haps, to gain than any other group from the acceptance of a complex, a myth, a fallacy of the inevitable, it is natural that they should do more than any others instinctively to perpetuate and to enthrone it. For a complex, I suppose, is no complex at all unless it rules, usurping reason's throne, making it impossible, while under its domination, to see a coal mine steadily and see it whole.

Now in the coal industry there are unsolved problems. Monopoly in anthracite and cutthroat competition in the bituminous coal industry are the most conspicuous, but do not exhaust their tale. There are also downright stupidities, wastes, survivals, biologic sports, and economic freaks-such as you will not encounter elsewhere perhaps, except in oil, or in steel, or in textiles, in agriculture, in housekeeping, in government, or in social work. The main difference is that in the coal industry they are now fairly well known. The facts have been searchingly studied and objectively set forth. In England two commissionsthe one of seven years ago, headed by Mr. Justice Sankey, and including Sidney Webb and R. H. Tawney in its membership, and another, of this year, headed by Sir Herbert Samuel-have between them told as much as any Englishman except a miner or an operator needs to know, and more than anyone outside England is likely to digest, about the coal industry of that country. In the United States the fact-finding commission created by act of Congress in 1922 made a report which I remember was characterized by one writer, with some apparent surprise, as "singularly honest." Perhaps I should be content to let it go at that. But I am not-quite. I will add that I think it tells more about the American coal industry than both the English reports tell about the English industry.

It has even been said of our report that you can prove anything from it, thus promoting it to the class of literature of which the census, the Bible, and the Proceedings of the National Conference are more illustrious examples. But as to the coal report, that is not quite true. You cannot prove from it that the spread between the cost of producing a ton of coal and the price the consumer pays for it is justified; you cannot prove the sort of bunk that was given out by the United Mine Workers of America, that radical revolutionists, communist agitators, foreign-born miscreants were responsible for the cold-blooded murders of strikebreakers who had surrendered under a promise of safe conduct in Williamson County, Illinois, in the summer of 1922.

But you can learn from the report what citizens need to know about the mining, preparation, transportation, and marketing of coal; what we need to know to make the major decisions, to frame a national policy, to cure the grosser evils of the coal industry; what we need to know in order to do justice between operator and miner, between producer and consumer; what we need to know about the prevention of accidents, the conservation of coal, the stabilizing of the soft-coal industry, and the control of monopolistic prices in anthracite.

But the fact-finding in 1922-23 was not all done by the coal commission and its staff. The industry itself, partly in order to answer the commission's

questions and partly to prepare its case, so to speak, for presentation to the public, its defense against any possible hostile recommendations, spent considerably more money than the government spent. The bituminous coal operators alone spent $500,000-one thousand more than a half million dollars-for counsel, accountants, field agents, and printing. What the anthracite operators, the carriers, the public utilities, the wholesalers and retailers, the United Mine Workers spent I do not know; but however large the amount, it was a good investment. If every typewritten copy of the commission's report had been destroyed before it was printed, or if, as John Lewis recommended, it had been allowed to gather dust on neglected shelves, we would still know more about the coal industry from these self-audits, these searching studies of the coal-mining and marketing business by the people engaged in it, than we know about almost any other large industry.

Some of the facts which you may learn from the coal commission's report will appear very serious, gravely out of harmony with our accepted standards of social morality and economic justice, e.g.,

In the non-union districts of several states the miners do not have the elementary civil liberties: free movement, free assembly, free speech, hospitality to guests. Living conditions, in isolated mining towns, are dreary beyond adequate description. Wasteful methods of mining prevail, in conflict with every sound principle of conservation, applied to limited and exhaustible natural resources. Preventable accidents occur-now the blowing up of a mine, with instant loss of many lives, and now a fall of roof or the running down of a miner by an electric motor, one life at a time, two at a time, but with an even more horrible aggregate.

Coal mining in the United States in 1922-23 was an unsocialized and beligerent industry. Yet in these respects it is American, and not exceptional, unless in degree. Those deaths in bloody Williamson, the Ludlow massacre some years ago in Colorado, the war in West Virginia, are to be regarded not so much as incidents of the coal industry as in relation to our Klan wars, our excessive homicide rate, and our automobile killings. I would not say a word to subtract from righteous anger that our deaths and injuries in the coal mines are so many or our wastes of coal so exasperating. On the contrary, we should be the more concerned about these phenomena because they are not peculiar to the coal industry.

There is no magic in free competition, in private property and contract, in the law of supply and demand, to insure an automatic harmony of economic interests. But then, there is no magic in nationalization either, or in any other such one-word solution. I have not the slightest prejudice against the idea of the national ownership of coal deposits. I hope that we shall not alienate any of the twenty million acres of coal land still in the public domain. I wish that we had retained the mining rights on all the coal lands that ever did belong to the nation. Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, asserting the inalienable national ownership of all coal, oil, phosphates, or other substances which are below the surface and not a part of the soil, not needed for agriculture, embodies, in my judgment, a sound policy. We have not acted on that policy. We have

allowed mineral deposits to pass into private hands. In the original thirteen states this occurred even before the American Revolution, even contemporaneously with the earliest private holdings. To buy them on any basis which the courts and the constitution would permit would leave us exactly where we are now, except as to future increments of value. It would be a bonanza to many coal owners. It would tie up a vast amount of national capital or credit. I cannot see that it would solve a single one of our unsolved coal problems.

The committee appointed by the United Mine Workers at their annual convention six years ago produced a plan with many admirable features, such as the provision for local, democratic management, largely technical. But the committee guessed that four and a half billion dollars would buy out both the deposits and the investment in buildings, shafts, and equipment. The coal commission invited a committee of eminent and qualified engineers to make an estimate of the value of the coal properties of the nation. Their guess was twelve and a half billion. The commission refused to adopt the report and to issue it as an official paper. Why? Not because it was too high, but because in effect it was merely the capitalization of the present and prospective earnings of the coal companies. If what you are interested in is whether those earnings are reasonable, you are obviously only reasoning in a circle if you calculate the rate of profit on an investment figure which is itself nothing else than a multiple of the earnings. But that is precisely what you would have to do if you took over the mines. You would have to compensate the present owners on the basis of their present and prospective earnings; and not Congress, but the courts; not a political campaign, but a long Anglo-American tradition; not a myth or a complex, but a conservative, rock-ribbed instinct would prescribe the terms of the bargain. Not John Brophy or even John L. Lewis and the rest of the national executive board who have so skilfully kept the miners' nationalization committee in its modest place would then, I fear, have the say about what the coal properties are worth. It is because these national officials are realists, because they know what kind of nationalization you would get, that they have been able to restrain their enthusiasm for it, and have rather ignored the repeated resolutions of the representative miners' convention. No, it would be such representative citizens as John W. Davis, of West Virginia and Wall Street, Democratic candidate for president in 1924, or Charles E. Hughes, let us say, to choose from the Republican side one who is well and favorably known in this assembly, and whose views on the expropriation of private property in Russia and Mexico happen to be also well known-it would be men who are regarded by business as sound in their views about property and vested rights who would be called upon, I surmise, to assess the value of the coal lands if we ever came to nationalization.

In England both commissions recommended that the nation buy out the royalty rights of the owners of deposits. The Sankey commission, by a majority vote, but with sharp differences of opinion, recommended also the nationalization of the mine equipment and the actual operation of the mines by the nation.

The Ramsay MacDonald Labor government for lack of time did not attempt to carry out this proposal; but their known sympathy for it was a factor in the parliamentary election, its opponents claiming a large share of credit for the overwhelming Tory majority. The Baldwin government appointed the new commission, granting a subsidy to the operators to enable them to pay the existing wage pending the new inquiry. The new commission reported, as its predecessor had done, that radical changes were necessary and that wages would have to come down. It was because wages were reduced without the changes, with no certainty that there would be any changes, that the miners quit work and the general strike was called in their defense.

In England the coal industry needs thorough reorganization, modernization. Whether with royalties eliminated it can become again a profitable private enterprise, or whether it can continue only as a subsidized or a sweated industry, will be determined in the future. England may have to accept the idea of some reduction in output, liquidate some of the investment, find other employment for some of the miners, perhaps even encourage emigration, as Englishmen have been emigrating for centuries, to the great advantage of the English-speaking world. Such readjustments are not unusual. Government purchase of the coal deposits, to which the government is now committed, may facilitate that reorganization. It may transfer to already overburdened taxpayers some losses which would otherwise fall on the industry or on consumers. It is the reorganization, however, and not government ownership or operation, that will save the industry if anything will: the scrapping of old machinery and methods, better coordination of operations, increase of speed and of output and of pay-the Americanization, if I may put it in one word, of the English coal mines.

In the United States it is not this kind of reorganization that is required. The coal industry is not an unprofitable and decaying enterprise. It is, on the contrary, exceedingly flourishing and profitable. It is rich and reckless. It needs regulation, not salvaging; restraint, not support; encouragement in housecleaning, not the wrecking of a tottering structure. Reckless and rampant individualism, antisocial corporate trustification, the insolence of adolescent strength are characteristic of the coal industry in the United States; but not such feebleness as would suggest unemployment doles, subsidies to operators to enable them to pay a living wage, or nationalization. Railroads menaced by trucks and bus lines, New England agriculture unable to compete with western farms, and western farmers in turn caught between falling prices and rising costs may appeal to our sympathy; but our coal industry, while it has its chills and fevers, has no such acute and alarming symptoms as to call for a major surgical operation.

We come, then, to the third aspect of the coal industry, no less striking than its family resemblance to other industry, viz., that it is basic to our economic life and to that of all industrial nations. Farms, factories, railroads, public utilities, congregate dwellings, and private households all require heat and power,

and their chief source is coal. In these days some 20 per cent of our total supply of energy comes from oil, imported and domestic; 4 per cent, from natural gas; 4 per cent, from water power; 6 per cent, from fire wood; 3 per cent, from work animals; one-tenth of 1 per cent, from windmills. That makes 37 per cent and the other 63 per cent comes from coal. Contrary to a current general impression, the relative importance of coal as a source of energy has been increasing with the exhaustion of the forests, and probably will increase further. In oil it has a temporary competitor, but within ten years, it is thought, our own more productive oil fields will be exhausted, and within twenty years there may be a world shortage. There is nothing on the horizon which seriously challenges the preeminence of coal as a source of energy. Therefore, upon the regularity, the efficiency, the stability, the rational functioning of the coal industry, the stability of our whole industrial structure depends, and, so far as can be foreseen, will depend. The whole nation has a concern-we may almost say, an equal, undivided concern-in the coal industry. Giant power, superpower, means merely its better utilization, linking it with water-power and changing in some instances the place of its conversion into other forms of energy more easily carried. Coal is therefore affected by a public interest. What is that interest?

What we desire is merely that the coal industry shall function rationally, economically, and productively; that coal may be obtained at low cost, in abundant amount. What we desire is to prevent waste, to make management efficient; to encourage invention and the use of labor-saving machinery; to get more continuous operation throughout the year by such means as purchase on annual contract and off-season storage; to reduce costs of production by closing down high-cost mines and increasing output from those which have low costs, superior quality, and short haul to market; to have mines laid out comprehensively, and developed in a logical and balanced way under competent engineering direction; to reduce accidents; to divert surplus miners into occupations where there is labor shortage; to pay wages that will maintain a high standard of life, including savings, life-long independence, and education for the children; to improve the working conditions, diminish the dangers and physical hardships; to prevent friction by equitable relationships; to integrate, organize, humanize the industry. Or shall I say, dehumanize it? For the fact is that ordinary, average, everyday human nature is responsible for a great deal of the friction, the lack of equitable arrangements. It is human to be irritable if you have a headache or indigestion or rheumatism, and miners and foremen have those ailments. It is human to hold on to a hoary, time-honored privilege, and such favors are to be found in coal mines. To humanize by taking into account these human frailties; to socialize by discouraging individual human tendencies, is what we

mean.

Who can deny that anthracite, partly a manufacturing industry in its aboveground breakers, furnishing a most profitable tonnage to the anthracite railroads, stabilized both in prices and in the regularity of its operations, neverthe