My daily round of errands led me from broker to broker and from bank to bank, and always I heard talk of copper. It is not remarkable that my youthful mind became impressed with the profound importance of the metal and all pertaining to it. I picked up a great deal of information on the subject, which I fortified later with a careful study of copper the metal, copper the mine, and copper the investment. As I mulled over the immense returns obtained from their ventures by the men I knew had their money in copper, it struck me as extraordinary that this industry should be so much more profitable than others. Here was a great staple, a necessity of the people, which had been in use since men began to sit up, and would be needed until Father Time smashed his glass, that returned 100 per cent. gross profit on the business done in it, while the business done in any other staple did not return, gross, over ten to eighteen per cent.; which gross profit gave to the capital invested in copper a net profit of sixteen to twenty-five per cent., while that invested in the other staples returned a net profit of only three and three-fourths to four and one-fourth per cent.[18] The value of money had decreased with the world's development; the cost of the great commodities of life had all come down with the decline in interest--all but copper, which kept its old places throughout all the changes that had occurred in the relations of capital to labor and business. I realized that copper, in that year, would afford a gross profit of 100 cents on each $2 worth produced; that this great gross profit was legitimate, was not brought about through unfair restrictions or forced combination, or evasion of the country's laws, but was wholly natural, being founded on the fact that the supply was so limited that the demand prevented the price dropping below a certain figure, and that this under ordinary circumstances represented at least 100 per cent. of gross profit to the producer after he had paid for labor and material the highest ruling prices. No better illustration of the main facts about copper can be found than the condition of the industry to-day, in 1905. The metal is now fifteen and a half cents per pound, and the consumption so great that the price still advances, yet if through an agreement among the producing mines this sales-rate should be dropped twenty-five per cent., it would so increase consumption as to force back the price to a point that would again discourage consumption; and yet in the old mines the cost of producing the metal sold at fifteen and a half is but six to seven and a half cents, in some even lower.