38 BULLETIN 102, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM. 
activities now being carried on in behalf of the country by the Food 
Administration and the Emergency Fleet Corporation. 
But whatever the outcome of the railway issue — or, more broadly, 
the transportation issue, from which the power problem is insepa- 
rate — this country need not wait upon the eventuality before taking 
action. Just as the railroads are not idle during the period pending 
their final disposition, so the matter of energ}^ transmission should 
not be held in abeyance until the question of control is settled. On 
the contrary, the establishment of such a project would require a 
preliminary period of planning and investigation, including a sur- 
vey of the coal and water-power resources of the country wfith refer- 
ence to the demand for power, and there is no apparent reason wiry 
this initial activity could not be engaged in at once. In view of the 
importance of the issue, this is not a matter to be referred to one 
side as an incidental piece of work, but belongs properly as a feature 
in the emergency activities of the day. 
NATIONALIZATION OF INDUSTRIAL OPPORTUNITY. 
Power and raw materials constitute the foundations of industry. 
Capital, labor, markets, and other elements enter into the structure, 
but they do not lie at the base. Neither power resources nor raw 
materials are uniformly available; both tend to be provincial in 
occurrence; but since industrial power is dominantly drawn from 
coal, while raw materials are derived from a thousand sources of 
organic and mineral origin, the aggregate availability is far more 
restricted in the case of coal. In other words, any given section of 
the country is almost invariably provided with raw material of some 
kind, while under the present regime only those sections contiguous 
to rich coal fields are amply provided with power . 1 The geographical 
and political consequences of the localized occurrence of coal and of 
concentrated types of raw materials 2 are obvious and well known. 
The inequalities of opportunity conditioned by these matters have 
always been bones of contention, from the aboriginal strife over de- 
posits of salt and flint down to the action which resulted in the con- 
quest of an iron-bearing province and contributed prominently to the 
epoch-making conflict now raging. 
Discord from this source is as old as human history and nations 
have evolved with the placement of their boundaries strongly influ- 
enced by concentrations of resource opportunity. The North Ameri- 
can Continent, however, provides a notable exception to the rule. 
Its vast area was explored and appropriated before its resource 
potentialities were recognized, and hence its various sections came 
1 On the Pacific slope and in the Southwest oil takes the place of coal in this respect. 
2 The organic raw materials are less significant in this respect than mineral resources, 
since the former are reproducable and not so exclusively focussed at specific points. 
