e destroyed or left in the ground beyond the reach of future
use. Up to this time the actual amount of coal used has been over
7,500,000,000 tons; the waste 9,000,000,000 tons.

Experts estimate that in the beginning there were somewhere about
2,000,000,000,000 tons of available coal, so that we have now, with all
our wastefulness, used less than two per cent. of our original
inheritance. But we must remember that in the ten years closing with
1905, we used as much as during the entire history of our country up to
that time, and the rate of consumption is still increasing. In 1907 the
amount mined was about 450,000,000 tons. Counting on a continuance of
the same rate of increase, in 1917 it will be 900,000,000 tons a year,
and if the same conditions should continue for twenty years we should be
using and wasting in one year as much as we have used in all our history
up to the present time. By that time more than one-eighth of our
original supply will be gone, and in less than two hundred years nearly
all of it will have for ever disappeared.

That is a long time to look forward, but a short time in looking
backward. It carries us back only to the childhood of Benjamin Franklin
and others prominent in our early history; and if this nation could look
forward to only an equal period of prosperous development in the future
the time would seem short indeed.

But the danger of our coal supply becoming exhausted lies not so much in
its present use as in the rapid increase in its consumption. Fifty years
ago (about the time of the Civil War) we were using an amount equal to a
little more than a quarter of a ton for every man, woman and child then
in the country. Now the rate is five tons, or twenty times that amount,
for each person of all our greatly increased population.

The Pittsburg Coal Company owns about one-seventh of the great
Pennsylvania anthracite fields. From the amount it is now mining each
year and judging from the amount of coal it is able, with present
methods, to reclaim from an acre of coal land, the estimate is made that
this Pittsburg field will be exhausted in ninety-three years. A like
comparison of all the eastern fields indicates that by the beginning of
the next century there will be practically no cheap fuel left in the
entire Appalachian basin.

The Geological Survey reports that, taking into account the available
coal which can be reached and mined by present methods, and supposing
the present