power: its significance and needs. 
37 
for which the railways provide a pattern; 1 the realm of power pro- 
duction offers great leeway for the upgrowth of coordinated, but 
separately constituted activities, thus stimulating initiative and en- 
couraging business enterprise far beyond their present attainments 
in this field. In this connection, it is worthy of emphasis that such, 
restrictions as may be inherently necessary in correlating the whole 
fringe of attendant activities with the central enterprise will be 
overwhelmingly offset by the tremendous opportunities created by 
the unfoldment. 
This type of development will place water power and coal on an 
equal footing. In regions where only one is present, that, of course, 
will alone produce. But in regions where both are on hand, the one 
rendering the cheaper service will come into play through a process 
of natural, unhampered selection. Thus the common carrier will 
coordinate the two resources, so long estranged, and lead to their com- 
plementary and balanced development. Adequate transportation has 
always been necessary to the development of resources; it is a trite 
commonplace that no region, however rich, can become of consequence 
until served by proper carriage. This is no less true with energy. 
Given suitable transportation and our energy supply is assured. 2 
The final status of a common-carrier system for the transmission 
of energy can not be determined at this moment. The entire prob- 
lem of transportation is in course of flux, and the special issue of 
power must be cast into the cauldron in which the railway matter is 
boiling. As the railways emerge, so should power. But with no in- 
clination toward voicing a decision in the matter, it may be antici- 
pated that a special transportation service for power, to fulfill its 
proper function, will have to be either (1) an integrated activity, 
privately financed, but under public oversight on the basis of a 
common carrier, and comparable to a railway company; or (2) if 
still closer Federal oversight be desirable, a close corporation, in 
which the Government holds the stock, bearing some analogy to the 
1 Owing to the relative shortness of transmission radius (up to about 200 miles under 
present practice), conditions might arise in certain localities in which the authority 
vested in the Federal Government under the head of interstate commerce might prove 
more restricted than in the case of the railways. These and similar difficulties will no 
doubt arise, and objections to the whole conception may be raised' on this score, but 
technical niceties and equivocations are being cast aside right and left in response to 
the claims of progress, and in this respect nothing of an unsurmountable nature can 
be discerned ahead. 
2 Taking a broad view ahead, we are confronted with the fact that the whole forward 
sweep of electrical development is dependent upon a supply of copper, or some such metal 
of ready conductivity. The copper supply of the world has come under close observation 
during the course of the present war and there has resulted no special confidence in the 
bountifulness of supply for the future. As is well known, copper mining has already 
been reduced to the expedient of working a lean type of disseminated deposit by large- 
scale methods of operation, and a large part of the world’s output is so derived. In 
view of the importance of the property of conductivity, the whole future of transportation 
would seem here to enmesh with mineral resource efficiency in respect to copper and 
with electrochemical advance in respect to developing supplies of other conductors. 
