What Coal Means to Us

I

THERE is no romance in coal; the word calls to mind no pleasing pictures of adventure and conquest. Argonaut expeditions never set sail to find coal; but to mention the spicy Indies, sunny California, the far-away Rand and Australia, and the frozen Yukon, is to recall the lure and the glamour — centuries old, yet ever new — of man’s perennial search for gold. Yellow gold suggests high adventure in the open, but black coal suggests only hard toil underground — it belongs to the big world of work rather than to the smaller realm of romance. Dull and dirty, coal is the symbol of the purely utilitarian in life; for coal is as highly useful as it is meanly prosaic. Though it is won from the depths of the earth by laborious effort, and though it soils everything it touches, coal makes our world a brighter and better place to live in.

What coal means to the world, however, is little appreciated by the many who share its benefits. The man on the street thinks of coal only in terms of the few tons he buys for his furnace and his range. A coal strike, though it may be country-wide, means little to him. ‘I use anthracite, and I bought mine in March,’ is the casual remark with which he absolves himself from any further interest in an impending shortage of both bituminous and anthracite coal. A newspaper headline telling of disorder and riot at a mine in Illinois or West Virginia may bring from him the question, ‘That’s where they mine coal, is n’t it?’ The fact that coal is mined in thirty states, and that the industry employs three quarters of a million men as well as two and one third billions of invested capital — all this escapes his notice and the notice of most of us, absorbed as we are in our own daily tasks.

At times, it is true, public interest hi coal is thoroughly aroused. Of the raw materials that go into the warp and woof of modern life, coal is one of the few that is directly purchased by the citizen. Our consumption of the useful metals, per capita, is, in value, roughly equal to our consumption of coal; but few of us ever buy pig iron or bar copper, and so we rarely think of the prices of these metals. But, unless he is so unfortunate as to dwell in a hotel, an apartment, or a boarding-house, every head of a family must buy coal for his own household. When, therefore, for any cause the price of household coal rises, his pocketbook nerve is touched, and he begins to feel feverish concern. A rise in the price of no other commodity, gasoline excepted, can more easily bring public opinion to a high temperature.

This sporadic concern about coal and coal prices lacks both perspective and proportion. The public interest in coal is something far larger than that based on all the use we make of it in our homes. Of the six tons that measure the per-capita consumption in the United States, less than one and a half tons are used for heating and cooking, even though that is the coal which we buy and whose price we know.

There is a large persona! service that we receive daily from coal that we often overlook, if indeed we ever fully appreciate it. Coal comes into our homes, not only by way of the chute to the cellar bin, but over the wire, and through the pipes, and also, in no small amounts, by the kitchen door. Our electric current and gas and water and ice all represent coal — more coal than we are likely to realize. Into the house that I happen to know best, for example, there came in a single year thirteen and a third tons of bituminous coal, which was never seen by any member of my household, but for which I had to pay, just as truly as I paid for the fifteen tons of anthracite I bought that year. A study of the accounts for the year shows that one and one fifth tons of coal had to be used at the power station, to furnish my electric current; more than four fifths of a ton of coal at the ice factory, to make my ice; more than eleven tons of coal, or its equivalent in coke or oil, at the gas plant, to furnish the more convenient fuel in my home; and, even with a gravity system, one hundred and twenty pounds of coal at the city pumping station, to raise the water we used from filter plant to reservoirs. These thirteen tons of coal thus bring to a home of to-day what we call its modern conveniences — service rendered by energy-slaves, whose presence we forget, but who quietly do so much work that our grandfathers — and grandmothers — had to do for themselves.

This indirect consumption of coal, amounting to more than two tons a person in the household I have studied, is nearly as great as the direct consumption of coal for heating the same home; so that the visible coal I buy from the coal-dealer is only half of my supply; and, be it noted, the most of my invisible coal is received in the form of what we call public-utility service, for which I pay at publicly regulated rates.

II

Essential as coal, both seen and unseen, is to the comfort of the home, it is a far larger aspect of our coal supply that demands national attention. Our industrial and transportation systems are built on a coal foundation: take coal away and the great structure that expresses all the material progress of which we as Americans are proud would be a useless thing. Coal we take too much as a matter of course; too seldom do we notice how it enters into the life of the nation. As we watch the railroad train passing, laden with coal, the truth of the statistics of coal and the problem of its transportation should come home to us: 40 per cent of all the freight loaded is coal, and the locomotives themselves consume more than a quarter of all the coal mined. For every five cars of coal that the railroads deliver to themselves, seven cars go to the boiler-house of factory, mill, or power plant, three and one half cars to the dealers who deliver the coal to our homes for heating and cooking, and two other cars to the coke ovens and gas works; the rest of the coal is used at the mines for power, or taken to the seaboard for bunker or export. Almost every modern industrial and commercial activity depends upon coal for its motive power.

Nature did not trouble to make an equal distribution of coal among the nations; nor, until recently, have the makers of national boundaries given much heed to the location of coal fields. To-day the wealth of each continent and country in unmined coal is well known, though the figures showing these world reserves of energy are far too large to be comprehended — roughly five million million tons of coal, not including the low-grade variety known as lignite. An easily remembered and thoroughly gratifying detail, however, is that half of the world’s known supply of coal is in North America. If, by way of humanizing these incredibly large statistics of coal reserves, we give the measure of a nation’s wealth in coal in the per-capita tonnage of coal unmined, we find that the leading industrial nations rank about as follows: the United States possesses more than 23,000 tons of coal, other than lignite, for every man, woman, and child of its present population; Great Britain has about 5000 tons per capita; Germany probably still owns not less than 4000 tons per capita; Belgium, perhaps 1500 tons; France, probably more than 800 tons; Spain, less than 400 tons; and Japan, 150 tons, or considerably less than our own per-capita reserve of anthracite, our luxury coal, the supply of which we regard as extremely scant.

If population were a fixed quantity, and the uses of coal were a fully determined factor, the rate of consumption of coal might be predicted for future centuries; but what we know about our grandfathers’ days justifies some hesitation in prophecy about our grandchildren’s days. If fifty years ago the per-capita consumption of coal was one ton a year, and it is now six tons, what dare we say as to the requirements of future generations? This rapidly increasing rate of consumption is, in fact, an ever-changing unit, which we have to use in measuring our reserve stocks of coal. It is true that over 99 per cent of our country’s original supply is even yet unmined, but it is also true that in the last dozen years we have mined more coal than in the whole of the preceding century and a half since coal mining began.

This startling increase in our country’s consumption of coal can be better understood if we look beneath the surface of everyday things. The trace of coal is found everywhere in modern life. That large tonnage of unseen coal already mentioned as entering our homes disguised as public-utility gas, electricity, and water is by no means the full measure of the domestic service rendered by coal. We know, for instance, that in the industrial zone between Boston and Washington — a relatively small area, in which, however, is concentrated one fourth of the population of the United States — the bakeries use over half a million tons of coal a year for heat and power, the sugar refineries a million and a quarter tons, the manufacturers of other food products another million and a quarter tons, and the ice plants nearly three quarters of a million tons. Indeed, fully seven per cent of what is called industrial coal in this area is thus translated into food; so that, again in invisible form, more than ten thousand tons of coal come each day to our tables. To this extent is coal consumed outside the home in fact a food-necessity.

Even more has coal become the staff of life of our industries. We can best realize what coal means in a national sense if we study history in terms of the steam-engine and industry. In the century and a half since the Declaration of Independence gave to the world a new political ideal, the substitution of steam for human labor in doing the world’s work has created a new industry, a new commerce, and a new social order. The leading industrial nations lead because of the coal they produce; their rank in the world’s markets is largely fixed by the coal they consume; and their future power must be conditioned by their wealth in coal. Hence the national significance of a properly functioning coal industry.

The modern industrial system, as we know it in the United States, is founded on a use of mechanical power more generous than prevails elsewhere in the world. We multiply man-power with machinery; we lift the load from the back of man by offering him the use of electrically driven tools; and man thus becomes the master of a machine rather than the slave of a Herculean task; yet these power-driven machines must be thought of as not so much labor-saving as product-increasing agencies. The modern steel plant may employ thousands of men, but back of each human worker there is from five to ten horsepower of electric drive; and this large coöperation of the machine with the man explains the low cost of American steel. And practically all this vast supply of energy, upon which every industry draws so heavily, comes from coal. So it is that each ton of steel we use represents more than two tons of coal; the cement that forms the other essential component in our modern structures has cost half its weight in coal; and the roof of copper shingles, three times their weight in coal; so too, this printed page has cost more than twice its weight in coal; and even the sheerest of fabrics contains its quota of coal, for the silk mills of New Jersey and other Eastern states consume each year nearly half a million tons.

Moreover, this large and increasing use of coal-generated power is typically American; no other country equals ours in its per-capita equipment of powergenerating and power-using machinery. And we need to keep in mind, as we face the future, the obvious truth that there is no other route to nation-wide prosperity so direct as this machine method of increasing the productivity of labor. Planning for an ever larger supply of mechanical power and for the ever wider use of improved machines is the surest way to continue American standards of wages and living against all competition in the world’s markets.

We have learned to look upon radium as the wonder-worker among minerals; yet the more common and commonplace coal possesses truly marvelous powers in its contribution to the everyday work of the world. Coal perhaps deserves to be called the magical multiplier of man-power. Take the average daily output of the soft-coal mine worker — four tons in 1920; the half ton of coal he mines in an hour will yield, under average practice, steampower to an amount of 500 horse-power hours, or say 5000 man-power hours: in that ratio do coal and the steam engine multiply human energy. Or, to put it in other terms, although the coalminer works a short year at best, nevertheless his year’s endeavor, measured in the coal he mines, is equivalent in mechanical energy to the continuous effort for a year of a thousand men turning wheels in some man-power machine. By a thousandfold at least does the energy in our coal replace the slavelabor of the ancient world. Better the Coal Age of America than the Golden Age of Greece.

Coal, then, is a wonder-worker whose rôle has become a commonplace — a faithful slave whose service we take for granted. Yet the sum total of all that coal means to us is so great a part of modern life that the public can no longer with safety shift the responsibility of the coal industry, even though the larger users of coal — the railroads, the steel industry, the electric public utilities — all have a more direct interest in watching it. In speaking to the members of the American Iron and Steel Institute, — men of engineering and financial talent, who have won worldleadership for their industry, — I held them to a definite responsibility for the one hundred million tons or more of coal they use each year in making steel; but the rest of us must also face the plain issue that the story of coal is a story of waste, all the way from the face of the mine-working to the smokestack of the boiler plant: waste of a natural resource, waste of human endeavor, waste of capital, waste of transportation capacity, and waste of energy; and of none of these have we enough — much less, any to spare.

III

The betterment of the coal business is not a simple matter. First of all, there are two major classes of coal: anthracite, or hard coal, and bituminous, or soft coal — a distinction that is commercial and industrial even more than scientific. The contrast in the physical characters of these two kinds of coal is so marked that it is evident even to a passer-by; but this Nature-made difference results in two distinct types of industry, whose diverse features are essential in any consideration of the coal problem. The annual output of anthracite, for instance, is less than one fifth that of bituminous coal, although more than one fifth as much capital, and even one fourth as many mineworkers, are engaged in the anthracite industry — that is, the dollar invested and the man employed cannot produce as much hard coal as soft coal. Practically all the anthracite comes from a limited area in Pennsylvania, while bituminous coal is mined in thirty states; there remains in the ground in the United States about one half of one per cent as much anthracite as bituminous and lower-grade coals. So it happens, logically, that anthracite mining is a natural monopoly, out of which has grown a well-organized business, duly proportioned to meet current demands for its high-grade product, which commands a luxury price not closely related to the price of soft coal. To maintain this favored standing, anthracite is prepared for domestic use by cleaning and separating into different sizes, with a resulting by-product of sizes too small for domestic use, — the ‘ steam sizes ’ of commerce, — which are sold in competition with soft coal, at prices much below the average mining cost for the whole anthracite output. The anthracite industry is thus a manufacturing as well as a mining business, and its product is roughly divided into 70 per cent domestic sizes and 30 per cent steam sizes. A contrast sometimes overemphasized is that, while 70 per cent of the anthracite mined goes to homes, only 12 per cent of the bituminous coal mined is classed as household coal; yet the fact is that about the same quantity of each, sixty million tons, is burned in domestic use. both may equally be said to keep the home fires burning; but bituminous coal is preëminently the fuel that makes the wheels go round.

With so much at stake, it is high time that the common people look into the soft-coal business or at least, learn the A B C’s of its economics. Nature has blessed these United States with wonderful beds of high-grade coal that can be easily mined; the productivity of our American mine-workers, backed by modern machinery, is higher than that of any coal-miners elsewhere in the world; but in Europe the miners work much longer years. In coal-mining it is the American hare and the European tortoise; for while in normal times, in Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and France, the coal mines have been open for work from 290 to 320 days a year, our average American bituminous mine has been open only 215 days in the average year, and considerably less than 170 days last year. Moreover, for over thirty years the American soft-coal miner has faced not only the certainty of idle days but also the uncertainty as to when his idle days were to come. Intermittency of employment year after year does not breed good working habits.

It is all too plain that this irregular running of mines for hardly more than two thirds of the working days of a year requires more mines and more mine-workers — it involves a sad waste of capital and a sadder waste of manpower. This overdevelopment of a basic industry is now generally acknowledged, even by those most interested. This excess of capital and of labor in the coal industry leads to the hazards of unemployment; and naturally both capital and labor seek wages high enough to cover expected idle time as well as actual working time. Larger profits and higher wages loom up as the logical content of this vicious circle of too many mines and too many miners and too short working time. All this makes the consumer’s coal bill too large, because it includes a charge for too much idleness — he pays for what he does n’t get.

The obvious remedy for inflation is deflation; but who is to begin the deflation? A coal operator with wide outlook suggests bankruptcy for one third of the soft-coal mines; and a spokesman of union labor suggests ‘back to the farm’ for 150,000 surplus miners. Probably neither of these radical programmes can be carried out, however desirable. A more practical line of attack will be to strike at the causes that have opened thousands of new and unneeded mines and attracted this excess army of mine-workers. The stimulus to overdevelopment has been furnished by high prices obtained under exceptional market conditions; and the stimulus to overmanning the industry has been furnished by high wages demanded for short-time employment. And so again we discover this chain of irregular operation and intermittent employment together causing a too high wage-scale, and yet resulting in too low annual earnings; with full justification, the coal-operator and the coal-miner and the coal-consumer, each thinks he is not getting a fair deal.

The average mine and the opportunity it offers the average miner is a statistical fact rather than a social picture. Thousands of miners have a better chance to work than that four-day week of the average mine; but, unfortunately, many thousand others have a much poorer chance. For ten years the coal mines in New Mexico have had an average working week of five and one half days; but in the same period the Oklahoma mines have been open almost two days less to the week. With such extremes, the United States plainly is not a land of equal opportunity for the coal-miner; and the steady work in New Mexico has not helped the family of the miner employed in Oklahoma.

The marked differences between states in the length of the working year are due in part to differences in type of market demand, quality of coal, mining costs (including wage-scale), and degree of overdevelopment. Copper smelters and railroads stabilize the demand for New Mexico coal, and the mine capacity of the state is well proportioned to the needs of the market. In Alabama the steel industry and the cotton-oil industry together give to the coal mines a much longer working year than is possible in Illinois, where a seasonal demand and overdevelopment of mines have combined to make a working year that is all too short. Undoubtedly these market differences tell only part of the story; for the lower wage-scales in the nonunion districts have made possible lower-cost coal, giving it an advantage over coal from union districts in any competitive market and affording the lower-cost mines the longer working time and more days’ wages to their workers. It is part cause and part effect, therefore, that the strongest union centres are the districts with the shortest working years.

Much that may be done to better the condition of coal-mining can be done only by the coal industry itself. The mining engineer is needed to raise the underground efficiency of the average mine nearer to what has been attained in the best mines; for we have large coal mines, well laid out and fully equipped with modern machinery, which show in practice how coal can be mined with the least waste of manpower. It is significant that in these larger and better-planned mines there is opportunity to work more hours in the day and more days in the year. Best of all, in such mines the individual mine-worker loads more coal for society and earns more money for his family, so that the two ideals are attained — cheaper coal and larger earnings. Both mine-worker and mine-operator have paid far too little heed to this method of bettering the coal business — the one has specialized too much on selling his labor and the other on selling his coal.

IV

Yet the economic defects in the coal business cannot all be cured by more attention to engineering by the mineoperator or a larger interest in his work by the mine-worker; for much of the trouble originates not at the mine but at the distant market. The consumer is too often uninformed about coal; and even if informed, he is too often utterly neglectful of any but his own interests. The charge of selfishness can be brought home as strongly to those who buy coal as to those who mine or sell coal; and public opinion needs to put the same ban on the consumer who disregards the interests of the coal producer, as on all those who disregard the interests of the coal consumer. Learning the A B C’s of the economics of the coal business is, indeed, no more needed than are a few kindergarten lessons in practical ethics as applied to coal-buying. Few coal consumers, for example, ever consider the possibility of accommodating their coal dealer by ordering a year’s supply of coal to be delivered, let us say, ‘a.d.c.’ (at dealer’s convenience). Yet that simple reform would enable the local dealer to stabilize his business, and in turn would help to stabilize the mine-operator’s business, to the end that the mine-worker’s April might contain nearly as many days as his November, instead of six or seven days less.

A thought-provoking instance of shortsighted self-interest is afforded by the recent bituminous-coal market. In June, New England and New York buyers were refraining from adding to their fast disappearing stocks of coal and were even cancelling their orders for shipments, because freight rates to seaboard points were to be lowered July first. The known facts that the country needed the product of every mine that was then running, that half a million tons waited on the cars at Hampton Roads, and that the failure to move this coal slowed down mine operation in West Virginia — all this counted for nothing against the expected reduction of 28 cents a ton on freight in July, even though at the National Conference of Social Work an earnest inquiry was made about ways and means of aiding the miners’ families in West Virginia: Dollars for charity, bat not 28 cents in a business deal! The result of this penny-wise disregard of the larger interest was about what might have been expected: in July everyone who had waited for the saving of 28 cents in freight rushed to market; and this demand not only cleared the docks of unsold coal but quickly pushed the price of coal at the mine up 56 cents; so that those who found coal to buy paid 28 cents more, not 28 cents less, for their coal at tidewater. Nor is this recent experience unique; for most of the surplus mines owe their origin to the high prices of panicky markets, and these in turn are due to the mass movement of buyers, whose selfishness causes them now to delay buying until coal may be cheaper, and now to rush to market for coal of any kind at any price. The 28-cent margin of such speculator-buyers is soon wiped out.

This failure of the consumer to see the producer’s side of the shield may be due as much to the distance that separates them as to lack of sympathetic vision. Measured even by the recent unusually high transatlantic rates from Cardiff, Welsh coal is only a few cents more distant from the Boston market than all-rail Pennsylvania soft coal. This long haul from mine to market, so large an item in the cost of coal, hinders the growth of community of interest between those who burn and those who mine coal — too often they are not citizens of the same state. Coal, in its relation to general welfare and to interstate commerce, thus has special significance in the New England States, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware; for this industrial belt has no coal of its own and is therefore wholly dependent upon mines outside of it. This means that the 21,000,000 citizens of these nine states look to their Federal government to protect their health and welfare so far as these depend on fuel and power: they ask Washington to provide coal, adequate as to supply and reasonable as to cost.

The evidence that sets forth the bad economics of the whole coal business is not yet all in; what we have learned in the last few years about the mining, distribution, and marketing of coal simply opens up wide fields for further inquiry. The sooner all the facts are known, the better it will be for the coal industry as well as for the public. Dead-set opposition to permitting representatives of the public to poke into so-called private business is a policy already out of date. What is most to be feared is public action without adequate consideration of the facts. Public opinion needs for its guidance a better understanding of the consumers’ possible influence on the marketing of coal; of the burden put on the railroads by the seasonal variation in coal shipments; of the useless duplication of transportation facilities demanded by competitive service to too many mines; of the waste of man-power in small mines that operate intermittently; of the lack of mine-efficiency due both to poor management and to union regulations; and of all the man-made handicaps placed on this industry, upon the health of which practically every other industry depends. We should not expose the coal industry to political experiments, but we must plan its restoration to economic health.

It may be that radical changes will be found necessary, such as permitting larger combination, under strict public regulation, of corporations engaged in mining and marketing coal; or controlling the distribution of coal along rational rather than fortuitous lines — a revival of zoning, so as to secure economy in the large item of transportation cost; or limiting the development of the industry more nearly to the measure of public requirements. Any of these methods may seem to run counter to the established ideas of the rights and privileges of private business; but public regulation has already taken similar liberties with the public utilities, and for the general benefit of all concerned. Monopoly of market, regulated quality of service, and prices adjusted to costs, are now accepted as basic premises in the conduct of what are well termed public-service corporations. What was private business a few years ago has now become public business; and it is noteworthy, too, that the public-service executives have visions of future advances in economy of power-generation and distribution in the public interest far beyond anything proposed by private initiative in the coal business.

Indeed, it appears wholly inconsistent that, although the energy put at. our service through the agency of railway train or street car or electric light is recognized as of a public-utility nature, and the rates we pay for it are fixed by municipal, State, or Federal regulation, the price of the coal that constitutes the source of that energy and the chief component of that public utility is regarded by some as outside the pale of public control or even of public inquiry. Coal, they say, is simply a commodity, like boots and shoes, and is therefore not to be made a matter of public concern or investigation. The coal mine, say these defenders of the past, is private property, even though the electric-power plant and the steam locomotive, which together consume so large a part of the output of that mine, are agencies engaged in business so affected with a public use that they are wholly subject to public regulation.

The futile conferences in Washington in July between coal-operators and coal-mine-workers emphasized again and again the fact that the stoppage of coal-mining was looked upon by both parties as purely a matter of private business, a controversy to be fought to a finish; and clever cartoonists were quick to portray the insignificance of the common citizen with the empty coal-hod. President Harding’s repeated references to the larger public interest in this issue were sorely needed to offset the vociferous utterances of those who set their business and their jobs above the general welfare; and no argument, however skillfully framed, could meet the President’s assertion that both workers and operators had an obligation 'to serve that public which made possible your industrial existence.' It is society that gives value to coal and opportunity to the coal industry.

The ‘ general-welfare clause’ undoubtedly must play an increasingly prominent part in national affairs, as the constitutional basis for action to protect the majority against any minority that arrogantly exhibits its indifference to the common good. The aggressive minority may derive its power from its monopoly of a valued resource or its monopoly of skilled labor; but the eventual reaction of the public will be the same, whether the monopolistic minority wears the label of trust or of union. Too long have the mine-owners treated the coal business as private privilege, and too long have the labor leaders, with no less monopolistic attitude, obstructed every move for underground efficiency and economy. The people’s coal costs too much because of the mistaken idea that mineowner and mine-worker can continue indefinitely to fight over contracts and rules.

Yet there is equal need and greater opportunity for the general-welfare clause to be made a standard for personal decision and a motive for individual action. The coal problem may yield in part to better engineering underground; but that engineering should have the humanitarian purpose of increasing the earnings of labor as well as the economic purpose of reducing the waste of capital. The coal problem may be solved in part by better distribution, but railroads and coal companies need to coöperate in a spirit broader than that of exchanging empty coal cars for coal contracts at prices below cost. The coal problem may also be made simpler by bettering the marketing system; but here, too, no machinery of public regulation can be so effective as the mutual recognition by buyer and seller of coal that broken contracts and profiteering prices do not serve to stabilize any business.

Not only does the trouble in the coal industry include sins against both economic and moral law, but at bottom there has been a lack of vision of its true relation to the general welfare. In the present readjustment period, for example, the coal-operator, coal-miner, and coal-merchant have too often failed to see that the price at which coal sells becomes a first item of cost in the great productive industries, so that the general recovery of business for which everyone prays is conditioned by the trend in coal. If the coal industry fails to keep down prices, what hope is there in other industries? No other producers exert a more general influence; and this relation of the coal industry to the general welfare carries the larger obligation to the nation.

For many years the coal industry has been burdened with evils that were only in part of its own making, — it is told that the first man who sold hard coal in Philadelphia was chased out of town as a swindler, — and now, in 1922, the controversy between the two active partners in the business has involved the silent partner in heavy losses. Exasperated by indifference and neglect, this silent partner has come to realize to some degree how large his share in the coal business really is and has now even threatened to take over the management of the business. Perhaps it would be wiser, first, to learn more about the coal industry and to apply the force of public opinion to its betterment in less extreme fashion than by Government operation. A somewhat radical journal recently referred to ‘a naïve belief in the power of public opinion’; yet in a democracy what other power can be appealed to for either conservative or progressive influence in public affairs? A larger faith in popular government was voiced by our President at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, when he said: ‘Deliberate public opinion never fails.'

Let a public opinion enlightened by a thorough study of the coal industry be the force that refuses capital to open or operate unneeded mines; that refuses either wages or profits figured on only two-thirds working time; that refuses, in short, to regard as private business the mining and marketing of so indispensable a commodity as coal, but that encourages, in turn, off-season purchase and storage of coal by consumers; that replaces suspicion and criticism with true coöperation between consumer and producer; and, especially, that endorses any legislation needed to put coal-mining and coal-distribution on a better economic basis.

With this more lively appreciation of what coal means to us, and with a more definite purpose to help to make the industry function better, the passing car of coal may catch our eye as one of the symbols of American greatness — as visible evidence of the energy whose uninterrupted service is needed in home and factory alike; for without coal our great industrial cities would be cold and dark and silent.