mountains, a sufficient feat of engineering in itself, and then to
create and organize at the end of this line everything pertaining to a
great mining plant. Thirty thousand men were employed in establishing
the mine.

Altogether Hoover and his associates had in their employment, in the
various mining undertakings under way in 1914, about 175,000 men, and
the annual mineral output of the mines being handled by them was worth
as much as the total annual output of all the mines in California. And
practically all of these successful mines had been made out of
unsuccessful ones. For Hoover really developed a new profession in
connection with mining; a profession of making good mines out of bad
ones, of making bankrupt mining concerns solvent, not by manipulation on
the stock exchange but by work in the earth, in the mills, in the mine
offices. He works with materials, not pieces of paper. It takes him from
three to five years to bring a dead mine to life; the mine must have
mineral in it, to be sure, to start with, but he does all the rest. That
little matter of having mineral in it is the whole thing, you may think.
But if you do, you must think again. The history of mining is more a
history of how mines with mineral in them have not succeeded in becoming
mines where the mineral could be profitably got out of them, than of how
such mines have succeeded. A successful mine is infinitely more than a
hole in the ground with mineral at its bottom. It is railroads and
steamers, mills, housing for men, men themselves, organization, system,
skill, brains, all-around human capacity. Herbert Hoover is a great
miner because he is--I say it bluntly and not from any blind
hero-worship--a great man.

If he is, he can do more than mine greatly; he can do other things
greatly. Well, he can, and he has done them. We come to that part of his
story now, the part that begins when the World War began, when the
world saw with amazement that grew into ever greater amazement an
unknown miner, that is, unknown except to other miners, calmly do things
that only great men can do. But we who know now the story of the boy and
the man of the years before the war are not so much amazed. We know that
he is the kind of man, who had had the kind of experience, the kind of
world education, who with opportunity can do things the world calls
great and be the great man. But just for a few minutes before we begin
with August, 1914, the time when Herbert Hoov