osed of and cannot again be used to satisfy a
ravenous consumption.

It seemed to me, then, a curious anomaly that, while capital was chasing
investments which promised but four per cent., it eschewed copper which
yielded from sixteen to twenty-five per cent., and my investigations
told me that a producing copper-mine is the surest business venture a
man engages in, for, by the time it begins to produce profitably, it
must be so far developed that its owners are certain of ore to work on
for decades ahead. A good copper-mine is really a safe-deposit vault of
stored-up dividends, which cannot be stolen nor destroyed by fire,
flood, or famine. Calumet & Hecla, for instance, though it cost its
first owners but a dollar a share, has paid out $87,000,000, or $870 per
share, or 3,480 per cent. on its par value of $25, and while it has been
paying dividends over thirty-five years, it paid last year $40 per
share, and has more in sight than it has yet paid. And Copper Range,
though but six years old, will be producing soon as much as Calumet &
Hecla, and has now in sight ore to keep it going fifty or sixty years.

Having pieced together all the facts and circumstances in this
connection, I was sure that I had grasped a principle of great
commercial value, and I set about finding a cause why the world of
capital should for so long have overlooked the tremendous potentialities
of this industry. I found the cause in Boston herself, in the
characteristics of the city, which was head-quarters for copper, and
which had grown in financial power with the revenues her mines earned
for her investors. Boston controlled and managed the copper industry,
and had since the days when copper-mining was a hazardous pursuit, in
which only bold and speculative souls dared engage. In the early days
the canny Bostonian demanded for the honorable dollar his parent had
earned--exchanging five-cent rum for human beings worth $1,000
apiece--at least twenty per cent. interest, and having acquired this
habit, it became a principle, and such principles as these are clung to
in Boston with the zeal of a miser for his hoard or of a martyr to his
faith. Looking back over the years, I still recall with chagrin the
quiescent hilarity of the scion of a Back Bay family whose good father
had been one of the most successful and most brutal of all the "East
India traders," when I suggested to him that he was fortunate in
obtaining twenty per cent. on some copper ve