized that this job in itself was not a contemptible one.

June 5 was the goal set as the opening date. I journeyed to Johnstown that morning and went to the spot-it is called the Franklin Plant. Bees could not have worked more busily than these men. The great brick-lined furnace was being filled up preparatory to the torch being applied.

At the bottom was a mass of oil shavings and the like; next was a thick layer of wood; then tons upon tons of coke; next a light layer of limestone; then several tons of iron ore, with coke, limestone, and ore, layer upon layer, all the way up for ninety feet. A huge bucket was hoisted to the capacious mouth of the furnace every minute and its contents dumped on a huge bell, which distributed the material evenly around. Railway tracks were being laid faster than Hill or Harriman ever built a road. Men were running hither and thither twisting a nut here, closing a steel port-hole there, painting ironwork yonder. Foremen and superintendents were making hurried final inspections all over the place. Yet there was no confusion.

Every man knew his job. Everything moved like clockwork.

Along with Chief Superintendent of Construction John C. Ogden, Chief Engineer F. H. Moyer, Furnace Superintendent R. C. Glazier, and a representative from the United States Patent Office, I was accorded the privilege, unique for a layman, I was told, of crawling inside this colossal brick-andsteel structure on the official inspection. Mr. Slick had invented a new mechanism for insuring the right distribution of the coke, ore, and limestone in the furnace, and the experts were anxious to find out how it had worked. Everything was in apple-pie order. As I stood on top of the mighty pile I shuddered to think what would happen were the match to be applied and the rope ladder withdrawn before we could scramble out! Not many minutes later the heat inside this tomb would exceed 3,000°-enough to turn the ore into molten iron.

At one o'clock General Manager Slick appeared on the scene. Miss Jane Ogden, the twelve-year-old daughter of Superintendent Ogden, arrived to light the great mineral bonfire. Thousands of workmen dropped their tools and crowded around to watch the opening ceremony. The signal was given, the little girl pushed an iron bar, red hot at one end, through a narrow steel tube, and the bonfire of one thousand tons was alight. A deafening cheer arose from the assembled workmen, who had labored like Trojans for this epochal movement.

The goal had been attained-attained with signal success. The Cambria Steel Company had lowered the record for building blastfurnaces by more than a hundred days; lowered it, too, not in a slack season with men and material available in abundance, but in the midst of a feverish boom, when workmen were acutely scarce and materials in famine supply.

Within a short time the liquid iron would be gushing from the aperture in the furnace in a stream that would shortly reach a volume of five hundred tons every day of the week.

Behind every big achievement is a big idea, and behind every big idea is a human brain. The brain behind Cambria's extraordinary feat is that of Edwin E. Slick. There is not a steel plant in the country that is not using one or more of Mr. Slick's one hundred basic patents. One alone saved, and is saving, the country's steel-makers over

$3,000 every day. It was officially announced not long ago by President Corey, of the Midvale Steel and Ordnance Company, that Mr. Slick had invented processes which were saving the Cambria Company between $3,000,000 and $4,000,000 a year. To-day 15,000 men are turning out, thanks to the inventor's labor-saving contrivances, as much steel as 20,000 used to produce.

The story of Mr. Slick's rise is typically American. His father died when the son was only three years old. Before he was fourteen the boy Slick began work in the shops of the company of which he is now the active head, with an army of almost fifteen thousand under him. He attended night school, and was quickly given a place in the draughting-room. Before he was twentyfive he had become chief engineer of the whole Edgar Thompson Works, and when the United States Steel Corporation was formed he was raised to chief mechanical engineer of all the Carnegie Steel Company's plants.

I asked Mr. Slick how he came to leave the billion-dollar Steel Corporation in 1912 to accept the management of the Cambria Steel Company, a relatively small, independent

concern.

"I was born in Johnstown," he replied. "I began working here, and I thought I would like to come back. Besides, I wanted to try and see how I could get along managing a large body of men."

I noticed at the entrance of the works a little letter-box marked "Suggestions." I learned that every employee is cordially invited to drop suggestions into these boxes, of which there are nine dotting the plant. A prize of ten dollars is given every month for the best suggestion in each box, and the best one of the nine wins an additional prize of twenty dollars. In May over two hundred suggestions were received. The nine prizewinners are invited to the "front office," where they are congratulated by Mr. Slick. This plan enables the managers to become acquainted with the men who have original ideas, and, when opportunities occur, to choose men from the ranks to fill more important positions.

Does this help to explain how the Cambria Steel Company, against apparently insurmountable odds in the labor and material markets, succeeded in establishing a new world's record for blast-furnace building?

W

ITH almost the regularity of the cycles of the seasons there sweeps over the United States a gust of agitation against the conditions of life imposed upon the employees of some one or the other of the great industries.

The difficulty is that in seeing only one side of the picture the reading public is likely to forget that there is another side, to believe that the bad conditions shown are the only conditions, and to imagine, for instance, that the case against the cotton mill is the blackest of all. It has not heard the story of Henry Decker, of the mill-owner with a conscience, or of the red-headed Yankee girl.

In 1910 there were 129,263 fewer children under fifteen years of age engaged in nonagricultural labor than there were in 1900. In the same decade the total population of the country increased fifteen millions. The astonishing decrease is attributed largely to the growth of sentiment that has removed the child from such an indoor industry as the cotton mill. And even when public sentiment has not crystallized itself in law the decrease is marked. Witness South Carolina, the second cotton mill State of the Union, which to-day employs fewer children in the mills than it did five years ago. Yet the increase in workers of all ages has been large, and there was until the last session of the Legislature this spring-no prohibition against the employment of the child of twelve and

over.

Says Mr. E. J. Watson, Commissioner of Agriculture, Commerce, and Industries of South Carolina, in his 1915 report: "It is easy to see that there was during the first six months of 1915 a rapid drift away from the employment of the child that is under the age of fourteen years. . . . Nothing could be more gratifying than this very fact."

But now what of the conditions of life of the operatives of the mills?

A visitor from the North or West who drops off his train in the mid-afternoon of a Saturday in one of the mill towns of the South is likely to jump to a conclusion not vividly favorable.

The streets are thronged with people. Many of the men are unshaven, pale, stoopshouldered, and anæmic-looking; the women soiled, slovenly of figure, vacuous of eye; children tattered and barefoot. The visitor

He

contrasts this Main Street with Longacre Square or Park Row-conveniently forgetting Thompson Street or Chatham Square, where squalor is not unaccompanied by vice. knows nothing of the antecedents of these people, their upbringing, their previous environment. He does not know that some of them have in their pockets a monthly wage that is more real money than they have ever seen before in the course of their whole lives. There is no one to inform him that the neat little bungalow down there on the corner of the street is owned by the mill superintendent, who at the age of twenty-three bought a suit on credit and left his mountain farm in debt to start at the bottom of the mill. He does not know that this man, whose salary is now forty-five hundred dollars a year, could not write a legible hand until after he was thirty; and that he then stopped work for six months to go to a business college, entrance to which had been made possible by months of lamplit study over a tattered "Sanford's Arithmetic" and the "Third Reader."

He does not know the life story of Henry Decker. Here it is:

THE STORY OF HENRY DECKER

Henry Decker was thirty-five years old. He had a chronic intestinal disease that prevented him from doing any manual labor. There was a wife, hopelessly broken by childbearing and privation, and five children, the oldest thirteen.

The Decker family lived in a one-room cabin in the North Carolina mountains. There was just one plank in the cabin; that was used for the table. The rest of the house was of split slabs, the floor of cedar puncheons unplaned. The roof was of slabs held in place by heavier cross-slabs. Nails cost money, you see.

In front of the shack, lying at an angle of thirty degrees, was a sterile scratch of land where grew a little corn. Four or five apple trees there were too about the house, and two pigs. Once a year one of the boys took the apples to market forty miles away; once a year the children rolled a few logs down to the road, and a neighbor who had an ancient mule dragged the logs to town. The gross cash income of the family was approximately eleven dollars a year. They lived on hominy made from the corn, what fish and game