1. Annual report on the production of coal by counties and by producing fields. 2. Annual report on the movement of coal, showing the state or locality to which coal produced in each district is shipped; and the origin, by producing fields, of the coal consumed in each state or locality. 3. Current reports at frequent intervals, showing production of coal, operating conditions at the mines, and the movement of coal by rail and by water to various consuming districts. 4. Occasional reports on stocks of coal in the hands of representative consumers. 5. Annual reports on consumption by the larger users. 6. Special reports.
But while the methods to be used in these reports have been worked out, not all of them are being carried on permanently, the reason being lack of funds. The latest detailed annual report on the movement of coal is for 1918, and it is uncertain when another can be prepared. The current reports are inadequate and the reports on stocks and consumption are issued only at irregular intervals.
Even the annual reports of production leave untouched many subjects of vital importance. We have no quantitative information, on a national scale, as to the amount of coal cleaned; the amount of mine-run, slack, and prepared sizes produced; the mechanical equipment of the mines; the depth of the coal workings; the distance the miner must traverse from mine mouth to working face; the dip of the coal seam; the tonnage produced by long-wall or room-and-pillar methods; the quantity of coal in the ground lost to the nation each year, in the roof, in pillars, because of squeezes; or the quantity lost in thin seams not now minable which are broken and fractured by the mining of lower seams. We do not know accurately how fast electrical haulage is replacing animal haulage underground, what progress the loading machine is making in relieving human backs of the labor of shoveling coal into cars. Of course, any operator and any miner knows of these things in a general way in his own locality, but such scattered, hazy, local knowledge will not suffice. We must have accurate information, national in scope.
In the realm of the financing of coal companies the ignorance of the public is almost complete. We do not know the capital value of the coal deposits, nor the degree of concentration and control of ownership of mines or mineral. We do not even know who owns the coal beds. There is no list of the landholding companies who as landlords absorb in many districts the economic rent paid by the mines working favorable seams. We do not know the prevailing royalty rates, we do not know whether or not there is a soft-coal trust. The most basic of our American industries moves in fog by day and blackness by night.
The social creeds of the Christian churches will remain the expressions of vague aspirations until they are supplemented by the knowledge essential to their concrete definition. Men and women who profess allegiance to the Great Commandments of Jesus have come to realize that the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Brotherhood of Man, cannot be built by fiat or verbal proclamation. The building of a worthy civilization is as definitely an engineering enterprise as the building of the Panama Canal. It demands a scientific procedure and a patient devotion as thoroughgoing as that which during the past two hundred years has gone into the development of the steam engine, the aeroplane, or high-tension electric transmission. The theory of nationalization, like the theory of collective bargaining and the traditional theory of progress by free competition, must each be tested, as the existing social and industrial order must be tested, in the light of painfully ascertained facts, and in terms of their effect upon the individual personality.
For it is only in the light of the truth that we shall be able to build a civilization in which the individual personality may find full fruition. It is only by the aid of knowledge and human understanding that we shall be able to resolve the drama of civilization into a victory of the consciousness of kind over the warfaring acquisitive instinct. It is only by making the technique of science obedient to the Great Commandments of Jesus that we shall be able to build a civilization worthy of a world that moves through infinite space with the sun and the marching stars.