EVERYTHING FOR THE WAR AT A STROKE.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 217, 13 October 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

EVERYTHING FOR THE WAR AT A STROKE.

By SIR LEO CHIOZZA MONEY M.x.

THE FUTURE OF COAL.

The rise or fall of nations depend. l ) tar more upon economic causes than upon that crafty animal the politician, or even upon the statesman, as long as he refuses to direct economic powers. The men who made modern England were not those who sat in the scats o the mighty, but the handful of inventors who, by teaching us how to work coal, and then how to appll coal-power through machinery, changed the backward and stagnant England of the middle of the eighteenth centur; into the industrial and commercial England of to-day. Coal is still the mainspring of onwealth and industrial greatness. With it we are fightng this war. Upon it we have to depend for our recovery from this war. Upon the wise 1193 1/ it depends our future. Upon the conservation of it depends the length o*' the period during wh:ch we can maintain greatness as a nation. Without it w<3 should lose command of the seas, and therefore the ability to maintain those sea connections which arc th s solo material connecting links of the widely scattered factors of the British Empire. Oblivions to the real foundation of our modern wealth, our politicians run their little courses and give place to others no more alive than they to the foundations of prosperity. In the middle of the eighteenth-century Engl'.siiinen lived in a country which possessed an undiscovered treasure compared with which the fabled wonders of.Eldorado were as nothing. Out of the discovery of the use of coal has procecoed our rise in wealth and status. We are a coal civilisation, and our fortunes are bound up with the future of coal.

Some generat'ons after James Watt made his first experiments „ith tho steamengine and less than ninety yea.s since George Stephenson, collier:engmeni&n. ran his famous "Rocket." wo arc st:ll found using coal for tliL> greater part clumsily and tastefully. The waste in the mines themselves >'s great; tha waste in use is prodigious. Towns are coated with the grime of unburaed wasted coal for which a high price in life and money has been paid. (Every year, ; n what we may call tin Battle of Coal, at least 1,000 miners are killed and 100,000 more or 'ess seriously wounded.) We know how to do all our industrial work with about one third the amount of coal we actually employ, but we leave industrial captains and householders alifco to do what they please wun the real capital of the country—a capital which cannot bo replaced, a capital without which the United Kingdom could not sustain a population of more than from 15 to 20 millions of people. The coal question h relevant to \\\ our doings. It concerns us whether we are manufacturers or middlemen, workers or idlers. It .is important at all timesj and the greater the strain, upon us the greater its importance.

BIG FIGURES. What 1 want to represent here :- ths, that just as in the middle of the eighteenth century we wcPe on the threshold of a great advance through the liberation of coal-power, so now wo can, if wo choose,make a further great pdvance by ceasing to empio-.. coal wastefully and by employing -it scientifically. Ido not'tlrnk it an exaggeration to say that, if we care to put our handd to the task, we can provide the country with such a spur to material progress as will in a very short space of time wipe out the whole of the costs of the war and vield i stream of wealth of ously greater than existed before the war. Coal reform on a national scale calls for a capital expenditure of about 50!) millions. Before the war to name this sum was sufficient to scare everybody from the held of discussion. It was useless to .point out that capital was pouring out of this country to fertilise places abroad to the tune of 200 mil lions a year. It was impossible to gut attenton to tlie greatest of our needs To-day, when we know that EVEBV HUNDRED DAYS WE ARE RAISING GOO MILLIONS, we may not be quite so easily dismayed. We are beginning to learn the much-needed lesson that tho affairs of 50 millions of people are necessarily counted in big figures it they are adequately dealt with. What does coal reform amount to, l.cm the point of view of the statesman economist anxious to exercise for the people at large the best-known means of exploiting the real worth of the country? Britain is a small island loaded wit'i splendid coal situate near the surface and near the sea . Coal at the pit-head and at other suitable economic points of distribution can be transmuted by known inventions into the convenient form of energy which we term electricity. Tho electric current so manufactured on a large scale can lie again transmuted by known means into light, heat, and mechanical power, and used to perform every kind of work, lrom moving trains to printing a newspaper, from running a cotton-mill to cooking a dinner, from lighting t.Le streets to warming a household. All that stands in the way of the universal ue of coal as electrical is the cost of current, and current is onlydear now because we do not choose to make it on a sufficiently large scale.

HOW IT MIGHT BE DONE. A few yours ngo Mr. S. Z. do Fci ranti devoted his president -n I at the lnst : tute of Electrical Engineers to an examination of this'great subject. Ho cbtimatcri that all the work th-on done with 100 million tons of coal could lie accomplished with on ly CO million tons. The 60 nvllion tuns <if coal lu> pictured as developed l>y a hundred groat generating stations costing 17-') millions pounds, wliieh for,. nected distributing plant and local stastions costing 3l'-"i millions, making a total eap:tal cost of :>i)i) millions. With such a plant, he estimated, electric power couid he supplied throughout the country at as low a prce as oneeighth of a penny per Board of Trade unit. At -lull a price, or anything near it. electricity could come into universal use, abolishing the filth of our-.towns,

Riving new life to our industries, and ircatng a revolution in the lives of working .women, whose household duties would he robbed of the greater part of the irksomenesfi. As to the practicability of distribution, it may be pointed out that already in the world electric current is successfully transmitted over 150 nvles from a power station, and that no part of our country is removed more than 100 miles from the sea. The engineer has done his work. I nc inventor has supplied us with the menus of power-reform. "What stano.s in the wav- Tins—that the matter is 100 big for private enterprise, and that cur govern, ng men do not yet understand the powers, tue duties, and the responsibilities of government.

]+ would l>e a moderate estimate to count thj, value of on all-ekclnc scheme to the United Kingdom ; 'n terms of increased wealth production. ;.t 200 millions a year witlvn t<>n years and at two or three times that sum per annum within twenty years. The I'nited Kingdom might soon attain to a national ineomo of at least 4 IX» millions per annum, and wth it mil versa! health and cleanliness. Our dirty coal civilisation would give way to a new era, in which our towns mijrlit easily become sanatoria, :n the veiv heart of wliuh verdure and Ih.wers and birds could flourish as u. the countryside.

Let me not he told that ltocause of the war we cannot afford this .uiv.t capital investment. If tins war 1- ti lie Kuceeeded by national par.si -.■■: '.' ihr>ii the future is ''lack indeed! As a matter of fact, the cost of the war, like the cost of annani.mts hofore '>>.? war k hen» tfio.-sly exaggerated, and its effects, sis 1 have pointed out ;u:;ni suggested would (juickly ret i.'v lie situaton. It is not merely to [•>':.o\o losses that 1 put the plan forward now I advocated it before the mar. and I sh.-fl nev.T (ease to advocate it as a plain and ne c<-sary rtep in our economic dcvclopmen-. ■