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.