The Challenge of Power
Scientists tell us that the energy poured by the sun on the Desert of Sahara in a single day exceeds by fourfold the energy stored in the annual production of all the coal fields in the world. They dream of a time when the radiant energy of the sun will be captured and turned to the uses of man. Then the wheels of our myriad machines will spin with the sun and the stars. In the soft whirr of their motors men will hear the music of the spheres.
When that time comes, will it signal the triumph of man's will over nature, the end of the brute struggle with hunger? Will it find our ideals of cooperation, service, and brotherhood ripe for practical application? Or will it mark a new intensification of the exploitation of man by men, of the clash of groups for power, of international wars for possession? Shall we have the spiritual capacity to match our technical achievement? Shall we know what we mean when we pray Thy Kingdom Come on Earth as IT IS in Heaven?
That prayer was old on the lips of men when a comparable gift was discovered. During ages without number the shifting seas and the slow-moving mountains had pressed down the sun's vintage in the coal beds of the earth. Less than two centuries ago the steam engine harnessed coal to the looms of England. With coal came iron and steel, and with steel and steam came the industrial revolution, its factories massed in cities, its railroads weaving manufacturing centers together, its steel ships and cables and telegraph wires unfolding and integrating the economic life of the world. In western Europe especially it converted an age-long economic deficit into an economic surplus. For the first time in human history it brought the possibility of the good life to every man's door. But it found men spiritually unprepared. The ancient bread hunger was still upon them. As in the tribal days men warred upon one another for food, so now they warred upon one another for coal and the incredible spawn of coal. For coal means food, clothing, houses, ships, railroads, newspapers, chemicals, and guns. With the coming of coal and coal-driven machinery the earth and the fullness thereof was unlocked for the service of man. There was not only the possibility of the good life for each but also of a noble, well-ordered civilization for all. But instead of establishing civilization on foundations of mutual aid, service, and brotherhood, men turned their cities into shambles of childhood, poverty was embittered, civil strife in mine, mill, and factory became endemic, wars on an unprecedented scale engaged nations and groups of nations. The World War and the famine and widespread desolation that followed gave tragic evidence of our spiritual unpreparedness.
Yet it would be as falsely sentimental to set up a golden age as a heightening background for the evils that came with coal as it would be to ignore or gloze over those evils. Economic insecurity, poverty, disease, wars, and blighted childhood are as old as human existence. The world is a better, richer, more vibrant, and thrilling abode since coal came than it was before. The indictment of our coal age can be justly based, not upon what it has destroyed, but rather upon what it has missed,—upon its spiritually blind, its bungling and inadequate use of a gift more magnificent than any allotted to man since grain was first sown to the harvest and ground at a mill. An indictment that involves all mankind is hardly an indictment at all. It is rather a confession of our common human limitations, a recognition of the tragic circumstances of our spiritual growth. It will be answered when we as individuals and nations and groups of nations, set ourselves to turn the wisdom of experience to account in building a civilization worthy of a world that moves through infinite space with the sun and the marching stars.
CHAPTER II
The Coming of Coal
The making of all the coal in the earth began when the sun hurled the earth into its orbit. Before there were vertebrates in the sea, or animals, or plants of any kind on land—fully one hundred and fifty million years ago—low foldings and depressions appeared on the earth where the Appalachian Mountains now are. Following the lines of what has become the Atlantic, vast ridges appeared. Ages later swamp forests grew in the intervening valleys, bearing and shedding the spores and thick, somber leaves still traceable in the lower carboniferous strata. In that time, a shallow sea covered what is now the Mississippi Valley in whose sludgy shoals more swamp forests grew. Along the inland seas and ocean beaches of Europe and Asia, the tides, the winds, and rains slowly spread the clay for still other swamp forests. When the lush plant life of the carboniferous age came out of the marshy ooze, it spread along the edges of the land, crept up the long estuaries between the rising and sinking hills and on into the landlocked seas. The rocks beneath and about these carboniferous forests rose and sank age through age, cycle through cycle. When they sank slowly, tangled morasses formed; when they sank rapidly, the inrushing water killed the plants and buried them under a covering of silt. When the rocky strata rose again, the swamp forests crept back to their old places, and again bore and shed their fernlike leaves, their spores and great scarred trunks upon the oozy bottom now scores or hundreds of feet above the level on which their ancestors had stood ages before.