Perhaps no industry in the United States is in a more serious plight than is the coal industry-so important is it to the welfare of our industry and people, that the United States Coal Commission, appointed by President Harding, summarized its relationship to society in the statement:

Every man, woman, and child is the beneficiary of coal.

The overdevelopment of the industry is a matter of common knowledge.

The following is copied from the report:

The fact of overdevelopment is stated most simply and commonly by saying that whereas the maximum annual demand for bituminous coal as measured by production was 579,000,000 tons in 1918, and for the five years, 1917-1921, averaged 516,000,000 tons, the mines are equipped and manned to produce 700,000,000 tons at the lowest estimate, upward to more than 800,000,000 tons of bituminous coal per year.

Among the chief causes of waste in coal mining are the intermittent operations caused by strikes and fluctuating market conditions. The Bureau of Mines estimated that in 1921 in the western states alone 196,000,000 tons of soft coal out of a production of 368,000,000 tons were left in the mines and lost to future recovery: This overdevelopment further justifies the following statement:

As it now is, many operators are on the ragged edge of insolvency much of the time, and only desist from closing out permanently in the hope and expectation that a strike or severe car shortage will bring a temporary flurry in prices, by which they may recoup. Further:

The Commission found that a limitation of marketing area by the adjustment of freight rates to express the true relation of cost to service, with a voluntary division of territory on economic lines was only part of the solution. The consolidation of mining companies, grouping or pooling mining operations, it was found also necessary and recommend that the government should not simply permit, but actually encourage such consolidation, with a view to securing more steady production, less speculative prices, a wider use of long term contracts with consumers, better living conditions, more regular employment and lower costs. The Commission pointed out that consolidation may be utilized to combine low and high cost mines, keeping the latter in reserve for periods of emergency and limiting to low cost mines current operation when the demand is normal. In other words, a modification of the anti-trust laws was thought necessary, as applied to the coal industry.

Does not the fact that the two most elaborate and exhaustive fact-finding commissions, acting under the sanction of two different Presidents of the United States, to inquire into conditions of two of the principal mineral industries of the country, disclosing a condition that calls for modification of our anti-trust legislation, demonstrate the absolute necessity for so doing?

Should a similar investigation be made into the production of iron ore, copper, lead and zinc, there is no doubt that a comparative condition of overdevelopment, overproduction and waste, compelled by the endeavor to meet competitive market conditions, would be disclosed.

Selective mining, so-called, is nothing more than the enforced segregation of the richer part of the ore body, which contains enough metal to pay for the cost of extracting and marketing under the conditions that exist and in the deliberate rejection and irreparable loss to the country of ores that should be worked and that cannot now be made to pay.

For nearly 40 years we have followed the firmly established policy of promoting competition and securing the cheapest price possible to the consuming public. So insistent has been our governmental attitude in this respect that it has almost become a fetishism, and yet yielding to the insistent demands of powerful groups, certain classes, who would most loudly maintain that the doctrine be held to apply to others, have succeeded in being themselves excluded from its operation. Has not the time come when the mineral industries of the country should present their special case before the bar of public opinion and ask for the relief which is not alone urgently needed for the continued prosperity of the units engaged in it, but which is demanded in the public interest as well. It is comparatively easy to point out the defects in our present system. It is far more difficult to reach a satisfactory solution. The advocates of reform differ in opinion all the way from those who preach the doctrine of ultraindividualism, of no interference by the state, to those who believe the state should take over the ownership and management of all key industries.

Between these divergent views lies a wide range of philosophic thought and political faith. The advocacy of radical departure

from basic principles is fraught with danger, and no nostrum offered that is based upon the principles that the purpose of industry is to serve the public need, and the public good is the paramount object to be achieved, can succeed.

There is a field for constructive statesmanship in industry as well as politics, and the industrialist who has but a single eye directed toward his balance sheet is thinking in terms no broader than the demagogue whose concept of public duty is to direct his efforts to catch the whimsical echo of a temporary popular approval.

To bring about the closer relationship of industry to government, which after all is but the administration of the affairs of the people, to seek to dispel the illusion that the interest of government, representing the collective will of the people, and industry can or should be regarded as inimical to one another, is the task to which we should apply ourselves.

It would be ill-timed and aside from the pertinent discussion to advocate any special reform. Painstaking investigation should be made and collective judgment formed. My province shall have been here fulfilled, if the attention of that important agency in moulding the opinion of the nation-the American Bar, as represented by this great Association-shall have been directed to a question that is among the most important to the well-being of our country and its people, and if the study of practical methods of conserving our wasting natural resources under laws which should assist and not prevent so important a consummation shall be seriously undertaken.

BRAKES FOR THE MINERAL INDUSTRY.

ADDRESS BY

DR. GEORGE OTIS SMITH,

OF WASHINGTON, D. C.

DIRECTOR OF THE UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY, DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, AND PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF

MINING AND METALLURGICAL ENGINEERS.

In discussing present-day troubles in the business and industrial world we easily drop into the habit of clinical diagnosis and speak of social or economic conditions as pathologic. Talk of this kind, with its emphasis upon suspicious symptoms and abnormal tendencies, makes us all morbid. As an English essayist has put it, we may thus induce a melancholy temper that simply invites the ministrations of social and political quacks. It is far betterbecause nearer the truth-for us to recognize that our condition is in no sense diseased, that our body politic, social, and economic is suffering merely from growing pains, that nothing here in America is decadent-indeed, that any lapses from staid normality are traceable to the excesses of youth. Our chief trouble, then, is only that our industrial state is still young; it may be that we have been growing too fast.

The growth in the industrial development of our country from pioneer days to the present time has been marvelous. Too many of us, however, take all this as a matter of course-we credit this record of American progress to our American genius alone. Too often we overlook the fundamental relationship between resources and progress-that man is aided and even guided by nature. The fact is, social advance, industrial progress, national prosperity all have their material basis in natural resources. America is great because America is a nature-favored nation and favored to a degree unrivaled by any other member of the family of nations.

In furnishing the needed mineral raw materials to the great manufacturing industries of the United States there has never been any halt but rather a general acceleration. No other phase of American activity can show equal advance. As the decades

have passed, the winning of mineral wealth has progressed from the rôle of a stimulus for Western exploration to that of the foundation for nation-wide business.

In 1890 the Sherman law was passed; since then the population of the United States has about doubled. Since then, too, the value of the annual product of the mines of this country has increased better than eight-fold-from 650 millions to 5 billions of dollars. Since then the four largest branches of the mineral industry, which supply the iron and copper, the bituminous coal and petroleum-the bone and sinew and the energy of all other American industries-have increased their annual output nearly ten-fold as to value and six-fold as to quantity. Such a growth in the volume of mineral output must be taken as a true measure of the exceptional service rendered by the mines of the United States. Not only is this a much larger country than it was 38 years ago, when the Sherman law was passed, but its growing mineral industry has met demands that have been out of all proportion to the growth of the population.

We must not make the mistake of interpreting the speeding up of the mines, quarries, and wells as a special phenomenon caused by the war demand, for, in the mineral industry as a whole, the postwar growth has been equal to the growth for a similar period of war and pre-war years. So long as the supply permits, the consumption of mineral raw materials increases in response to civilization's demands. Agriculture grows only about as fast as population, because the per capita demand for foodstuffs changes in variety only-not in quantity. Mining grows at a far different rate and a rate independent of population, for the demands by civilization for mineral products change in both variety and quantity with every discovery and invention.

This fairly constant growth of the mineral industry would be a matter of national pride, were it not that in recent years the industry seems to have grown too fast. To change the metaphor for a moment, the mineral industry-as well as our other industries is overengined, and those who are best informed by reason of their intimate connection with coal or copper, oil or steel, lead or zinc, or almost any other of the essential minerals realize most keenly the ever-present hazard of the overdeveloped industry speeding up regardless of the curves or grades just