FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



June 



General discussion of Mr. White's 

 paper was opened by Mr. John Mitch- 

 ell, for years, and until last January, 

 president of the United Mine Work- 

 ers of America. Mr. Mitchell has 

 long been known as an eloquent and 

 forcible speaker and writer upon mat- 

 ters connected with coal, mining oper- 

 ations, and mineral fuel supplies, and 

 his brief paper was the statement of a 

 man who has during his life been in 

 actual, close touch with all sides of 

 this most important question. 



Mr. Mitchell took issue with those 

 experts who state that one-half the 

 coal of our mines is lost through 

 wasteful or unscientific mining opera- 

 tions. He stated, however, that his 

 personal observation led him to be- 

 lieve that fully twenty-five per cent of 

 the coal was so wasted beyond recov- 

 ery through difficult physical charac- 

 teristics of some of the formation^, 

 through pillaring the workings with 

 solid coal for the support of the roofs 

 of tunnels and other workings, through 

 cave-ins, and through the shunning of 

 veins of low-grade coal. Mines oper- 

 ated under any of these faulty condi- 

 tions, he stated, were, when worked 

 out, left to cave in, and thus the coal 

 remaining in them was permanently 

 lost. 



He stated that large coal consum- 

 ing corporations in America pay about 

 a dollar a ton, at the mines, for their 

 coal supplies, while like corporations 

 in other countries are forced to pay 

 from $2 to $3 per ton for their fuel 

 supplies. He said that, while it is vi- 

 tally important to our industrial well 

 being that large manufacturing con- 

 cerns be furnished their coal supply 

 at a cost sufficiently low to enable 

 them to compete with manufacturers 

 in other countries, still, in view of the 

 tremendous waste of energy that ac- 

 companies the use of cheap fuel, the 

 conclusion is inevitable that this very 

 cheapness is as extravagance, and not 

 an economy. Illustrating this point, 

 he stated that the cheapness of fuel 

 led to improper firing and the use of 

 imperfect furnaces, the result being 

 that three tons of coal are consumed 



in creating the power that under 

 proper conditions would be generated 

 by a single ton. 



Touching on the shocking loss of 

 life that accompanies coal mining 

 operations in the United States, Mr. 

 Mitchell stated that for every 100,000 

 tons of coal produced in this country 

 one mine worker is killed and several 

 are injured. Last year, he said, 2,500 

 coal miners were killed and more than 

 6,000 were seriously injured in the 

 coal mines of the United States ; and 

 he stated that in the foreign coun- 

 tries, where mining is most hazard- 

 ous, the proportion of thote killed to 

 those employed in the mines is from 

 fifty to seventy-five per cent less than 

 in the United States. In conclusion 

 Mr. Mitchell said: 



"In our mad rush for spoils and profits 

 we not only waste and destroy those ma- 

 terial resources with which God has so 

 bountifully endowed us, but we press for- 

 ward in the race, sacrificing, unnecessarily, 

 the lives and the comfort of our fellow 

 beings. It seems to me that the time has 

 come when we should stop for a moment 

 and think not alone of those inanimate 

 things that make for comfort and pros- 

 perity, but also of the men, and the women, 

 and the children, whose toil and deprivation 

 have made and will continue to make our 

 country and our people the most progres- 

 sive and the most intelligent of all the na- 

 tions and of all the peoples of the earth." 



At the conclusion of Mr. Mitchell's 

 talk. Governor John A. Johnson, of 

 Minnesota, who had arisen to make a 

 motion, was urged to the platform, 

 and his extemporaneous talk was lis- 

 tened to with deep interest, outbursts 

 of vigorous, applause punctuating his 

 speech at frequent intervals. 



Governor Johnson announced that 

 his real purpose in arising was to ask 

 the Conference to listen to Dr. Charles 

 R. Van Hise ; but the Conference was 

 not minded to let the Minnesotan off 

 without a speech after he had arisen. 

 Governor Johnson said : 



"I have been very seriously impressed in 

 the few hours during which we have been 

 together. It seems to me that if all that 

 has been said is fact, and I assume it to be 

 fact, that the sun of American prosperity 

 has reached the zenith, and that the shad- 



