1873O Limits of our Coal Supply. 343 



VI. THE LIMITS OF OUR COAL SUPPLY. 



[gj STIMATING the actual consumption of coal for 

 home use in Great Britain at no millions of tons 

 per annum, a rise of eight shillings per ton to con- 

 sumers is equivalent to a tax of 44 millions per annum. 

 These are the figures taken by Sir William Armstrong in 

 his address at Newcastle last February. As the recent 

 abnormal rise in the value of coal has amounted to more 

 than this, consumers have been paying at some periods 

 above a million per week as premium on fuel, even after 

 making fair deduction for the rise of price necessarily due 

 to the diminishing value of gold. 



Are we, the consumers of coal, to write off all this as a 

 dead loss, or have we gained any immediate or prospective 

 advantage that may be deducted from the bad side of the 

 account ? I suspect that we shall gain sufficient to ulti- 

 mately balance the loss, and, even after that, to leave some- 

 thing on the profit side. 



The abundance of our fuel has engendered a shameful 

 wastefulness that is curiously blind and inconsistent. As a 

 typical example of this inconsistency, I may mention a 

 characteristic incident. A party of young people were 

 sitting at supper in the house of a colliery manager. 

 Among them was the vicar of the parish, a very jovial and 

 genial man, but most earnest withal in his vocation. Jokes 

 and banterings were freely flung across the table, and no 

 one enjoyed the fun more heartily than the vicar ; but pre- 

 sently one unwary youth threw a fragment of bread-crust at 

 his opposite neighbour, and thus provoked retaliation. The 

 countenance of the vicar suddenly changed, and in stern 

 clerical tones he rebuked the wickedness of thus wasting 

 the bounties of the Almighty. A general silence followed, 

 and a general sense of guilt prevailed among the revellers. 

 At the same time, and in the same room, a blazing fire, in 

 an ill-constructed open fire-place, was glaring reproachfully 

 at all the guests, but no one heeded the immeasurably 

 greater and utterly irreparable waste that was there pro- 

 ceeding. To every unit of heat that was fully utilised in 

 warming the room, there were eight or nine passing up the 

 chimney to waste their energies upon the senseless clouds 

 and boundless outer atmosphere. A large proportion of the 

 vicar's parishioners are colliers, in whose cottages huge 

 fires blaze most wastefully all day, and are left to burn 

 all night to save the trouble of re-lighting. The vicar 



