1873-] Limits of our Coal Supply. 361 



zinc, tin, nickel, or silver in the neighbourhood of Birming- 

 ham, nor any golden sands upon the banks of the Rea, yet 

 this town is the hardware metropolis of the world, the 

 fatherland of gilding and plating, and is rapidly becoming 

 supreme in the highest art of gold and silver work. 



These, and a multitude of other analogous facls, abun- 

 dantly refute the idea that the native minerals, the natural 

 fertility, the navigable rivers, or the convenient seaports, 

 determine the industrial and commercial supremacy of 

 nations. The moral forces exerted by the individual 

 human molecules are the true components which determine 

 the resulting force and direction of national progress. It is 

 the industry and skill of our workmen, the self-denial, the 

 enterprise, and organising ability of our capitalists, that has 

 brought our coal so precociously to the surface and re- 

 directed for human advantage the buried energies of ancient 

 sunbeams, while the fossil fuel of other lands has remained 

 inert. 



The foreigner who would see a sample of the source of 

 British prosperity must not seek for it in a geological 

 museum or among our subterranean rocks ; let him rather 

 stand on the Surrey side of London Bridge from 8 to 

 10 a.m. and contemplate the march of one of the battalions 

 of our metropolitan industrial army, as it pours forth in 

 unceasing stream from the railway stations towards the 

 city. An analysis of the moral forces which produce the 

 earnest faces and rapid steps of these rank and file and 

 officers of commerce will reveal the true elements of British 

 greatness, rather than any laboratory dissection of our coal 

 or ironstone. 



Fuel and steam-power have been urgently required by all 

 mankind. Englishmen supplied these wants. Their urgency 

 was primary and they were first supplied, even though the 

 bowels of the earth had to be penetrated in order to obtain 

 them. In the present exceptional and precocious degree of 

 exhaustion of our coal treasures, we have the effect not the 

 cause of British industrial success. 



If in a ruder age our greater industrial energy enabled us 

 to take the lead in supplying the ruder demands of our 

 fellow-creatures, why should not a higher culture of those 

 same abundant energies qualify us to maintain our position, 

 and enable us to minister to the more refined and elaborate 

 wants of a higher civilisation ? There are other necessary 

 occupations quite as desirable as coal-digging, furnace- 

 feeding, and cotton-spinning. 



The approaching exhaustion of our coal supplies should 



