As a
people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources
to be inexhaustible. To no other resource more frequently than coal has
this stupidly false adjective been applied. Yet our coal supplies are so
far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption
shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to
prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and
of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. From the point of view
of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important
factors in our civilization within the immediate future. Not a few coal
fields have already 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.
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