he 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 massacres.

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 participate 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 a