Present and Future of the Copper Industry

I HAVE been asked to discuss "What Can be Done to Revive the Mining Industry," particularly from the standpoint of the copper industry. It is impossible to consider this problem, if in fact there can be one, from an isolated position. The mining industry is but a part, although a very important one, of that exceedingly complicated machine characterized as commerce, which comprises within its operation and functions the-multitudinous activities that, combined, make up the sum total of the production, manufacture, distribution, sale and utilization of goods and products resulting from the agrarian, industrial and commercial effort of mankind. We survey a world today with its disturbed mass of humanity permeated with discontent, passions loosened by brutal combat not yet brought under control, class hatreds aroused, national prejudices in a state of stimu-lated excitement, governments for the most part enfeebled, some destroyed to their foundations, with fragile structures raised in place of those that seemed enduring, and which have disappeared. A burden of indebtedness incurred in defiance of all economic law exists, to meet the exactions of which, levies of taxation that constitute a grievous burden upon effort and industry are exacted by the needs of those nations that are most favored, while printing presses are busy manufacturing currency that either has, or approaches, a negative value among those less favored. This picture, while not pleasant, is one that should be looked at squarely and carefully appraised in estimating the immediate future. For four years the world marshalled, and exerted without stint, its combined endurance, vitality and resource in an effort of destruction, which violated no less the orderly working of physical and economic laws than it did the conventions of social and civic relations. To have imagined that without travail the orderly processes that governed the relations of mankind could at once be reestablished and begin functioning, was, as has been demonstrated, fallacious; perhaps no more so than the error that is committed today by those opportunists who fail to take cogni-zance of basic conditions which must be remedied be-fore the world can resume its progress to a universally prosperous and satisfactory condition. Please do not gather from this somewhat unpleasant recital that I regard the future with gloomy foreboding or entertain pessimistic doubts, for, emphatically, I do not.