smiss the constant
harassments of possible strikes. Such unions exist in dozens of
trades in this country, and they are entitled to greater
recognition. The time when the employer could ride roughshod over
his labor is disappearing with the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on
which it was founded. The sooner the fact is recognized, the better
for the employer. The sooner some miners' unions develop from the
first into the second stage, the more speedily will their
organizations secure general respect and influence.

"The crying need of labor unions, and of some employers as well, is
education on a fundamental of economics too long disregarded by all
classes and especially by the academic economist. When the latter
abandon the theory that wages are the result of supply and demand,
and recognize that in these days of international flow of labor,
commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is
efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible.
Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which
each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen
insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was
inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men
of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But
every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor
unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in the false belief
that they are providing for more labor."

Three years before publishing the _Principles of Mining_ Hoover had
collaborated with a a group of authors in the production of a book
called _Economics of Mining_. And three years later, that is in 1912, he
privately published, in sumptuous form, with scrupulously exact
reproduction of all of its many curious old woodcuts, an English
translation of Agricola's "De Re Metallica," the first great treatise on
mining and metallurgy, originally published in Latin in 1556, only one
hundred years after Gutenberg had printed his first book. "De Re
Metallica" was the standard manual of mining and metallurgy for 180
years. Georgius Agricola, the author, was really one Georg Bauer, a
German of Saxony, who, following the custom of his time used for
pen-name the literal Latin equivalents of the words of his German name.

This translation, with its copious added notes of editorial c