o argue the question as to whether the material demands
of civilization should be curbed and progress restricted to matters of
mind and human happiness.

METHODS OF INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

The first step in international consideration of minerals is obviously
one of fact-finding. This became painfully evident during the great war,
when the sudden cutting off of outside supplies and markets brought home
the fact that the mineral question is only in part a domestic one. The
average mining man had come to take the established marketing and
commercial conditions more or less for granted, and had not looked into
the underlying factors. There had been a tendency to assume that a kind
Providence was in some manner looking after these elements in the
situation. The nearest approach to Providence, as a matter of fact, was
a small group of importers and exporters, possessing special knowledge
of the international movements of certain commodities,--which knowledge
was of unsuspected importance to the mineral industry. War conditions
showed that neither the general public nor the mineral industry as a
whole, much less the government, had even an elementary grasp of the
important elements of the world mineral situation. The mobilizing of
this information under high pressure, through the cooperation of
government and private agencies, was an interesting and important
feature in the complex activities back of the firing line. It is vastly
to the credit of the men interested in the mineral industry in this
country, and presumably also in other countries, that almost without
exception they contributed their bits of knowledge to the common pool,
even though these bits had been in a sense their private capital.
Certain importers, who by their knowledge of international phases of the
mineral situation had been able to exercise a profound influence on
domestic markets, voluntarily sacrificed their own interest for the
common cause and pointed out ways in which reductions of imports could
be made.

The problems of the Peace Conference, and of other international
agreements now pending, have required a still further systematizing of
international information. One of the results has been the establishment
of organizations of an international fact-finding character in our own
and in certain other governments. In the chapters on the several
minerals in this book, are summarized some of the salient features of
the international situation