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Show The Omnipotence of Mining A FRIEND asks us if we are not mistaken in the statement, often made, that the prosperity pros-perity of Utah has for forty years rested, in great part, upon her mining, citing the fact that the other products of Utah are aggregating two and a half times those of mining in value. We hardly think so, for the perfectly apparent reason rea-son that, except for the mining, the other products prod-ucts would not be worth one-third what they now are. They would not be of half the volume that they now are, nor, save, perhaps, in the two great factors of beet sugar and live stock, with wool as a by-product, of half their present value. Prices, when not manipulated by grafters, are regulated by the volume of money in circulation among the people. Take the money away that is now paid miners, smelters, and for the transportation of oi es and base bullion, and what would become of prices within sixty days? What would become of the places of amusement in this city; the places where beverages, soft and hard, are sold, half the stores? How long before the aristocratic hen would cackle to supply eggs at 15 cents a dozen, the autocratic cow haul in her horns and furnish butter at 20 cents a pound, and the horny-handed horny-handed farmer consent to be two years in making mak-ing a fortune out of ten acres of potatoes, cellery and onions, instead of one year, as under present pres-ent conditions? Quartz mines are helpless things. They are generally in more or less inaccessible places; everything has to be carried to them, everything brought away. The call for money for them is incessant, and they have to pay in gold. What they produce is the measure of values; the first prosperity that comes from them is what the people receive who supply them with material, with labor, with machinery and roads everything; every-thing; before anything is realized by the owners. The gathering in of dividends is another business. What that means can be seen by a brief inspection inspec-tion of what has been going on here during the last four or five years. The improvements could not have been made, that have been made, Just through the steady growth of the city. There had to first be an accumulation. The Newhouse and Boston buildings mean simply the materializing materializ-ing into steel and marble and mahogany of some dull ore in the Cactus and Boston Con. The Hal-loran-Judge block is merely the ore in the Silver King taking on a new form. It is the same way with the Keith-O'Brien building; it will be the some way with the Kearns skyscraper. The foundation of what Mr. J. J. Daly has done, all came from the Ontario, Daly and Daly-Judge. The foundations of the Salisbury structures rest in the Bay-Horse mine and the Black Hills, so much of the great cathedral was due to mining, for, except for it, its erection might have been postponed post-poned for half a century. The beautiful Packard Library is but the treasure treas-ure of Gemini at Eureka Hill transformed; monuments monu-ments to mining are all over the city; others are beginning to take form constantly. There would have been no beautiful Stock Exchange without it, no new superb Commercial Club building, no Newhouse hotel nor theatre would be under construction. con-struction. To think how the city would look were all that mining has done and is doing taken away, will enable any one to imagine what the state of business would be here without that potent moving mov-ing agency. It is easy to reach great values if the measure is large enough, and mining is what supplies that measure. That rules the world; it has since before Pharaoh put the chain of gold on Joseph's neck; since before the ships of Hiram and of Solomon sailed away for Ophir and brought back peacocks and gold. |