A very fair telephone service can be maintained with iron wires.

Those who are looking for the exhaustion of Germany on a copper basis are reckoning without knowledge of German resources.
For petrol she can substitute benzol and alcohol, with some inconvenience.

Germany is likewise the home and center of industrial alcohol, which it manufactures from surplus products.

But when it comes to gold, there is the rub.

Germany fixes a price of 20 cents a pound for copper within her own borders, but the government will pay 30 cents a pound to anybody who will deliver it to her from the outside.
Indeed, I have heard of one lot of copper in Sweden for which 40 cents a pound was bid if the parties could ship it out across the Baltic.
I have a friend who was bid $5 a gallon for gasolene if he would land it within Germany, but such bids are not necessarily convincing.