THE PASSING OF COAL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14931, 2 March 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE PASSING OF COAL.

BY TOHUNGA.

About it million men in the Old Country are talking of knocking off coalmining for a few days or weeks or months—until, in I short, they tiro guaranteed about threo half-crowns for every eight-hour shift they spend, in the bowels of the earth. Whether this is unreasonable or not we may well leave it to the. parties concerned, having quite enough troubles of our own without hunting round for strange worries. What we may hope, however— somewhat interested ourselves in the coal question— is that some day the miners will leave the , coal pits, not for a few days but for ever and ever. A lecturer recently expressed the opinion that in a few more years our children would be abusing us for having wasted the irreplaceable and limited coal supply of the world. Similarly, titty years ago, a lecturer might have denounced the waste of whales, and declared that a world sitting in darkness would be. abusing those who had used sperm oil ?o extravagantly. As ft matter of fact, coal is a most barbaric fuel, just aa steam is a very semi-civilised i motive power. In a hundred years it will ; probably not matter to the world whether J thcro are any coal measures left or not. If there are they will almost certainly be I unworked, excepting perhaps in China or Japan or India — labour is too dirt cheap to be worth replacing by machinery. i Our children will wonder, not at our wasting of coal, but at our wasting of labour in its inefficient burning and at continued using of coal after it could so easily have been dispensed with. The age of coal is passing away, though too slowly for the change to bo noticed by tbo industry. It would bo unwise to say that we owe nothing whatever to Coal, | but it is really surprising how little we owe, and it is quite possible that we may owe nothing whatever, excepting the giving of a twist to civilisation and civilised methods, which only time can show was for our advantage. The world was a brighter and better world before coal and steam—which depends on coal; it is becoming brighter and better and more huj man and more livable as we get rid of i coal and steam, and return to the use of j the constant forces of Nature. Even, mine- . ral oil is not on the main path of human progress, for any civilisation built on oil j would collapse with the exhaustion of the wells. The winds that always blow, the rivers that ever flow, the tides that never cease to swing and swell, the electrical energy, which may bo won directly from j the mysterious laboratories of Space, the j sun heat which inspires all life, these are j obviously the only permanent and reliable sources of machine and lighting and heat- • ing powers. 1 Mechanical arts developed enormously before coal and steam and without coal and steam, Holland pumps itself dry without the aid of a single stoker and without fouling the atmosphere with ugly smoke- ' fogs. The famous tea-clippers ran round the world at a pace which has only re- ; cently been equalled by the fastest j steamers. The greatest sawmills in the | world never burnt a pound of coal. WindI mills and watermills were long the backbone of industrialism, and are steadily re- | gaining the place from which coal 'temj porarily dislodged them. The oil engine is ! already displacing the steam engine— and the oil engine itself is an exotic; everybody knows that when once an economical 'storage battery is invented, electricity will have a clear run against both of them. Waihi will soon be relying on waterpower. It is merely a question of time when every railway and every tram line in New Zealand will be driven from the same source. In a hundred years electrical trunk wires will net the entire civilised world; the cook will boil eggs, the homo will be warmed, the plough-gear will be charged by the touching of a button. Coal has had its uses, presumably, but Lord Kelvin once pointed out that more water power ran to waste over the weirs .of; the Thames locks than would provide all the power needed in London, that in the sea arms which fretwork.the British coasts the tides exerted more power than would supply a dozen industrial Englands, that on the calmest days the hill tops are swept by the horse teams of the winds. There is no heat like the heat which can be developed by an electric furnace, no motive power so illimitable as that which might be generated by dynamos, no light so intenso as that which might be projected from an electric lamp. To-day, and for many years to come, coal will have its place; steam may bo a great motor, gas will certainly be a popular illuminant and fuel— the Age of Coal is passing nevertheless, and will have been forgotten long before the coal measures are exhausted. And who will regret it? Does a man breathe who will waste a kindly thought on the crudest and ugliest of all power-making materials. Certainly, lihe steamship is a majestic structure, "and her engine-room one of the j inspiring sights— but her stokehold is not. j It is the engine that men love, in that queer masculine fashion that passes the love of women. The sweep of the great rods, the thrust of the wondrous gearing, the resistless play of the co-ordinating pieces, the pulsing of the giant thing called by puny man to his aid and chained to his service. Tho engine will last, and grow, but the force that drives it will come clean and pure from Nature's living breast, not be drawn from her dead bones. Men made "in the image of God" will no longer toil like gnomes in the bowels of the earth or like demons before Satanic fires. The electrician will then do for us what the grimy miner does now. Humanity will win its powers from wind and water, sun heat and earth movement, and will no more regret coal than wo now regret the cannibal feast. The sailing vessel was a lovely thing, as no coal-driven steamer can ever be. for she was compelled to fit herself to conditions that exist, as the coal steamer i= compelled to tit herself to conditions that are gone. People who depend on coal are parasitic, while those who depend on wind and water, fresh, air, and God's sunshine, are independent entities, growing with the ages and changing with the changing of God's world. The whole'coal business is monstrous and inhuman. It is worse than Egyptian. It is abysmal. It links us with the , carboniferous period and with the times when the highest forms of life crept and crawled or flapped or waddled amid shiny morasses and pestiferous air. If civilisation had been compelled to stay in it tho end would have come soon. That we are passing slowly from it into smokeless skies and I cleanly forces is among the hopeful signs. Coal and steam have centralised nations I in an inhuman way. They have drawn I half our populations in the older lands to hideous streets where the air is stifling and ' men learn to hate tho nation that gives them such a living. They have given commercial and industrial preponderance to districts which are least suited to the national development, and have made tho dull and patient endurance of ignoble and depressing toil an essential virtue of those who would survive. If wo could only exhaust tho coal measures to-morrow, if such a demand could be created that every coal mine from Greenland to Greymouth would bo worked with such feverish energy that in ten yeans every ounce of coal would bo worth " its weight in gold, civilisation would suddenly realise that it had shaken off a ghastly incubus, a iiolemn "Te .Deum" would* be chanted in the hearts of men. For we should turn again to the laboratories of tho high gods, to the waters that come leaping down with offers of service in their white outstretched hands, to the wholesome winds that may kill us but never foul us, to the tides that are like the pulse-beating of the Eeternal, to the sun that shines and to the invisible fire that comes, we know not whence and goes we. know-not whither.