162 BULLETIN 102, VOL. 1, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 



production to insure revision here that will set petroleum aright. 

 So the focal point of the entire situation is transportation; energy- 

 transmission, with all that entails, provides the key to the vast range 

 of possibilities awaiting the coordinated, scientific development of 

 coal, oil, and water power. 



The procedure, to repeat, is through the agency of transportation. 

 The tools with which this agency will work are the principle of 

 electricity and the principle of multiple production — both modern 

 forces unknown to the old order, neither cultivated as yet to con- 

 structive ends. The directed employment of these forces may be 

 made to indicate the power of modern technical loiowledge so clearly 

 as to create, through enlightened public opinion, a constructive 

 economic policy which may not only stem a wholly unwarranted 

 drain on petroleum, the country's most limited resource, but also 

 shape the whole industrial growth of the Nation into the channels 

 of most effective progress. 



In conclusion, the pivotal importance of the energy resources can 

 not be emphasized too strongly. They are what they appear to be, 

 and very much more besides. They provide the energy from which 

 modern civilization draws its very existence ; they involve the supply 

 of fertilizers, upon which an adequate food supply is dependent ; they 

 furnish raw materials for the production of an enlarging series of 

 commodities, without which a nation is helpless in the struggle for 

 existence. The time has passed when an adequate endowment in 

 energy materials is sufficient; the energy resources must now be 

 brought to their highest point of effectiveness. This matter is too 

 near the bottom of things to be neglected. It can not be neglected. 

 A nation which fails at this point will pass. 



