142 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



as our own minerals, from the ever increasing diffi- 

 culty of procuring them, become necessarily more costly, 

 so must our excessive exports diminish, and with it 

 must diminish our power of maintaining our present 

 abnormal mining population. A period of adversity 

 will then probably set in for us, only faintly fore- 

 shadowed in intensity and duration by those arising from 

 mere temporary fluctuations in the demand for minerals 

 and their manufactured products. 



Fourthly, we not only injure ourselves and our successors 

 by thus striving to get rid of our mineral treasures as fast 

 as possible, but we probably do more harm than good to 

 the nations to whom we export them ; for we prevent them 

 from deriving the various social and intellectual benefits 

 which would undoubtedly arise from their being compelled 

 to utilize for their own purposes the mineral products of 

 their own lands. The working of mines and the establish- 

 ment of manufactures bring into action such a variety of 

 the mental faculties, and so well vary and supplement the 

 labours and the profits of agriculture or trade, that a 

 people who wholly neglect these branches of industry can 

 hardly be said to live a complete and healthy national 

 life. By considering our rich stores of coal and iron as 

 held in trust by us for the use of the present and future 

 populations of these islands, we should probably stimulate 

 and advance a healthy civilization in many countries which 

 the most lavish expenditure of our own minerals, aided by 

 our capital and engineering skill, fail to benefit. 



Lastly, I would call attention to the way in which the 

 lavish production of minerals disfigures the country, 

 diminishes vegetable and animal life, and destroys the 

 fertility (for perhaps hundreds of generations) of large 

 tracts of valuable land. It would be interesting to have a 

 survey made of the number of acres of land covered by 

 slag-heaps and cinder-tips at our iron and copper works, 

 and by the waste and refuse mounds at our various mines 

 and slate quarries, together with the land destroyed or 

 seriously injured by smoke and deleterious gases in those 

 " black countries " which it pains the lover of nature to 

 travel through. The extent of once fertile land thus 



