y been exhausted, as in portions of Iowa and Missouri.
Yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue to treat our coal as
though there could never be an end of it. The established coal-mining
practice at the present date does not take out more than one-half the
coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower grade material to be made
permanently inaccessible by the caving in of the abandoned workings.
The loss to the Nation from this form of waste is prodigious and
inexcusable.

The waste in use is not less appalling. But five per cent, of the
potential power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used.
For example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred
and fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the United
States is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended
unproductively or is lost. In the best incandescent electric lighting
plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal
is converted into light.

Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the
Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas
continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the
streams. Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were
systematically burned in order to get rid of it.

The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the
face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can
never be replaced. If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it
might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the
Nation's future.

Many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more,
as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the
mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost
or not at all. Similar waste in the case of other minerals is less
serious only because they are less indispensable to our civilization
than coal and iron. Mention should be made of the annual loss of
millions of dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other
furnaces now thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but
to the serious injury of the community. In other countries these
by-products are saved and used.

We are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal hills
as though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time and
certain to furnish perpetual support for pro