220 



The Review of Reviews. 



water. Oil occupies only one-fourth of the bunkers 

 needed for coal. No boilers are needed ; three-fourths 

 of the engine-room staiT can be dispensed with ; stokers 

 will become extinct. The Diesel oil motor-engine will 

 compel the conversion or rebuilding of all our steamers, 

 and they will not burn coal. 



It is a rather melancholy reflection 



Us Industrial that the moment when the collier 



Imperial Significance, has achieved a triumph without 



precedent, the industry by which 

 he makes his living should have received definite notice 

 of its coming doom. The concession of the minimum 

 wage will hasten rather than retard the dethronement 

 of coal. As it will tend to the elimination of the older, 

 weaker and less competent miners, so it will tend to the 

 closing down of mines which, in face of the competition 

 of oil, can no longer be worked at a profit. It is as 

 melancholy for Great Britain as it is for the colliers. 

 For our long industrial supremacy has been based 

 upon our possession of the best and cheapest coal in 

 the world. America has long since displaced us, but 

 we hold our own against all other nations. In oil, 

 however, we are nowhere in the race. The United 

 States and Russia possess inexhaustible stores of the 



-<5^?r,rp^j; 



Its Bearing 



on ttie 



Naval Competition. 



liy frnttissitin oj the prtypHetors o/** Funch,"\ 



Mean Profits. 



Coal MF.RCH\Nr (to miner): "Look licre, my friend, I'm 

 against sirikos, I am ; but the more threat!, of 'cm you can give 

 nic, the better it suits my book." 



new motive force of civilisation. We have only a 

 limited supply in Scotland, and none, or next to none, 

 in England, Ireland and Wales. Probably nothing 

 would do so much to revive Ireland's prosperity as 

 the striking of paying oil in the wilds of Connemara. 

 P"rom the point of view of Imperial defence the change 

 from coal to oil hits Britain hard. We have hitherto 

 been supreme on all the seven seas because we alone 

 had coaling stations all round the world. Coaling 

 stations may now be scrapped as useless. Ships can 

 carry enough oil to take them round the world without 

 calling anywhere en route. If they should run short, 

 they can fill up from any tank steamer they meet in 

 calm or in storm. Thus oil wipes out one of our great 

 advantages. And what is worse, it will compel us to 

 rebuild our navy. All our costly Dreadnoughts, 

 which cost two millions each, will be scrapped before 

 they have fired a shot. For it would be impossible to 

 reconstruct them. 



It is the certainty that the Diesel 

 engine will put the Dreadnoughts 

 and the super-Dreadnoughts out 

 of action that partially reconciles 

 me to the weakening of our shipbuilding pro- 

 gramme, for which various Liberal papers have been 

 working with a zeal worthy of a better cause. Instead 

 of maintaining without discussion or questioning 

 the standard of two keels to one, they are eager to 

 prove that we should be quite safe if the standard were 

 reduced to three keels to two — signs of weakness noted 

 with grim satisfaction in Germany, where the two 

 keels to three standard is already being talked of as 

 the normal relation between the two navies. This 

 might be fatal — it is dangerous, in any case. But the 

 certainty that all the capital ships upon which we 

 are lavishing our millii)iis will be out of date so 

 soon renders it less mischievous than would other- 

 wise be the case. At present the Germans are ahead 

 of us in the application of the motor-engine to ships 

 of war. But we have great faith in our genius for 

 naval construction, and in all probability some novel 

 leviathan is being de\-ised in British shipyards which 

 will utilise the motor to such an extent as to effect as 

 great a revolution as was wrought by the Dread- 

 nought, which practiially held up the battleship 

 building of the world for cigliteen months. It is unsafe 

 to play tricks with the standard of two keels to one, 

 but it will be some consolation, if Mr. AN'inston 

 Churchill should monkey with that standard for stcain- 

 driven Dreadnoughts, that he will be all the more 

 iioiind to lay it down as an axiom when he comes to 

 build his new motor battlesliips. 



