MINERAL INDUSTRIES OE THE UNITED STATES-— COAL PRODUCTS. 18 
Of the foregoing three considerations, the first named, that of the 
capacity in which by-product carbonization appears, is a connection 
too fully evident in the diagram itself to call for further comment. 
With reference to the second, the importance of the products to 
society, pages would be involved in any attempt to trace with any- 
thing like finality the influence of the various products specifically. 
The significance involved in the situation as a whole, however, is 
capable of expression in terms of a simple comparison. On the 
one side stands the chimney stack with its all too familiar contri- 
bution; on the other an elaboration of industry offering instead a 
veritable storehouse of treasure to the use of society; a storehouse 
affording essentials in agriculture, pharmacy, photography, tex- 
tiles, disinfection, explosives, refrigeration, painting, paving, water- 
proofing, wood preservation, and an ever-widening circle of more 
specific requirements touching every aspect of human life. The 
magnitude of the contrast is precisely the measure of coal-product 
potentiality. 
Another and more far-reaching significance attaches to the com- 
parison, a significance in which the fundamental reason for the in- 
adequacy of the country’s coal-product developments may be recog- 
nized. The one, a direct hand-to-mouth economic procedure, is the 
attribute of a cruder stage of social evolution; the other, an elabo- 
rately involved adaptation, can come only as the outgrowth of refine- 
ment. The resources at hand awaiting employment in the past have 
exceeded in both magnitude and multiplicity the facilities available 
for their adequate utilization. The consequence has been toward 
preserving the cruder economic tendencies with expression in the 
form of dissociated opportunist industrial activities rather than 
toward the evolution of any true economic organism of coordinated 
industrial parts. Coal-product manufacture, with its elaboration of 
complex interrelationships calling for coordination of development 
along scores of directions at once highly specialized and widely 
diversified, represents the most advanced order of industrial evolution 
thus far attained. Amid the crudity characterizing the American 
economic system in the past such an establishment would have been as 
incongruous and as incapable of growth as a movement toward 
internationalism in the environment of the Dark Ages. 
The dawning of economic consciousness in the progress of a civili- 
zation is marked by evidences of a hoarding instinct. So in the be- 
lated evolution of the scheme of industrial life in America the past 
decade has manifested in the crude conceptions of conservation 
sporadic evidences of a similar stage with reference to the application 
of industry to the natural material resources of the country. Crude 
though these conceptions have been, to ridicul-e them in the light of 
existent conditions means failure to recognize in them a step in ad- 
