| OCR Text |
Show 628 WESTERN WILDS. bonanzas are discovered, silver will soon be " cheap enough to manu-facture into door- hinges." To such I guarantee comforting proofs. Let them invest heavily in undeveloped silver mines, and before they get their money back they will be convinced that silver is still a precious metal hard to get at and correspondingly valuable when got. One Ohio editor says : " Suppose they should discover a mount-ain of silver!" Suppose they should discover a mountain of ice-cream in August! The one supposition is just as reasonable as the other. In fact the latter phenomenon would violate fewer of the laws of nature than the former. Unchanging law decrees that, even in the richest mineral region, there must be many million times as much dead rock " attle," " rubble," and " country rock " as silver-bearing rock. Let silver permanently cheapen but 5 per cent., and two- thirds of the mines in the world would cease to be profitable. For another class there is comfort. Poet and romancer, as well as hunter and tourist, have lamented that in so short a time the wild West would be a thing of the past ; that soon all would be tame, dull and common- place. Let them be reassured. The wild West will continue wild for centuries. There will be a million square miles of mountain, desert, rock and sand, of lonely gorge and hidden glen, of walled basin, wind- swept cafion and timbered hills, to invite the tour-ist, the sportsman and the lover of solitude. The mountain Terri-tories will long remain the abode of romance ; and " Western Wilds " will be celebrated in song and story, while generation succeeds genera-tion of " the men who redeem them." THE END. |
