46 china's petrified sun-rays 



and fifty dollars per ton. Similarly in England where heavy 

 manual labour now gets some 10s. per day the real value of 

 a ton of coal properly used is at least £35 per ton. (In some 

 ways the value is even greater, because power plants enable 

 concentrations of energy to be obtained which are quite 

 impossible with men alone). Let us put it another way. 

 An unskilled labourer spends say 50 years of life (from 15 

 to 65) on repetition work, 10 hours a day for 300 days a year. 

 His whole life's work can be done by 20 tons of coal, which 

 consumes nothing ! The coal output of the United Kingdom 

 is about 250 million tons or over six tons per head per annum. 

 Even if only one of these six tons per head is put into* power, 

 it makes the mechanical energy of an Englishman over three 

 times that of the national of a non coal-owning country. 



Without coal or oil, all the great carrying trade of the 

 world would vanish and leave transport conditions but little 

 better than they are in the interior of China. Oil and 

 elevated water can compare in some way with coal, but for 

 many years they themselves will depend on coal-made 

 machinery to use them. Oil is also probably so deficient in 

 quantity that its price will always be much greater than that 

 of coal, and at the best it can but be used as a convenient 

 substitute for coal. Oil will also probably be derived from or 

 used in combination with coal in the near future. The 

 utility of dust coal is also rapidly increasing. Water power is 

 localized and can only be transmitted with loss or stored for 

 transport in electro-chemical " accumulators" which are 

 really an expensive and very heavy kind of artificial fuel. 

 Water would have to be raised five hundred miles above the 

 earth to begin to compare weight for weight with coal in 

 potency. 



China possesses great stores of coal. Even now her 

 output is almost equal to that of Japan, some thirty million 

 tons per annum. Most of this is, however, locally consumed 

 for heating. In North China where there is practically no 

 timber, coal is particularly in demand for this purpose. How 

 much coal is required to heat human beings up to a moderate 

 standard of comfort is a little uncertain, but almost certainly 

 one ton a year per head is not far from the figure. If you 

 consider that in a moderate sized foreign house in China 

 perhaps fifteen tons per annum is burnt providing heat for 

 say three individuals and four servants, it is quite obvious 

 that in smaller houses with many persons, one ton per head 

 per annum can provide enough heat. Obviously at present 

 nothing like so much is used in China. In Shanghai only about 

 two piculs of firewood or charcoal per head of the Chinese 

 population per annum are used in addition to a very small 



