power: its significance and needs. 
33 
choice in practice has uniformly fallen in favor of the second 
procedure. 
The reason for this uniformity is obvious. It is cheaper for the 
user of energy to rely upon the transportation facilities already at 
hand, employing them in the movement of the crude bulky material, 
than to provide himself with special facilities for the transmission 
of the refined electric derivative. But it does not follow, to be sure, 
that because the procedure so uniformly followed is individually 
cheaper, this course is economically preferable. In the absence of 
railway facilities, for example, it would be decidedly cheaper for 
the individual consumer to haul his coal from the nearest mine by 
truck than to build a railway line for the purpose. Yet no one would 
think of arguing in this case that reliance upon truck haulage is 
preferable to the opportunities that would be afforded by railway 
transportation. The issue between electric transmission and rail- 
way haulage is precisely similar. 
The provision of special facilities of transportation finds its justi- 
fication in the magnitude of the service to be rendered. Were the 
item of haulage under view small in size or restricted in locality 
the whole matter need not come up as a broad problem. But the 
haulage of power in material form amounts to nearly a half billion 
tons and covers the country. There is no default, then, on the side 
of magnitude. Special facilities, too, have been provided for oil, 
the power material next in importance to coal. To serve the ends of 
this large resource a network of pipe lines, thousands of miles in 
aggregate length, are spread over half the country. In this case, 
however, crude oil is not in the nature of a general utility, but serves 
a specialized industrial demand centered in refineries. In conse- 
quence, pipe-line transportation found its creation and nourishment 
at the hands of the large private interests at stake. For electric 
power, on the contrary, there was no such activating interest. 
Though bulking large, it enjoyed a diverging distributive use quite 
the opposite of the convergent refinery consumption of crude oil. 
Moreover, the railroads were already established in coal fields when 
electricity came on the scene; their presence, therefore, offered 
scant encouragement to the growth of a more modern type of com- 
mon carrier. On the contrary, it may be surmised that the whole 
matter may have been arbitrarily held back by the pecuniary dis- 
advantage that would accrue to the established undertaking in event 
of change. Indeed, it may well be that this consideration has not 
been without weight in retarding the electrification of the railway 
lines themselves. A given railroad, under conditions of active com- 
petition, could scarcely be expected to take the lead in giving up 
such a lucrative item as the transportation of coal. It thus appears 
69298°-— Bull. 102—18 8 
