The human significance of coal lies in the effect which the release of its energy has exercised upon the struggle between the acquisitive instinct and the consciousness of kind for ascendancy over the soul of man. Through its creature, the industrial revolution, it has given man command of an economic surplus and set him free to win the good life for each individual and to substitute mutual aid for war in international relations if he will.

But the first effect of coal was not to usher in the good life but to intensify the ancient struggle, widening its stage from pocketed civilizations to the world. For more than a hundred and fifty years, the abundant and readily accessible coal of Great Britain made her the protagonist in the world drama. Her acquisitive instinct, charged with cosmic energy, shot lines of imperial expansion out across the seas to America, India, Australia, China, and Africa. Her coal-created wealth enabled her to maintain the mastery of the ocean highways which she had won from Spain and Holland and to hold it against Napoleonic France and later against imperial Germany. It gave her an economic surplus upon the basis of which the consciousness of kind welded her people into one nation and ended the civil wars which from the time of the Danish invasion and the landing of William the Conqueror had kept each little group within the island armed against every other little group. And it transformed her with jarring rapidity into a country that lived by manufacture and by trade and supported a far larger population than could have lived upon the island if it had been merely an agricultural country raising its own food.

In order that this swelling population might go on getting coal out of the mines and turning out products from the factories it must be adequately and cheaply fed. The place where its food came from was chiefly America. During the hundred and fifty years of England's primacy, America was not only her granary but increasingly the granary of other nations, and the great reservoir for all their overflowing populations. For the industrial revolution in England was followed by the harnessing of coal in France, then in Germany, then later in Japan, and this set in motion among them the processes of imperial expansion, whose friction and clash culminated in the World War.

It was as necessary to the success of the industrial revolution, particularly in specialized little England, that the surplus populations which were poured by the million into America should send back food to Europe, as it was that their factory machines should have coal to drive them. This interdependence was not conscious, not a deliberate effort on either side, but it was an extremely practical fact nevertheless. In order that England might live by trade, some other land must live by agriculture, and during the first hundred and fifty years of the industrial revolution that land was America.

To live by agriculture was an easy thing in the New World, easier than it had ever been anywhere before,—to live and to feed a continent besides. For America is the only great modern nation whose history is written not against a background of famine but against a background of economic abundance. After the first thin stream of colonial adventurers and exiles for conscience' sake had established themselves upon the Atlantic coast, her seemingly boundless domain opened up before the hungry millions of Europe like the promised land of milk and honey. Unlike the peoples of the great Asiatic and European folk-wanderings, they found no comparably developed peoples to bar their way. As they spread from the Atlantic to the Blue Ridge and Alleghenies, then along the Great Lakes and down the Ohio; on across the Mississippi, the Kansas prairies, the Great Desert, the Sierras and Rockies to California and the Golden Gate, they found only hunting tribes or the fading remnants of cliff-dwelling and primitive agricultural clans. These they could meet not only with effective weapons of defence but also with a highly developed agricultural technique.

At first America's planless prosperity had little to do with coal and nothing at all with manufacture. It was a prosperity made up of the sum of her food products, and men skimmed the soil and the forests with only one thought, to make that sum immediately great. Exploitation got into their blood. It was the method by which they grew rich, and when the wealth of the coal deposits was added to the wealth of the fields and forests, they carried the same methods of planless exploitation over into the coal mines. England must still depend on them for food, but they did not have to depend so abjectly on her for manufactures after the industrial revolution crossed the Atlantic at the call of the Pennsylvania coal fields.

After the industrial revolution harnessed their unique reservoirs of coal, the people of the United States enjoyed a degree of economic security such as no other people ever enjoyed. Had they been spiritually prepared, they might have used this economic abundance to establish brotherhood among men. But after all, they themselves were Europeans who had fled from the ancient tyranny of hunger. To them America was naturally more an escape from that haunting menace than a challenge to the good life. Here and there, as in the Puritan theocracy, they heard and tried to obey the challenge. But they were not prepared.

The hungry immigrant millions swarmed across the continent, laying waste the forests, skimming the fresh fertile soil, growing prosperous by destruction rather than by thrift and planful use. They caroused and swaggered like prodigals. They glorified mere acquisition, measuring a man's worth by the money he owned. As they filled the continent, the old world fever of imperial expansion entered their blood. They seized Cuba and the Philippines, Haiti and Santo Domingo. They set about building the greatest navy in the world. After a few faltering efforts to lead the warring nations to peace through conference and conciliation, they threw the weight of their wealth and numbers into the balance and with fire and sword imposed a victorious peace. And they were able to do this in the last analysis because of the enormous power of their coal supply, for coal in a modern industrial civilization means guns and munitions of war, transportation systems to set armies in the field, and the ability to supply them after they get there. America's coal-wrought wealth made her decisive in battle. Even so today her unique reserves of coal make her the arbiter between peace and war. Possessed of the richest coal fields in the world, she holds the destiny of the nations in her hands. For coal has grown to mean food and clothing and shelter, transportation and communication, and the economic surplus and the leisure without which science, invention, art, representative government, democratic education, and enlightened organized religion would atrophy and perish.

Since coal means all these things, and since America owns the world's greatest available reserves of coal, it is obvious that the manner in which her people develop and govern their coal fields is of crucial importance, not only to themselves, but also to the rest of the world. Before the United States entered the World War, her people were hardly aware of this fact; even the momentous experience of the war has but dimly impressed its meaning upon the national mind.

Our coal measures underlie an area of more than four hundred and sixty thousand square miles. They contain almost four thousand billion tons of lignite, bituminous, semibituminous, anthracite, and semianthracite coals. About two-fifths of the world's annual output is mined in the United States.

The very abundance of the supply has made us enormously wasteful in its exploitation, as we have been wasteful in the exploitation of our forests. Unlike the forests, coal once destroyed does not grow again. The most valuable of our coals are in the Appalachian bituminous fields that stretch from northern Pennsylvania to Alabama, and in which some of the best sections have already been gutted and abandoned. In our greedy grasp for wealth, we have left one ton of coal to waste underground for every ton we have brought to the surface. More than one hundred and fifty thousand miners have been drawn into the mines in excess of efficient requirements. Planless overexpansion of the industry has resulted in such irregular operation of plant and equipment that for more than a generation the miners have lost an average of ninety-three days in the working year of three hundred and eight days, and a needless overhead charge has been imposed upon the consumer which Mr. F. G. Tryon of the U. S. Geological Survey calculates at a million dollars for each working day. Planless exploitation has made the most basic of our basic industries the prey of technical inefficiency and social unrest, the extent of which we as a people ignored until they threatened national and international disaster at the crisis of the war.

This trouble might have gone on some time longer undiagnosed if we had not met our first modern national emergency in 1917. Of necessity the weight of the military structure was added to the weight of the industrial civil structure and the combined load was more than the coal industry could bear. It bent and broke under it, and in order to prosecute the war, the government was forced to take hold of the formless inchoate thing and reshape it into a stable prop for the national need. As a first step it was necessary to find out what this great unwieldy coal industry was.

Coal mines are systems of tunnels driven into the veins where they crop out along the slopes of hills, or from the foot of shafts sunk through the overlying strata. These tunnels run for miles underground. Secondary tunnels run from the main tunnel or heading into the rooms where the miners work. The surveyor's diagram of a mine looks like a crushed centipede. The getting of coal out of the mines, after it has been picked or blasted down by the miner, like its distribution after it is brought to the surface, is almost entirely a problem of transportation.

Even in times of peace our railroad transportation was an intricate and complicated thing. It had been repeatedly regulated and re-regulated to bring it more in line with community needs. Among other regulations was a law, designed to give the public the benefit of as much competition between operators as possible, which required the railroads to furnish sidings and cars to all coal mines in proportion to their production, with a preferential provision for new operations. The double demand for coal sent up prices and the rise in prices led to the opening of new coal mines and the re-working of old abandoned ones. All the eleven thousand mines, scattered more or less at random over thousands of square miles of territory, clamored for their legal quota of cars and transportation to market. This competitive din aggravated the confusion upon our already overtaxed railroads. At the critical moment when the essential movement of troops and munitions was straining the resources of the railroads, the sprawling coal industry made their task impossible.

In peace times one-third of our ordinary bituminous production is used to generate steam for transportation, and more than one-third of all the tonnage carried by the railroads is coal. The weight of the coal which the railroads normally carry is double the weight of iron ore, steel, lumber, wheat, corn, oats, and hay combined. The problem of hauling this huge load is needlessly complicated by competitive cross-shipments of coal from one mining state into or across another. The producers of Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana sell their coal in from eighteen to twenty states, many of them coal-mining states. A part of this cross-shipment is necessary, because certain mining states like Illinois, for example, do not produce the grade of coking coal which their steel plants need and which must, therefore, be brought from West Virginia or southern Pennsylvania. But most of it is due to blind competitive planlessness and waste.

Upon this tangled mesh the critical demands of the war placed a crushing burden. The nation's safety made it imperative not only that coal should be produced, but that it should be delivered where it was needed. The miners were digging more coal than had ever been produced before, yet cries of coal shortage went up from domestic consumers and manufacturers all over the land. The railroads themselves resorted to the confiscation of coal in transit to keep their engines running. To avert impending catastrophe to the nation and the world, the national consciousness of kind asserted itself over the acquisitive instinct of individuals and groups, and through the federal government created the Fuel Administration which brought the mines under unified public control and converted the coal industry, for the period of the war, into a unified public service.

From the high central tower of the Fuel Administration, the people of the United States for the first time caught a fleeting glimpse of the coal industry as a whole and of the relation it bears to the national and international industrial life. They discovered that coal bears much the same relation to our modern industrial structure that the water supply bears to the life of a great municipality. When America entered the war, she resembled with respect to her primary source of mechanical energy a municipality dependent for its water supply upon eleven thousand separate wells, owned and operated primarily in their individual interests by thousands of enterprising individuals, with hundreds of separate delivery systems jostling in the highways that needed to be kept clear for soldiers and guns, its people bidding against one another, offering fabulous prices for water, yet parched with thirst.

“Basic industries and transportation,” writes Dr. Garfield, in describing what he saw as head of the Fuel Administration, “were caught in a vicious circle. Steel could not be manufactured without coke, coke could not be made without coal; coal could not be commercially produced without transportation; transportation was dependent upon coal…. Industrially we were in a wild scramble of manufacture, production, and shipment…. It was no longer a question of withholding coal from non-war industries but rather a question whether any coal could much longer get through to any consumer.”

With eleven thousand coal mines in operation, the engines of the nation were running cold for lack of coal.

Created to avert impending catastrophe, the Fuel Administration went about the service of the nation much as an engineer would tackle the job of converting eleven thousand wells into a modern system of water supply. It dealt with the coal fields as a single great reservoir of fuel and power. It worked out a budget covering the needs of the essential industries, the railroads, steel plants, munition factories, gas and electric utilities, as well as the domestic consumers. It made maps charting the coal-producing and coal-consuming territories, divided the nation into regional zones, established these zones as fuel reservoirs, created a distributing organization by zones and states like a great system of water mains. It called the experienced operators and technical managers into public service and entrusted to them the technical problems of production and distribution. It fixed prices limiting profits to an estimated fair return. It converted the miners' union and the operators' organizations into administrative arms of the government for the industry, with committees for conference and conciliation at the mines, and in the various producing districts, heading up in a Bureau of Labor at Washington as a final court of appeal for the adjustment of disputes over wages and working conditions.

For the period of the war, the coal industry functioned as a cooperative public service. The coal budget, based upon a detailed analysis of the country's resources and needs, set a definite standard of performance both for the industry and the railroads, and made it possible for them to cooperate intelligently. The zones served as tools for the control and direction of the flow of coal called for by the budget. Mr. C. E. Lesher, Director of the Bureau of Statistics of the Distribution Division, writes: “In the short period of a few months after the work of the Fuel Administration was begun, it was determined that the requirements of the United States for bituminous coal in the coal year ended March, 1919, were 624,000,000 net tons, compared with a production in 1917 of 552,000,000 tons of bituminous coal, and for anthracite 100,000,000 net tons, but slightly more than in 1917…. To provide coal was the problem of the Distribution Division of the Fuel Administration; to provide transportation was the problem of the Railroad Administration…. The adoption of the zoning system represented the supreme effort of the Railroad Administration to overcome the transportation tangle in connection with coal…. So closely did the officials of the two administrations work, and so effective were the measures employed, that the results surprised all…. The Director of Operations of the Railroad Administration in May, when production of bituminous coal was averaging 11,500,000 tons a week, believed that 11,800,000 was the highest that could be expected in 1918, as the railroads were believed to have reached their maximum capacity. Within a month records of 12,500,000 tons a week were reached, and in July, and again in September, the 13,000,000 ton mark was passed…. When the armistice was declared, New England, farthest from the mines, with an average of 20 weeks' supply, was literally gorged with soft coal, and eastern New York and Pennsylvania, with from 6 to 9 weeks' stock, had abundant supplies…. From April 1 to July 6, 1918, rail shipments to New England were 3,058,000 net tons, or 98 per cent of the schedule of 3,150,000 tons; on September 28, shipments were 6,164,000 tons, or 105 per cent of the schedule for that date. The schedule for shipments to tidewater from April 1 to July 1 called for 11,916,000 net tons. By December 21 shipments were 9 per cent ahead of the program. The Lake program called for 28,000,000 tons of cargo coal; a total of 28,153,000 tons was supplied. With similar precision and certainty munition factories, arsenals, powder works, and by-product plants were kept running, while stocks were accumulated, insuring uninterrupted operations throughout the winter. In the same manner retail dealers were given supplies for their domestic trade. Such results were possible only because of complete control of shipments and the full information on which to proceed.”

This was an amazing and illuminating demonstration of the fact that our greatest national resource could be administered for the benefit of the whole nation. It was no longer a mere possibility, the thing had been done.

It has been said that this achievement was possible because during the war the people had a common object which so challenged their higher ideals that they were able to subordinate their individual and special group interests to the service of the nation, to make their consciousness of kind as a people triumphant over the acquisitive instinct. Again it is said that human nature being what it is, similar unselfish consecration is not to be expected in the sluggish days of peace. But if the historical record teaches us anything it is the essential falseness of this assertion. That record shows us the gradual irresistible spread of the consciousness of kind from one realm of human activity to another as the acquisition of a surplus makes this possible. It shows human understanding reaching out to give all men religious freedom, to assure them equal political rights; shows it asserting human brotherhood in the right to education, health, happiness—and these things not under the stress of war, but in the conditions of peace. The possibility hangs not on any technical inability, but on the better preparedness of the minds of men, on their clearer vision, their ability to see the spiritual implications of their technical triumphs.