The Fuel Problem
I
IN its recent and personal aspect the fuel problem presents itself to most of us in two equally difficult phases: first, how to obtain the coal we need; and, second, how to pay for it after we get it. No longer may we rely upon the wood-lot behind the barn for adequate reserves of fuel; the driftwood fire ‘built of the wrecks of stranded ships’ has become only a poetic memory.
We now depend on coal, and the poetry has departed. No author has descried the cricket on the register, nor has even vers libre as yet identified itself with the gas-log or the radiator.
‘For altar and hearth’ was the cry of the Roman legions; but the home-fires that our own soldiers urged us in song to keep burning are of a very different sort. The ancient civilizations were based upon slavery, or sustained, like that of Rome, by conquest and resulting tribute. The many labored to no other end than to provide leisure and luxury for the few. For power they relied on human muscles; but wheat or corn or bacon burned in the human engine is an expensive form of fuel. Our civilization is built on coal. It has much of coal’s murkiness and grime. It has, nevertheless, developed a complex industrialism based on power, which, utilized through the agency of machines, multiplies many times the productive capacity of the individual. Whether a coal civilization is upon the whole better than the man-power civilization, which Thomas Jefferson so ardently prayed might persist in America, is perhaps more open to question than we realize; it is certainly more debatable than we admit; but, for better, for worse, here it is, and it is here to stay. We have long passed the time when, as Dr. Johnson said, ‘Four good wants ought to last a man a year.’ The industries that we created to meet our relatively simple wants feed and develop on the new wants which they themselves create. They have thus grown, until they dominate our civilization; but, as pointed out by Gilbert, it is a curious and pathetic anomaly that the two most basic industries in the United States, food-production and the coal industry, are the most inefficiently organized of them all.
In the United States the enormous increase within our memory in the production of basic products gives spectacular testimony of the rate of our industrial growth. In 1870, we produced 1,600,000 tons of iron; in 1919, 30,000,000 tons. Our coal output, which was then 33,000,000 tons, is now approaching 700,000,000. We mined, in 1870, 28,000,000 pounds of copper; in 1919, 1,289,000,000; while our per-capita consumption of petroleum, which was .016 barrel in 1860 and only .83 in 1900, has, during twenty years, jumped to threeand-a-half barrels.
These figures are significant only as one is able to visualize the ramifications of industry into which these basic products enter. The textile and paper mills, the steel works, the electrical manufactures and the diversified distribution and influence of their products, the gas-works, the automobile industry, the countless factories which pour their product into the market — to each and every one of these the fuel problem is a problem of the first magnitude; for without fuel, or its equivalent in energy, they cannot turn a wheel.
With more than half of the world’s coal reserves within the area of the United States, we have permitted a situation to develop which has involved shortage at the mines, with the miners on strike or ‘on vacation,’ famine at consuming points, embargoes, priority rulings, and the complexities and inhibitions of fuel administration by the state.
Nor are we alone in our difficulties: the problem is world-wide. The industries of France are starving for coal, while Germany resist s all efforts to compel promised deliveries. Italy finds her national life imperiled; Portugal is on the verge of a coal-famine; Scandinavia and the Argentine bid frantically; while Britain, exporting at outrageous prices, is threatened with a general strike and nationalization of the mines. A recent news item states that at Blantyre, near Glasgow, the officials have been bluntly told that seizure of the coal-pits is imminent, and that the men propose to establish a soviet system of mine-control. Meanwhile the British coal output has shrunk 47,000,000 tons, or 16 per cent.
The situation is due, of course, to the converging influence of many factors, not all of which find their origin in the war. There is a noticeable shortage of men at the bituminous mines, and there is a serious shortage of coalcars. The men work little more than half the time. They show a broad catholicity in the observance of church holy days, whether it is their own church that celebrates, or some other. With winter upon us the anthracite miners take a vacation, and this curtails output by 3,500,000 tons. Watershipments to New England have been hampered, or interrupted, during most of the summer by labor troubles at the piers, which may have had no nearer cause than a hunger strike in Brixton prison or the failure of an archbishop to land in Ireland.
Concurrently with the gradual and general breakdown of rail-transportation services has come the building up of an enormous increase in the demand for power, which, nevertheless, is so inefficiently distributed and utilized that, in the densest industrial section of the country, the average load-factor is only 15 per cent, where it might well be 60. We may expect no cessation in the development of this demand for power, because only by rendering available to the individual worker larger and larger units of power, may we hope measurably to satisfy the insistent demands of labor.
The increased cost of coal has probably imposed an annual tax upon the American householder of not less than $600,000,000 in direct charges, and has been the cause of much acute suffering in the households of the poor. An indeterminate, but probably far greater, additional burden has resulted from higher manufacturing costs, and delayed production due to failures in coal-deliveries. The industries consume more than 30 per cent of all the coal we mine, and in many cases of bulkproduction the amount of coal consumed is greater than the weight of product. A ton of paper, for example, requires for its manufacture two tons of coal. Moreover, the fuel problem bears a very direct relation to the housing problem, since great quantities of coal are required for burning lime, cement, and brick, and for smelting and working the iron and steel that enter so largely into construction. In other important industries, like the manufacture of gas and coke, calcium carbide for acetylene, and for the nitrogenous fertilizer cyanamide, as also in many metallurgical operations, coal functions as an essential raw material, which enters directly, or as coke, into the reactions of the process.
About a quarter of our total coalproduction, or 153,000,000 tons, is used, and used wastefully, by our railroads. The steam locomotive, with its varying load and frequent periods of idleness, is not an efficient unit of powergeneration. Moreover, about a third of the freight tonnage of the railroads consists of coal. Obviously, therefore, a very pressing phase of the fuel problem is that which concerns the railroads. It can be met only by lifting the general load-factor of our industrial communities, while at the same time, wherever possible, transmitting electrical energy or distributing high-pressure gas, instead of transporting coal.
Sir William Crookes, toward the close of a phenomenally long life, summed up his experience by saying, ‘ Whatever happens makes for progress.’ If we can accept his conclusion, we may even reconcile ourselves to the present high level of coal prices, since they seem altogether likely to lead to the adoption of methods long in common practice abroad for the utilization of low-grade fuels; the far wider use of producer gas from coke, peat, lignite, and high-ash mine refuse; the expansion of the coal-gas industry with recovery of chemical values; and, finally, to the production and general use for city fuel of artificial anthracite, which permits the same recovery. We commonly think first of coal in terms of its heating values, and some of us stop there. Most of us recognize that its energy values as applied to powerdevelopment are of at least equal importance, but comparatively few realize the significance of the chemical values in coal.
Obviously, there should be a way for the home to get its fuel more cheaply, when a ton of coal, costing in 1915 about one dollar at the mine, contains about fifteen dollars’ worth (at 1915 prices) of commodities useful to society. These are, —
1400 pounds of smokeless fuel . . . $4.67
10000 cubic feet of gas, at 90c . . 9.00
25 pounds ammonia sulphate, at 2.8c .70
1 1/2 gallons benzol,at 26c . . . .39
9 gallons tar, at 2.6c . . . . .23
$14.99
The way to get these values generally out of coal lies, according to Gilbert, in the development of artificial anthracite. Another way would seem to be through the establishment of great super-gas plants, and the distribution, over a considerable radius, of highpressure gas for industrial purposes. Such distribution does not seem to lend itself to domestic heating, by reason of the enormous fluctuation in the demand, with temperature variations.
The smallness of the anthracite field, which, by the way, now contains only about 190 tons per capita, has favored a closeness of control under which effective mining methods have been developed in spite of laws opposing the means to that end. Bituminous coal, of which we have vast reserves estimated at 15,000 tons for each inhabitant of our country, fails, nevertheless, to meet its obligations, because of the competitive manner in which it is mined, the unnecessary extent to which it is transported, and the improper way in which it is used. It is a necessity, which cannot be produced advantageously under competitive operation. Integrated mining will reduce waste, stabilize production, and hold the centres of production longer than otherwise to their present spots, to the advantage of distribution; but to reduce the price to the consumer, we must change our methods of use and recover other values than mere heat value. As it is, we have a public policy hostile to combination, and no methods of storage; so that we can mine only when cars are available. The companies are scattered and unorganized, while many are small and financially weak. The price at the mine has in the past been so low that only thick seams could be worked. The industry is hampered by the restrictions of the miners, and subject to the derangements resulting from a fluctuating demand and seasonal variation. These conclusions, which have been strikingly emphasized by Gilbert and Pogue, and many other facts and tendencies, point to a very real danger of the ultimate nationalization of coal, petroleum, and perhaps other basic resources. Such a prospect can be regarded with equanimity only when we have been able to secure a far higher level of efficiency in the conduct of public affairs. Not only must we demand vision in our public men, but we must demand a public policy based on vision and directed toward the coördinated development of the resources of our estate.
The present spectacular boom in oil; the feverish search throughout the world for new producing fields; the immediate shortage in our own supply and the impending exhaustion of our oil reserves; the new oil-burning navies and merchant fleets; the extending use of fuel oil by railroads and the industries; the enforced economy in the employment of gas-oil for carburetting water-gas; the flood of gasoline required to drive automobiles, trucks, tractors, power-boats, and aeroplanes, and its soaring price—all bear witness that the fuel problem is not confined to coal. The internal-combustion engine, by reason of its efficiency, convenience, and compactness, has brought us to the verge of another industrial revolution, which may yet prove to be as far-reaching in its effects as the one which derived so much of its impetus from coal. Already it has resulted in the development of a new and most pervasive system of transportation, dependent upon petroleum and insistent in its demand for better roads. It supports scores of new industries, drains the labor market, profoundly affects real-estate values, upsets the economy of households, and conducts its operations on such a scale of magnitude that two per cent of the American people are said to be dependent upon the activities of a single manufacturer of motor-cars.
Our aspirations for an over-seas commerce under the American flag involve the assurance of a supply of fuel oil, since four ships burning oil will do the work of five propelled by coal. Fuel oil, according to Lord Fisher, increases the strength of the British Navy 33 per cent; and, partly because of its remarkable adaptability to service, partly because of its greater efficiency, it is generally recognized as far superior to coal as fuel. It generates in practice nearly double the British thermal unit per pound consumed. None the less, its general use as fuel can be regarded only as an economic crime, in view of its other and greater potential values and the limitation of supply. Its price is bound to rise to a point prohibitive for ordinary fuel uses. In the Diesel engine its capacity for doing work is multiplied by three, and one ton of oil is equivalent in effective power to four tons of coal.
Meanwhile, the demand for fuel oil is increasing at an unprecedented rate, under the stimulus of an aggressive campaign by the oil companies, whose stocks had begun to accumulate in disconcerting volume with the termination of the war. The programme of the Shipping Board will soon require an annual supply of 60,000,000 barrels, for much of which we must depend on Mexico. Already the price has reached a point that has led the navy, in several instances, to seize supplies held at figures that it refused to pay.
More than 90 per cent of all the automobiles in the world are in the United States. It is estimated that their number in 1921 will reach 10,000,000, without including motor-trucks or tractors. We consume to-day about 120,000,000 barrels of gasoline and 7,200,000 barrels of motor-oil a year, and are called upon to contemplate a requirement of 250,000,000 barrels of gasoline, by the automobile industry alone, within fifteen years. There is small justification for the hope that we can get it. There is no general substitute in sight that promises to be available in adequate amount, although both alcohol and benzol function admirably as motor-fuel. The Geological Survey estimates that the oil resources of the country are more than 40 per cent exhausted. In 1870 we mined 5,000,000 barrels. In 1919 our production was 378,000,000. The 60 per cent reserves represent what is left in spite of our utmost endeavors to get it out. It totals something like six and a half billion barrels, on which we may hope to draw at our present rate of consumption for about sixteen years. That is a short time in which to develop a substitute for 250,000,000 barrels of gasoline, even if the possibility and means of such development were in sight. Requa foresees a demand for 900,000,000 barrels of petroleum in 1930; and it is not surprising that he regards it as a quantity which the oil territory of the United States is probably incapable of supplying.
With our domestic yield representing two thirds of the entire petroleum output, and with a consumption within the United States of one half of all petroleum values produced, it is not surprising that nations, corporations, and individuals are engaged in a desperate search for petroleum, which extends to the remotest corners of the earth. It is indeed the Day of Petroleum, but no one knows the time o’ day.
Vast quantities of gasoline have in the past been allowed to escape with natural gas, the waste of which has been as high as a billion feet a day. In 1900, in West Virginia, in only two counties, over half a billion feet were lost every twenty-four hours. Several ingenious processes are now employed to recover gasoline at the casing head of gas-wells. The quantity obtained from this source was about 12,000,000 barrels in 1919. It is an important contribution, but without real bearing on the general situation; and our reserves of gas are failing.
These wastes of natural gas, which is an ideal fuel, and the losses and maladjustments which attend the orgy of petroleum production, again afford glaring examples of the need of a constructive national policy for the development of our resources; but no such policy was outlined by either presidential candidate in the late campaign. So long as ownership of portions of a common reservoir of oil is determined by vertical boundaries, each owner can hope to secure his own only by getting it before his neighbor. The result is necessarily hurried, unregulated, and wasteful production.
The hope has been held out that, as our oil reserves fail to meet the increasing demands upon them, the burden can be shifted to the vast deposits of oil-shale in the Middle West, notably in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and southwestern Indiana. These deposits in Colorado alone are estimated to contain not less than twenty billion tons of shale, much of which yields upon distillation a barrel of oil per ton. Much leaner shales have been profitably treated for many years in Scotland, though the industry is now said to be jeopardized by the competition of Persian and Egyptian oil. Unfortunately, the Scotch methods of operation do not seem to lend themselves to the treatment of our American shales, from which the large-scale production of oil presents industrial problems of the first magnitude. These problems are in fact so great, and so remote from solution, that no relief from shale in the near future can reasonably be expected. We shall undoubtedly some day have an oil-shale industry of vast proportions; but it is well to realize that, before it can carry the burden of responsibility now borne by oil, we must develop mining operations upon a scale at least equal to our present effort in mining coal, and must superimpose upon these operations a great transportation system, and a refinery capacity of the order of that now serving petroleum. It may well employ a million men, and its operations will build up mountains of waste beside which the anthracite culm piles will look like hillocks.
In peat and lignite we have other great reserves of fuel, as yet untouched. The peat deposits of the country are estimated at fourteen billion tons, most of which is in the eastern states along the Atlantic seaboard. New England, which is now dependent upon the delays and hazards of rail and water transportation for its fuel, is especially rich in peat, which it does not know how to use. In Boston we shivered through the rigors of last winter, and endured the hardships of a protracted coal-famine, while great beds of peat remained untouched around us. The basic problem of peat-production remains that of harvesting, which is often complicated by a mass of interweaving roots in the overburden; and there is still the difficulty, due to its colloidal character, of drying peat, which commonly contains from 80 to 90 per cent of water. Much admirable work has been done, nevertheless, in the direction of peat-utilization. On the dry basis it has rather more than half the heating power of the best coal (8500 B.t.u.), and in some instances has equaled coal in economy when burned under boilers. As amply demonstrated in Germany and Canada, it yields its best return in gas-producers, with recovery of ammonia as sulphate. With beds averaging 2 per cent in nitrogen, power-gas has been produced from peat at nominal or negligible cost.
Our supply of lignitic coals exceeds our total bituminous reserves by 33 per cent, and amounts to some 20,000 tons per capita. It is far more available at once than peat. The Bureau of Mines has shown that one ton of dry lignite yields from 8000 to 10,000 feet of gas, 17 pounds of ammonium sulphate, one gallon of oil, 50 gallons of tar, and one half to two thirds of a ton of carbon residue, convertible into briquettes approaching the value of anthracite. Lignite, when mined, has the disadvantage of powdering in the process of drying and weathering; but used as powdered coal, it undergoes very complete combustion and gives high efficiencies. For domestic and general purposes it needs only to be briquetted after carbonizing, with recovery of byproducts, and is thus potentially one of our most valuable fuel reserves and one upon which we are likely soon to draw. There are, for example, great lignite deposits in Texas, which, like the whole of the Southwest, is now entirely dependent on a failing oil-supply for fuel.
A shocking proportion of the values in our fuel is now lost through preventable wastes. We have wasted more natural gas than we have used. A recent British critic estimated that indiscriminate drilling and inefficient work has resulted in the loss of over 50 per cent of our potential petroleum production. The wastes, not all of them preventable, in our mining of coal approach the same order of proportionate magnitude. The absurdly low average load-factor carried in our industries, the great excess of air commonly supplied in burning coal, and the inefficiency of the locomotive as a 24-hour power-plant, all add heavily to the burden of waste we carry.
For metallurgical purposes we coke about 80,000,000 tons of coal a year; but only half of this is coked in by-product ovens, in spite of the stimulus to their development afforded by the war. The other 40,000,000 tons are still coked in crude beehive ovens, with complete loss of gas and chemical values. Thus we still waste prodigally the ammonia required by our agriculture; tar and oils available for waterproofing, road-making, and wood-preservation; benzol, toluol, aniline, anthracene, and naphthaline, the basic raw materials for dyestuffs and explosives industries, and for countless synthetic products of widely diversified usefulness.
Anyone who has seen a great battery of boilers fired by natural gas must have been impressed by the ease and flexibility of control, the steady maintenance of steam-pressure, the absence of smoke, the cleanliness of the equipment and surroundings, and the minimum of manual effort required for these results. This remarkable adaptability to the requirements of service makes gas an ideal fuel for most industrial and domestic purposes. Our annual consumption of natural gas is around six hundred billion cubic feet, which is probably twice the volume produced by all the gas-works and coke-ovens in the country. This includes coal-gas from the destructive distillation of coal, water-gas made by the reaction of steam on incandescent coke, and producer-gas, which is the result of the complete gasification of coal under the action of a mixture of air and steam. In our development of the gas industry we may still learn from the British, with whom coal-gas originated, and who are now demonstrating the economic advantages of lower heating values. Our smaller municipal gasplants are too often antiquated organizations, without vision, and far from realizing, cither in their present practice or in their preparation for the future, the possibilities of the industry. They are, therefore, not likely to initiate, and are poorly equipped to meet the revolutionary developments which seem to be impending. They are confronted with higher manufacturing costs, due to dearer coal, labor, and money. They are being rapidly shut off from the supplies of gas-oil required for the enrichment of the relatively cheap water-gas.
A forced return to coal-gas seems inevitable, if present standards of quality are to be maintained, though the immediate tendency is toward combination processes involving the complete gasification of the coal. Meanwhile, a general advance in rates is in effect.
Looking to the future, there is obvious need of a more flexible method of manufacture and a wider range of products. The utilization of the gas itself is still relatively undeveloped, but the gasengine, the new methods of surfacecombustion, the range and convenience of high-pressure gas, and many other factors, point to a great expansion in the industrial use of gas. Similarly, the progress made in the low-temperature distillation of coal and the remarkable results already attained point to the ultimate city gas-plant as one designed to receive the raw coal required by the community, and to produce therefrom gas, artificial anthracite, oils, motor-fuels, and alcohol from ethylene, concurrently with the recovery of the benzol, tar, and ammonia now lost when the community burns raw coal. In fact, coal is the only resource in sight available in sufficient quantity to serve as raw material on which to base a method for the production of fueloils and motor-fuel in quantities adequate to meet the ultimate demand. It devolves upon chemistry to develop such a method, and, when developed, the place for the method is in the gasworks. Very significantly, the yields of oils obtainable from coal by carbonization have almost doubled since 1918.
But the gas-works are not alone involved in the impending revolution in our use of fuel. Powdered coal combines many of the advantages of gas with many of those of oil. It is highly efficient, easily controlled, and, perhaps best of all, permits the effective use of low-grade coals, culm, and lignite. A more recent development is colloidal fuel, composed of an emulsion of powdered coal and fuel-oil. The usual proportions are 40 per cent coal, 59 per cent oil, and one per cent, of a fixateur to ensure the stability of the emulsion. Colloidal fuel remains in the liquid state, can be stored and pumped like oil, and burned in the usual oilburners. Its chief present importance lies in the fact that it conserves and extends the supply of fuel-oil.
III
We sometimes call the period in which we are living the Age of Electricity, whereas it is really the adolescence of electricity. We mine, transport, and distribute nearly 700,000,000 tons of coal, when what we really want at the delivery points are heat and light and power. We ask for energy and are given a stone. The transportation of energy and its delivery to our homes and factories and along our railroad lines have just begun. In its extension on a scale vastly greater than anything we have known lies the hope of solving our fuel problem. We have come to the day of super-gas-works and super-power-plants, high-pressure distribution of gas, and common-carrier transmission lines for electric energy.
Electricity has already become the most effective servant in the house. At the turning of a button, it floods our rooms with light; it is not above doing a little cooking; it runs the vacuum cleaner, the sewing-machine, the dumb waiter, and the pianola. It heats the curling tongs and the flatiron, and may even be persuaded to replace the iceman at the refrigerator door. It is a prompt and willing messenger. The farmer who, in response to the revolt of mother, installs an electric pump, soon finds that mother’s labor at the old pump-handle was worth only one half-cent an hour. Some indication of what these integrated services cost in power may be found in a recent order for one million electric washing-machines, each of one kilowatt capacity. A million kilowatts is interesting to any central-station manager.
The well-recognized relation of water power to fuel is expressed in the popular phrase, ‘white coal.’ The present production of hydro-electric power in the United States is roughly equivalent to 40,000,000 tons of coal; whereas nearly ten times that amount is used in the generation of steam power and carboelectric power. In densely populated districts as much as one quarter of the coal-fired power is often devoted to the generation of electricity. Generally speaking, however, our public electrical utilities even now probably consume not more than 7 per cent of our total output of coal. The large unit applications of electricity to the industries are, nevertheless, rapidly extending. These applications involve not only the turning of wheels. More and more generally are great installations being devoted to the processes of electro-chemistry and electrometallurgy, to the production of bleach and alkali, carbide and acetylene, fertilizer, abrasives, aluminum, magnesium, special steels, and other basic products of the decomposing cell and the electric furnace. We have hardly begun to make electric steel, but the world already devotes some nine hundred million kilowatt hours of energy to its production.
The results obtained through the complete or partial electrification of a few of our railroads have amply demonstrated that the electric locomotive, in every variety of railroad service, does its work always as well as, and in most cases better than, the steam locomotive, while the latter as a prime generator of power is of course hopelessly behind the great turbo-electric generator.
These converging factors, which are quite general in their bearing, have already developed in England a strong trend toward the concentration of fuelconsumption in super-power-plants as a step toward the ultimate electrification of British industry. In our own country the reaction to the obvious necessities of the situation has taken on an even more definite and concrete form in the stupendous plan for the creation of a super-power zone, extending provisionally from Washington to Boston, and inland from 100 to 150 miles. As a necessary preliminary to the realization of the plan, Congress in July authorized and provided for the conduct of the Superpower Survey, which is now being made by a special engineering staff under the inspiring leadership of W. S. Murray, and the general direction of the United States Geological Survey. Although the super-power zone includes only 2 per cent of the land area of the country, there is concentrated within it 47 per cent of our industrial activities. It contains an estimated machine capacity of 17,000,000 horsepower, of which 10,000,000 is employed for industrial purposes and the remainder utilized by the railroads. In a word, the super-power plan provides a means of lifting the average load-factor, which now within the zone does not exceed 15 per cent, to a load-factor of more than 50 per cent, and possibly as much as 60 per cent. It proposes to make one ton of coal do the work now done by two, and to relieve the railroads of transporting one half the amount of coal required for power and lighting purposes. It expects to increase the value of the machine capacity within the zone from threefold to fourfold, and to save not less than 30,000,000 tons of coal a year, worth, even at $5 a ton, $150,000,000. The reduced cost of maintenance of machinery and the reduction of train-miles through consolidation of trains will, it is believed, save another $150,000,000, making the total annual saving $300,000,000, or 24 per cent of the estimated cost of installation. The plan offers immediate relief from the present intolerable congestion of the railroads within the zone, by automatically increasing rail capacity without extending track mileage.
The present economy of power-production within the Boston-Washington zone will average at least 40 pounds of steam per kilowatt hour. In the contemplated super-power-plants of 300,000 to 500,000 kilowatts capacity, located near the mines and along the coast, not more than 15 pounds, and it may well be as little as 10 pounds, of steam, with a total consumption of one and a half pounds of good coal per kilowatt-hour output, should be required.
These super-power-stations, together with all efficient generating units within the zone, and all available water-power, will be linked together and pour their output of high-tension current into the common-carrier transmission line from which both the railroads and the industries will draw their primary power.
This super-power plan may well be regarded as the first step in that coordination of our resources, and their development under a comprehensive general plan, which I have long advocated, and from its successful operation still greater things may reasonably be anticipated. Thrift has been defined by Roosevelt as ‘common sense in
spending.’ We need sadly to develop a national common sense, and to apply it to the spending of our natural resources, which are the basis of our national wealth. More than ever before is the whole world under a heavy responsibility to use its resources wisely; and the major portion of that burden falls upon us who are the most richly endowed of all. We are beginning vaguely to recognize the urge of the hoarding instinct, which, according to Gilbert , marks the dawning of economic consciousness in the progress of civilization. We must learn to hoard until we can learn to use. We must substitute coördinated development by planning for opportunist development designed primarily for the enrichment of the individual. We have only to contemplate the situation into which opportunist development has brought us, as regards our coal, our oil, our gas, our water-power, our transportation systems, and our forests, to realize that most of the wastes, delays, and difficulties which characterize the situation are due simply to lack of planning years in advance, and to our failure to embody in a coördinated general plan those lines of action which are well recognized by experts as vitally essential to our proper development as an industrial nation.
Have we not a right to demand that the formulation of such a plan shall take precedence in the minds of presidential candidates over the size of campaign budgets or the precise wording of Article X?