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 assistants 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