to
electricity and by wire served into factories and homes 100, 200, 300
miles from the mine? Why burden our congested railroads with this
traffic? Why strew our streets with this dirt? This may be a practicable
thing, a wise thing; it deserves study if coal is worth conserving.

Are there no substitutes for coal which we can use and can not export?
This question immediately raises the water-power possibilities of our
land, of which only the most superficial study has been made. Sell coal
and use electricity would appear a thrifty policy.

As petroleum is being used as a substitute for coal--and inasmuch as
the whole problem of fuel supply is one--we are ultimately compelled to
an investigation of the ability of our petroleum supply to meet its
present drain and to meet the expansion in its use, which is the most
surprising development of our day in the study of power creation.

This spells a program of development and conservation which should
challenge the ambitions of this Nation, and on a few of its features
perhaps a few further words would be justified.

SAVING COAL.

The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are the
discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from the ton
and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any particular
use.

It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence.... The railroads
have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per cent of the
heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive boiler, 10 per
cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of all the coal
mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which our railroads
have. This shows how great the problem is to them. Some have adopted a
system of paying a bonus for the greatest distance made on a given
quantity of a given coal. But this laudable effort has not met with the
cooperation that would be expected from the firemen, for reasons that go
far afield. Industries, especially those which generate electric power,
have made similar effort to gain from their fuel its greatest
potentiality, and with varying success. We can overlook the stoking of
the domestic furnace as a national concern, for the amount of coal used
in this way amounts to not more than 17 per cent of the national coal
bill, and this whole charge could be saved, it is estimated, by giving
care to the 75 per cent of our coal which is burned under boilers to
make steam. Here there is a