ch year has seen the prophecy unfulfilled that
the peak of the possible yield had been reached.

From the mountains of western Pennsylvania into the very ocean bed of
the Pacific and even beyond and into the broken strata of upturned
Alaska, the oil prospector bored with his sharp tooth of steel and found
oil. Hardly has one field fallen into a decline when another has come
rushing into service. Only three years ago and all hopes were centered
in Oklahoma, and then came Kansas, and then the turn went south again to
Texas, and now it looks toward Louisiana. Geologists have estimated and
estimated, and they do not differ widely, for few give more than thirty
years of life to the petroleum sands of this country if the present
yield is insisted upon. And yet there is so much of mystery in the
hiding of this strange subterranean liquid that honest men will not say
but that it will become a permanent factor in the world of light, heat,
and power. If this is not so we are a fatuous people, for with every
fifth man in the country the owner of an automobile and the expenditure
of hundreds of millions of dollars for roads fit only for their use, and
with ships by the hundred specially constructed to burn oil, we have
surely given a large fortune in pledge of our faith that our pools of
petroleum will not soon be drained dry, or that others elsewhere will
come to our help.

In 1908 the country's production of oil was 178,500,000 barrels, and
there was a surplus above consumption of more than 20,000,000 barrels
available to go into storage. In 1918, 10 years later, the oil wells of
the United States yielded 356,000,000 barrels--nearly twice the yield of
1908--but to meet the demands of the increased consumption more than
24,000,000 barrels had to be drawn from storage. The annual fuel-oil
consumption of the railroads alone has increased from 16-2/3 to 36-3/4
million barrels; the annual gasoline production from 540,000,000 gallons
in 1909 to 3,500,000,000 gallons in 1918. This reference to the record
of the past may be taken not only as justifying the earlier appeal for
Federal action, but as warranting deliberate attention to the oil
problem of to-day.

Fuel oil, gasoline, lubricating oil--for these three essentials are
there no practical substitutes or other adequate sources? The obvious
answer is in terms of cost; the real answer is in terms of man power.
Whether on land or sea, fuel oil is preferred to coal because it
require