OCR Text |
Show PREDICTS STEADY DEli FOR COPPER Head of American Mining Congress Believes in Future Fu-ture of Red Metal. Walter Douglas, , president of the American Mining congress, in the December De-cember issue of the Mining Congress Journal, writes: "What will post-war conditions be in the copper mining industry? An intelligent intelli-gent forecast can only be made if certain cer-tain hypotheses of federal action can be assumed. The principle of government control of Industries producing essentials of war lias been accepted by those industries in-dustries as a war-time measure and with , the tacit understanding that with the termination of the struggle such control would be remove' and the law of supply and demand again come into force. It must now be admitted that a termination termina-tion of the war docs not and will not mean an immediate return to prewar conditions, and that pending readjustment readjust-ment and refinancing it may be necessary and desirable that the government should, for a period, continue to exercise, with the consent of the industries, its control of prices and production tonnage. Should this not be done, and should, as is probable, proba-ble, the demand for the commoner metals be temporarily curtailed and the price depressed, de-pressed, a very serious crisis would confront con-front not only capital, but labor. "As the present abnormally high wages being paid in the mines are to a certain extent based on the increased cost of living, and as such increased cost, especially espe-cially as applied to the necessaries of life, cannot be materially decreased until the armies are demobilized, it is obvious that labor cannot accept a serious reduction reduc-tion in its income. Reconstruction of devastated Belgium and northern France and replacement of the copper stocks of the central powers will, in time, make the demand Cor the red metal active, and it can be fairly assumed that -the average aver-age price will not again be as low as in the past, any more than it can reasonably reasona-bly be anticipated that the wage rate j will ever return to its former level. "After the necessary, though indefinite, period of readjustment is passed, the demand de-mand for copper will, I think, be so great that the producer will be enabled to demand de-mand and oh tain a sufficiently high price for his product to permit of a hih rate of wages being paid and the mining of ; the low-grade ore deposits, on the sue- i cessful exploitation of which the future prosperity of the industry depends." |