18 BULLETIN- 102, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
The question naturally arises, why this preponderant inadequacy 
in coal utilization? This is no simple matter to explain: the reply 
that the individual user, whether an industry, a community, or a 
householder, finds it cheaper to consume raw coal than to dispose 
separately of its various values is true, but superficial. That pro- 
cedure is not cheaper for the users in the aggregate; also there is 
no lack of technological knowledge requisite to fuller recovery 
of the values in coal. The shortcoming, then, can not be due to 
lack of desirability or to lack of technique. The default must be 
credited against economic conditions. And since the United States 
in the past has possessed no activities engaged in shaping and stimu- 
lating industrial developments, the responsibility reduces itself to 
the fact that industrial enterprise has not seen fit to go into the 
matter. Either the opportunity has not been apprehended or indus- 
trial enterprise, cognizant of the situation, has not been interested. 
The latter is undoubtedly the true explanation . 1 For this lack of 
industrial initiative a blend of several factors is responsible. In the 
first place, America has been full of opportunities for volume pro- 
duction, and consequently business enterprise has not been forced 
by the stress of narrowing industrial opportunities to turn to the 
far more complex field of multiple, or by-product, production; only 
where the opportunities afforded in this direction were outstand- 
ing and marked has the inducement been responded to . 2 Secondly, 
any given project, on contemplating the prospect, faced a situation in 
which the establishment of production would yield by-products, the 
consumption of which required other industries which in turn 
would contribute other products calling for still further activities; 
hence a project at the source would undoubtedly see their contem- 
plated output ranging off into hypothetical regions not yet estab- 
lished; while a project, viewing the matter further out, would 
regard its proposed position as bearing some resemblance to an island 
in a sea of nondevelopment. The requisite reach of coordination 
was evidently not self-accredited on the part of industrial enter- 
prise. Then, again, the field has opened up fully only of late, so 
that the full measure of the opportunity has not been long standing. 
In addition to these considerations, there has been no competitive 
spur to action. The loss represented in the wasteful consumption of 
raw coal was not felt by any given industry, since the practice was 
universal and the cost under this head was a more or less uniform 
item which was shifted in its entirety to the shoulders of the con- 
1 Industrial enterprise has been interested to the extent of bringing multiple production 
into about half of the coke industry, but here the opportunities are particularly favorable. 
2 As in the case of by-product coking, petroleum refining, etc. 
