THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 33 



attended by the opening of the Suez Canal, cheaper transport by steamers 

 and the spread of railways from the coast of India, the lohar has been 

 exterminated from all but the most remote parts of the country. His 

 history is similar to that of other workers ; the small ore-bodies that he 

 used are of no interest to the modern iron-master, and one result therefore 

 of the modern movement is the neglect of a large fraction of our total 

 resources. We are discussing, however, what is actually happening, not 

 what we think should be a less wasteful course of evolution ; natural 

 evolution, like ' trial and error ' methods, is always wasteful. 



Primitive workers in various lands have opened up to relatively shallow 

 depths rich but small deposits of other ores, and in Eastern countries 

 especially, where forms of civilisation extend far back into history, the 

 numerous and widespread ' old workings ' have given rise to travellers' 

 impressions of great mineral wealth. But low-grade deposits that the 

 ancient miner could not utilise are now opened up by mechanica^ 

 methods on a large scale ; and, on the other hand, what satisfied the 

 primitive metallurgist in abundance would be of little use to the modern 

 furnace. 



We have now to revalue the tales of travellers which have had a 

 dangerous influence on those who have directed the course of international 

 competition : we have to strike out of consideration the integers of the 

 primitive worker to whom a great tonnage would form a mere decimal 

 point in the modern unit ; we have to realise that our mid- Victorian 

 standards of metal production are gone for ever, and that the comforting 

 after-war formula of ' back to normal ' is merely a hypnotic drug to conceal 

 the uncomfortable, one might say regrettable, dynamic conditions which 

 have since developed at a speed that is not sufficiently recognised within 

 our Empire. 



It is now misleading to speak of the wide distribution of minerals within 

 a country as we could have done some fifteen years ago ; we must now 

 rule out the smaller deposits, and so form a new picture composed of 

 those concentrations that are on a scale suflS.cient to support modern metal- 

 lurgical units. 



For this reason it is necessary to review afresh the resources of the 

 undeveloped Far East, which has for many years been regarded as a 

 menace to Western industrial dominance. The vague general notion that 

 mineral deposits are evenly distributed throughout the Earth's crust has 

 fed the impression that the development of China, which is much larger 

 than the United States, may yet shift the centie of industrial gravity when 

 1929 D 



