feet of the tunnel level and then quit sinking until the tunnel is
completed. We use a tunneling machine, boring a tunnel six feet in
diameter at the rate of one hundred feet per day. We run the tunnel
directly under the shaft and then withdraw all the men and machinery
from the tunnel, put a six-inch drill into the shaft that makes a hole
into the tunnel, and quickly drains the mine. Then we begin to stope out
at the lowest level, filling in the waste upward, and taking out only
ore to be conveyed to the mill or smelter. While the shaft is being sunk
the ore taken out is sent to the reduction works and carefully tested to
find out the best way of reducing it so that when the mine is in good
condition to work we know how to handle ore to the best advantage.

"We have only a few reduction works for refractory ore, but they are on
a grand scale, some of them handling one hundred thousand tons daily,
and as the government owns and operates all the railways the cost of
transporting ore is under two mills a ton per mile. We employ a corps of
metallurgists experimenting to discover better methods in reducing and
they have made great progress so that ores that were left in the mine or
on the dump are now worked with handsome profit to the government Our
workmen all carry life and health insurance, one-half paid by the men
monthly and the other half by the government, and where a mine is shut
down by the government the miners are furnished employment in another
place, so that they are never idle.

"We also bore thousands of artesian wells throughout the country, some
of them to the depth of five thousand feet, for artesian water, gas, and
petroleum, and occasionally we locate fine bodies of coal by those means
and those that we don't need to supply the market we cap and stop the
flow and use them in the future, always using the best flowing wells for
the present time. When we have to use drainage tunnels for our mines we