But out in the prospects and on the trails there was no such aqueous luxury. There was no water for washing and little to drink. And that little was mostly drunk as a terrible black tea, like lye, heated and re-heated, with now a little more water added, now another handful of leaves. I have a well-vouched-for story of an Australian girl who went into this gold-paradise with her husband who was manager, at a large salary, of one of the first mines. She used to take a cupful of water and carefully wash the baby and afterward the little girl, and then herself. After that it was saved for the husband to rinse the worst off when he came home from the mine. But he could have an additional half cup to finish with because he was so dirty. And they tried not to use soap with it so that finally, after letting it settle, it could be added to the horses" drinking water. It was not that the family could not afford to pay for water, but there was simply no water to buy.
Into this cheerful h.e.l.l came the young Quaker engineer, from the heaven of California and the "city" offices of London where sat the big men who were intent on having their share of the big things in West Australia. He was to do his best for his particular big men, but how he was to do it was mostly for him to find out. His firm had already acquired interests in several promising properties. He was to help develop these mines and perhaps to find new ones to be taken on. A junior member of his firm was already on the ground when Hoover arrived, but he remained only a few months. It was a long way to London and Hoover could get few instructions. It was up to him. It was a hard life with many opportunities to go wrong in any of many ways. But he kept his brain clear, his body and soul clean, and just everlastingly worked.
There were all kinds of work to do, and all sorts of new things to learn about mines and mining. The ore occurred in the rock in a manner different from that in any other known gold field, so finding it and getting it out, and then getting the mineral out of the strange new kind of ore, required resourcefulness, "original research," as the scientists say, and constructive imagination. And the technical problems of discovering and manipulation once solved, there was still needed organization, system, and administration to make the mine a paying one.
But all these things were exactly the young engineer"s specialties. He was from the beginning, as we already know, and conspicuously is today, resourceful, original, capable of prompt decision, an organizer and administrator. Although there were many trained engineers in West Australia, there was no one to equal him in these specialties of his.
And very soon his firm"s mines, which had so far had little benefit of executive ability coupled with technical knowledge and originality, began to pay and their stocks went up on the London market--which was the criterion of success in the eyes of the men in the "city." About the stock ratings Hoover knew little and perhaps cared less. He did care, however, about making good mines out of bad ones. And that was exactly what he was doing.
And very soon he did the other successful thing that the big men in London hoped for and that he kept always working for. He uncovered the big new mine. He had turned up several promising leads but their development proved disappointing. But the "Sons of Gwalia" realized his hopes from the beginning. It was out from Kalgoorlie four or five days hard riding, near a smaller camp called Leonora. He went out and took personal charge of the opening up and equipping of the whole mine and plant, living in a little "tin" house and gathering about him a staff of the best of the firm"s a.s.sistants collected from all over the Colony. It was hot, although the climbing mercury usually stopped at about one hundred degrees. But that only further inflamed the enthusiasm of the group. They had the real thing, and they had a real leader--a very boyish looking boy of scant twenty-five. They forgot to watch the thermometer. They were more interested in water and transportation and labor and all the other things that are as necessary to a good mine as the gold in the ore-veins.
Occasionally, however, they had some relaxation. For one thing, they thought sometimes about food. One of the men had his wife with him, and she imported chickens and later even ducks which never, however, set web-foot in water. And they had a garden because they decided they were so in need of green vegetables. They turned a little priceless water from the condenser into the garden; but not enough for the vegetables and too much for the accountant"s books. After estimating that the one undersized cabbage they raised cost them 65 worth of water, he discouraged further gardening.
They had also a pet emu. So did the wife of the manager of another mine near-by. They used to arrange to have the emus meet occasionally and there was always a glorious fight. Once when they had got the lady"s emu over for a visit, one of the Australian boys thought it would look amusing in trousers. So he took off his overalls and after immense exertion got them on the legs of the creature, with the straps securely fastened over its neck and back. But the great bird became so enraged that the men could not safely get near enough to it to get off its clothing, and even its mistress feared ever to approach it again. There was also a pet goat named Sydney that ate several boxes of matches and had to have its internal fires extinguished by the only available liquid, which was the tinned b.u.t.ter that had yielded to the one hundred and ten degrees. Sydney lived through the experience but had always after that a delicate interior and was petted more than ever in consequence. And there was a tennis court occasionally wetted down with the beer that always went stale while they were saving it for state occasions. It was all a happy, glorious time--because they had discovered and were making one of the great mines of West Australia.
Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new experience were calling.
Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made a successful _coup d"etat_ and had formed a cabinet for the first time in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for the first time in the history of China, to effect a coordinated control of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own benefit than China"s. This official was to be in a position much like that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given the t.i.tle, in the Chinese equivalent, of "Director-General of Mines."
He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large t.i.tle. With all this decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know, just such a man in Western Australia.
CHAPTER V
IN CHINA
When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some business relations. The princ.i.p.al expert advisor of this group had been the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of Hoover"s firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great London mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by which the head of Hoover"s firm came to have the opportunity of making the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing, promptly accepted it.
In two weeks after the cable offer and answer, a feverish fortnight devoted to a rapid clearing up of things in Australia, Hoover was on his way to London, to report personally to his employers about their own affairs as well as to get some information about the new undertaking. He wanted to find out before he got to China, if he could, something of what would be expected of a Director-General of Mines of the Chinese Empire. Perhaps he had in mind the possible necessity of "getting up" a little special knowledge about Chinese mines and mining ways before he tackled his new job, just as he had got up enough physiology in thirty-six hours to help get him into Stanford University, and enough typewriting in a week-end to fit him for entrance into Louis Janin"s office in San Francisco.
However, after two weeks in the metropolis, eight or nine days on the Atlantic, two or three in New York, and five on the transcontinental trains, he found himself again in California and ready to make from there his second start to the far-away lands from which his loudest calls seemed to come--ready, that is, except for one thing. He was now, let us remember, at this beginning of the year 1899, not yet twenty-five years old, not that by half a year, indeed, and a half year could mean, as we have already seen, a great deal in his life. And he was a boy-man with a record already behind him of achievement and a position already in his hands of much responsibility and large salary. So he declared that the time had now come for the carrying out of the decision he had made in his college days of four years before. It was the little matter, you will promptly guess, and guess correctly, of marrying the girl of the geology department. He arrived in San Francisco the first of February, 1899. He spent the next few days in Monterey, "the old Pacific capital" of Stevenson"s charming sketch, but of chief interest to Hoover as the place where Lou Henry--that was her name--lived. And here they were married at noon of Friday, February 10. At two o"clock they left for San Francisco, and at noon the next day sailed for the empire of China.
Into the sleepy, half Mexican, historic town on the curving sands of the sh.o.r.es of the blue Bay of Monterey this swift, breathlessly swift, boy engineer had come from distant Australia, by way of Ma.r.s.eilles and London, had clutched up the beautiful daughter of the respected town banker, and was now carrying her off to distant China, where she was to live in all the state becoming the wife of the Director-General of Mines of the Celestial Empire. It was a bit too much for the old Pacific capital, which did not know--for it was not told--that the sudden appearance of the meteor bridegroom had been preceded by many astronomical warnings in the way of electric messages that came to the prospective bride from Australia and London and New York. Anyway, it wasn"t quite fair to the town, which tries to maintain old Mexican traditions, that go back to Spain, of a full a.s.sortment of festivities incident to any proper marrying. But Monterey has long been reconciled to this missed opportunity, and now reveals a just pride as the home town of the woman who has played such an active role in the career of her distinguished husband.
The hurrying couple, at least, had time for breath-taking--and honeymoon--when once on board ship. For it is a month"s voyaging from San Francisco to China--or, at least, was then. They had for seat-mates at table Frederick Palmer, the war correspondent, and wife, which was the beginning of a friendship that still endures. And there were for other interesting companions a secretary of our legation at Peking and his wife, and a missionary pair who may or may not have survived the Boxer ma.s.sacres.
The work in China was at first rather simple. Mines, of course, there were and had been for uncounted centuries. But what was needed by the new Department was some sort of survey of the mineral resources and mining possibilities of the Empire, and a tentative framing of a code of mining laws, so that the new development of the mines of the country which Chang hoped to initiate could be carried on to best advantage, and in such a way that private enterprise could partic.i.p.ate in it. For centuries the mines had been Crown property and the ruler had simply let them out directly, or through the viceroys, for either a stipulated annual rental or for as much "squeeze" as could be wrung from the lessees in any of several various ways. And there had to be some rental or "squeeze" for each of the many officials that could get within arm"s length of the mining business. The tenure of the use of the mines by the lessees was usually simply the period of the continued satisfaction of the lessor.
All this had not made for any extensive new opening up of the country"s mineral resources, or for the scientific development of the mines already long known. One could not afford to put much capital into prospecting or into modernizing the mining methods when each improvement simply meant either more rent or "squeeze," or the giving up of the mine. So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous possibilities of improvement. It would have been hard for any mining engineer to do anything at all to the situation without improving it.
For Hoover, with his technical education in metallurgical processes, his experience in handling various and difficult mining situations, and his genius for organizing and systematizing, the opportunity was simply unique. He plunged into the work of examining and planning and codifying with the zest of a naturalist in an unexplored jungle. In the day time he made his examination; at nights he studied the mining laws of all time and all the world.
He built up a staff as rapidly as it could be put together and correlated with the tasks before it. He had sent in advance for two or three men he had worked with in America and for some of his most able and dependable a.s.sociates in West Australia, including Agnew, a mill expert, and Newbery, a metallurgist, son of a famous geologist, both of them devoted to "the Chief." That was Hoover"s _sobriquet_ among his early mining a.s.sociates; just as it was later among the members of his successive great war-time organizations. He has just naturally--not artificially--always been "the Chief" among his co-workers and a.s.sociates.
His Caucasian staff of perhaps a dozen was greatly overshadowed in number by his Chinese staff, composed chiefly of semitechnical a.s.sistants, draftsmen, surveyors" a.s.sistants, interpreters, etc. A few of the Chinese helpers had had foreign training; there was one from Yale, for example, and another from Rose Polytechnic; the latter so devoted to American baseball that he was greatly disappointed in the new Director of Mines when he found he was not a baseball player. But he thought better of him when he learned that he had at least managed his college team. The staff had its headquarters in Tientsin, where were also the princ.i.p.al laboratories for the mineralogists, a.s.sayers, and chemists. Some of the men gave their time to the technical work, and others were engaged in collecting and correlating everything that had been published in the foreign languages about the geology and mines" of China, while Chinese scholars hunted down and translated into English all that had been printed in Chinese literature. But the Director and most of his immediate experienced a.s.sistants were chiefly occupied with the exploring expeditions into the interior and the examination of the old mines and new prospects. Especially did some immediate attention have to be given to the mines already being actually worked, for the Minister let it be known that he expected the new Director to pay the way of the Department as soon as possible from the increased proceeds of the mines which were to arise from the magic touch of the foreign experts.
These expeditions were elaborate affairs, contrasting strangely with Hoover"s earlier experiences in America and Australia. The Chinese major-domo in charge insisted that the make-up and appearance of the outfit should reflect the high estate of the Director of Mines, so that every movement involved the organization of a veritable caravan of ponies, mules, carts, men on foot, and sedan chairs carried by coolies.
These chairs were for the Director and his wife, who, however, would not use them, preferring saddle horses. But the proud manager of the expedition insisted that they be carried along, empty, to show the admiring populace that even if the strange foreign potentates amazingly preferred to ride in a rather common way on horseback they could at least afford to have sedan chairs. Imagine a prospecting outfit in the California Sierra or the West Australian bush with sedan chairs! And there were cooks and valets and cot beds and folding chairs and mosquito bed curtains and charcoal stoves and an array of pans and pots like Oscar"s in the Waldorf kitchens, and often a cavalry guard of twenty-five or fifty men, superfluous but insistent and always hungry.
Whether the expedition found any mines or not it was at least an impressive object lesson to the Celestial myriads that the new Imperial Department of Mines knew how to hunt for them in proper style. When Mrs.
Hoover once remonstrated with one of the interpreters of the cavalcade about such an unnecessary outfit, the answer was: "Mr. Hoover is such expensive man to my country we cannot afford to let him die for want of small things."
A similar state had to be lived up to in the Director"s home in Tientsin. The house was a large, four-square, wide-veranded affair, in which a dozen to fifteen servants, carefully distinguished as "No. 1 Boy," "No. 2 Boy" and so on down the line, waited, according to their own immemorial traditions, on the Director and his wife. These servants had curious ways, and a curious language in the odd pidgin English that enabled the door boy to announce that "the number one topside foreign devil joss man have makee come," when the English Bishop called, and the table boy to announce a dish of duckling as "one piecee duck pups," or of chicken as "one piecee looster." The social scale among the few foreign residents was very precisely defined, and the social life of the foreign colony highly conventionalized, so that the una.s.suming, practical-minded young engineer of the high t.i.tle and social position who was terribly bored--as he is today--by social rigmarole, and who was thought rather queer by the conventional-minded small diplomats and miscellaneous foreign residents because, as one of them put it, "he always seems to be _thinking_," was glad to be out of all this as much as possible and on the road, even if it had to be with the ludicrous caravan of state. Sometimes even all the attempted comfort and superfluous luxury of the caravan did not prevent the expedition from having serious hardships and running into real danger. An expedition across the great Gobi desert that lasted for thirty-nine days was successfully accomplished only after hard battling with heat, hunger and thirst, and even with hostile natives.
Some of the results expected from this imported miner were rather startling. For instance, age-long rumor had it that the Emperor"s hunting park at Jehol overlay immensely valuable gold deposits. The Minister intimated to the Director that he would like to know the real facts about this as soon as possible. As the park lay in a little-explored region of southern Manchuria and was a place of much historical as well as geological interest, the Director decided to make a personal examination of it. After the expedition had been out several days, he was told that on the next they would come in sight of the Great Royal Park. Accordingly on the next day the guide of the caravan took him, with one or two of the Caucasian members of his staff and an interpreter, off from the road the grand retinue was following, and by winding paths up to a hill top which commanded a superb prospect.
"There," said the interpreter, with a wave of his hand toward the stretching prospect of beautiful valleys, low broad hills and mountain side, "there is the Hunting Park of Jehol." Then, turning complacently to the Director of Mines, he asked, simply: "Is there gold beneath it?"
And interpreter and guide, and later, even more important officials, were stupefied to learn that the wonderful imported man who knew all about gold could not say offhand, from his vantage point, miles away, whether there was gold under the Park or not. And, more disturbing still, that he probably could not say anything about it at all without actually tramping over the sacred soil and perhaps sacrilegiously digging into it.
Such occasionally necessary confessions of incompetence made a little trouble, but only a little. However much the under men lacked knowledge about minerals and mines and how to find out about them, the head of the Department, Chang, knew enough to know that if his young Director confessed inability to meet certain demands it was because there was more wrong with the demands than with the engineer. But the real fly in the ointment soon began to make itself visible. It was not a disillusionment on the part of the Chinese officials in connection with their foreign expert, but a disillusionment on his part in regard to his real position and opportunities for accomplishing something for China.
He began more and more clearly to realize that he could investigate and advise as much as he liked but that he could really do, in his understanding of doing, comparatively little. The modern West cannot make over the immemorial East in a day or even a year.
Gradually the young engineer came to realize that while his examinations and reports were all very welcome, and whatever he could suggest for improvement in technical detail, resulting in immediate greater output of the mines already working, was gladly accepted, there was no willingness to accept advice leading to changes in administrative and general organization matters. And to the modern engineer efficiency in these matters is as much a part of successful mining as skilled digging and good metallurgy. Suggestions looking toward getting more work out of the men, or cutting down the payrolls by removing the thirty per cent of the names on them that seemed to have no bodily attachments, were frowned on. These things interfered with "squeeze," and "squeeze" was a traditional part of Chinese mining. Foreign advisors and helpers were all very well when they found gold, but not so well when they found graft. A crisis was visible in the offing. But this particular crisis did not arrive, for another larger and more serious one came more swiftly on and arrived almost unheralded. It was the Boxer Uprising.
The outbreak found Hoover at Tientsin having but recently returned from Pekin with Mrs. Hoover, and both just recovering from severe attacks of influenza. If opportunity for thorough organizing of the mines of China had failed him he now had full scope for organizing a military defense of his home and wife and his many employees, foreign and native, for Tientsin, for a month, was the scene of hot fighting. It was a besieged household in a beleaguered city. Hoover could have gotten out with his wife and few Caucasian a.s.sistants at the beginning of the trouble, but he would not desert his few hundred Chinese helpers and their families--and his wife would not desert him. So they staid on together through all the rifle and sh.e.l.l fire and conflagrations of the Tientsin siege, building and defending barricades of rice and sugar sacks, organizing food and water supplies, and cheerfully "carrying on" in the face of certain death, and worse, if the outnumbering fanatic Boxers happened to win.
But there were occasional lighter incidents amid the many grave ones of the fighting weeks. Mrs. Hoover tells one, her favorite story of those days, in something like the following words. "We had a cow, famous and influential in the community, which cow was the mother of a promising calf. One day the cow was stolen and Mr. Hoover set out to find her.
With three or four friends and half a dozen attendant Chinese boys he took out the tiny calf one night and by the light of a lantern led the little orphan, bleating for its mother, about the streets of the town.
Finally, as they pa.s.sed in front of the barracks of the German contingent of the international defending army, there came, from within, an answering moo, and Mr. Hoover, addressing the sentry, demanded his cow. The sentry made no move to comply, but, summoning all his _Worterbuch_ English, countered with the inquiry: "Is that the calf of the cow inside?" Upon receiving an affirmative reply to his Ollendorff question, he calmly declared, "Also, then, calf outside must join itself to cow inside." And thereupon by aid of a suggestive manipulation of his bayonet, he confiscated the calf, and sent Mr. Hoover home empty-handed."
As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines.
Because he thought that he might save from probable confiscation a valuable coal mining property at Tongshan about eighty miles from Tientsin, he desired to transfer this property outright to Hoover"s name for the protection of the foreign t.i.tle. Hoover refused this, but did undertake to go to Europe on a contract with Chang to enlist the aid of the Belgian and British bondholders of the Company to protect the property. These men rescued and reorganized the Company, dispatched their own financial agents to China, and appointed Hoover chief engineer to superintend the real development of the great property.
The wily old Celestial finding, after all, that China was not to be part.i.tioned by the powers that had defended it against the Boxers, and that private property was not to be confiscated, now proposed to break his contract so eagerly made. And there seemed to be no hope that the curious course of Chinese law would ever compel him to recognize his previous agreements. But there was something in the persistent, indomitable pressure of the quiet but firm young Belgian agent, named de Wouters, who had come back with Hoover, and of the young American, which did finally compel the old Chinaman, after much trouble and delay, to live up to his contract.
Years later the situation, with kaleidoscopic picturesqueness, took on another hue, and Hoover found himself defending Chang"s interests from the overzealous attempts of some of the foreign owners to get more out of the mines than was their fair share. In making the original contracts it had been agreed to have a Chinese board with a Chinese chairman, as well as a foreign board. This led to much difficulty and some of the Europeans declared that the young American had been much at fault in consenting to an arrangement which left so much share in the control to the Chinese, and they repudiated this arrangement. Hoover and de Wouters had a long hard struggle in getting justice for old Chang, but just as their persistence had earlier held Chang up to his agreements for the sake of the European owners of the undertaking, so now, directed in the opposite direction, it succeeded in getting justice for Chang and his Chinese group.
The affair brought him into business relations with another Belgian named Emile Francqui, of keen mind and great personal force, who, with de Wouters, were, strangely enough, later to be chief and first a.s.sistant executives, respectively, of the Great Belgian Comite National during the long hard days of the German Occupation. It was with these men among all the Belgians that Hoover was to have most to do in connection with his work as initiator and director of the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
But we are now, in the story of Herbert Hoover, only in the year 1900, and the Belgian Relief did not begin until 1914. And Hoover was still to have many experiences as engineer and man of affairs, before he was to meet his Belgian acquaintances again under the dramatic conditions produced by the World War.
He had now his opportunity really to do something in China in line with his own ideas of doing things in connection with mines, and not with those of Chinese mining tradition. As consulting engineer, and later general manager of the "Chinese Engineering and Mining Company" he attacked the job of making Chang"s great Tongshan coal properties a going concern. This job involved building railways, handling a fleet of ocean-going steamers, developing large cement works, and superintending altogether the work of about 20,000 employees. A special one among the undertakings of the twelve months or more given to this enterprise was the building of Ching w.a.n.g Tow harbor to give his coal a proper sea outlet. Altogether it was a "mining" job of all the variety and hugeness of extent that the twenty-seven-year-old miner and organizer found most to his liking. And despite obstacles and complications due both to his Chinese and Caucasian company a.s.sociates he did it successfully, enjoyed it immensely, and got from it much education and experience. But he was ready after about a year of it to turn his attention to the rest of the world.
CHAPTER VI
LONDON AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
In 1902, now twenty-eight years old, Herbert Hoover returned to London as a junior partner in the great English firm with which he had been earlier a.s.sociated as its star field man in West Australia. But, though with an actual headquarters office in London, he was mostly anywhere else in the world but there. He was still the firm"s chief engineer and princ.i.p.al field expert and upon him fell much of the responsibility of the firm"s actual mining operations in the field as distinguished from its financial operations in the "city." He probably spent little more than a tenth of his time in London, and this was also true in his later career when he had given up his connection with the firm and was wholly "on his own" as independent consulting engineer and mine-organizer. And this explains what has often puzzled many of the people who came to know him and his household in London. He and it were so little "English."
His home in London seemed always to be a bit of transplanted America, and, in particular, a bit of transplanted California. As a matter of fact, in all his years of London connections there was hardly one that did not see him and his family in America including an inevitable stay in California. He maintained offices in New York and San Francisco and had no slightest temptation, much less desire, ever to become an expatriate.
But this is getting ahead of the story. There is one outstanding happening in his London experience that insistently demands telling. It is the happening that meant for him the greatest setback in his otherwise almost monotonously successful career. And yet, although this happening meant temporary financial ruin for him, it was, in its way, only another success, a success of revealing significance to those who would like to know the real man that Herbert Hoover is.
After one of his returns to London, and in the absence of the head of the firm in China, he discovered a defalcation of staggering proportions. A man connected with the firm had lost in speculation over a million dollars obtained from friends and clients of the firm, by the issuance and sale of false stock. Technically the operations of the defaulter were of such a character that the firm could not be held legally liable. But the junior partner swept the technicalities aside with a single gesture. He announced that they would make good all of the obligations incurred by the defaulter. This meant the immediate loss of his own personal fortune, and it meant a serious difference of opinion with the absent head of the firm, whose frantic cables came, however, too late to overrule the decision of the junior partner.
There ensued a long bitter struggle, most of it falling on the junior partner with the Quaker conscience, to make good the losses without actually putting the firm out of business. For going on with the business was essential to the making good. It was a gruelling four years" struggle, but with success at the end of it. And then the American engineer, now grown forever out of youth to the man who had experienced the down as well as the up in life, gave up his connection with the firm and launched on that career of independent and self-responsible activity which has been his ever since. This was in 1908. Hoover was now thirty-four years old and probably the leading consulting mining engineer in the world.