Hoover was now twenty-four, and a man of large reputation in mining circles in Australia and London, with a salary to correspond. He had spent about twenty-four months in West Australia, although they ran over all of one and parts of two other years, so that he is generally credited with having remained there three years. And he could have gone on among the Australian mines for as many years as he liked, for the big men in London now fully realized that they had in this young American
engineer the unusual man, and that his only limit in Australia would be the limit of the possible. But the new opportunity and the new experience were calling.
Just about this time a young Chinaman of royal family in Peking had made a successful coup d'état and had formed a cabinet for the first time in the history of China, and this cabinet decided, naturally also for the first time in the history of China, to effect a coördinated control of all the mines of the Empire. There was, therefore, established a Department of Mines, with a wily old Chinaman, named Chang Yen Mow, at its head. He understood that Chinamen knew little about mining, and hence decided to find a foreigner to help him manage the mines of the Empire. He also thought that a foreigner, thus attached as an official to his department, could be of particular help to him in dealing with other foreigners inclined to exploit Chinese mines more for their own benefit than China's. This official was to be in a position much like that of an undersecretary in a cabinet department, and was to be given the title, in the Chinese equiva
lent, of "Director-General of Mines." He was to have a salary appropriate to such a large title. With all this decided, it only remained to find the proper foreigner, who should be a man who knew much about mines and was honest. There was, as we know, just such a man in Western Australia.
CHAPTER V
IN CHINA
When Chang Yen Mow, the new head of the new Department of Mines of the new Chinese Government, began to look about for the foreigner who should know much about mines and be honest, and who would therefore be a fit man to occupy the new post of Director-General of Mines, he bethought himself of an English group of mining men with whom he had once had some business relations. The principal expert advisor of this group had been the man who was now the head of the great London mining firm for which Herbert Hoover was working, and working very successfully, in West Australia. Chang applied to this group for a recommendation of a suitable man for him. And this group in turn applied to the head of Hoover's firm. Or, perhaps, Chang applied directly to the great Lon
don mining man. The exact procedure, which is not very important, anyway, by which the head of Hoover's firm came to have the opportunity of making the recommendation, is a little obscure today. The important points in the whole matter, however, which are not at all uncertain, are that he did have it, and that he recommended Herbert Hoover, and that Chang Yen Mow, acting on the recommendation, offered the place, through him, to the youthful Quaker engineer, and, finally, that the competent and confident boy of twenty-four, always ready for the newer, bigger thing, promptly accepted it.