That question cannot be answered without first considering the condition of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day.  As a people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources to be inexhaustible.  To no other resource more frequently than coal has this stupidly false adjective been applied.  Yet our coal supplies are so far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred years.  From the point of view of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important factors in our civilization within the immediate future.  Not a few coal fields have already been exhausted, as in portions of Iowa and Missouri.  Yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue to treat our coal as though there could never be an end of it.  The established coal-mining practice at the present date does not take out more than one-half the coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower grade material to be made permanently inaccessible by the caving in of the abandoned workings.  The loss to the Nation from this form of waste is prodigious and inexcusable.

The waste in use is not less appalling.  But five per cent, of the potential power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used.  For example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred and fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the United States is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended unproductively or is lost.  In the best incandescent electric lighting plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal is converted into light.

Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the streams.  Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were systematically burned in order to get rid of it.

The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can never be replaced.  If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the Nation’s future.

Many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more, as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost or not at all.  Similar waste in the case of other minerals is less serious only because they are less indispensable to our civilization than coal and iron.  Mention should be made of the annual loss of millions of dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other furnaces now thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but to the serious injury of the community.  In other countries these by-products are saved and used.