"Fuel Administrator Garfield hoped to save 30,000,000 tons of coal and to give the railroads a chance to straighten out the transportation tangle in the eastern states, according to a Washington correspondent of the New York Tribune, who notes that the measures were taken by the President and the government heads 'as a desperate remedy.' The closing down of the greater part of the nation's industries, trades, and business, says the New York Sun, is the 'fruit of the insane, criminal starvation of the railroads by the government for a generation'; yet regardless of what it may cost any individual or group of individuals, the order is to be 'greeted without protest.' A surgeon was more welcome than an undertaker, in the view of this daily, and a disaster of the second degree and a temporary one is better than a disaster of the first degree and a permanent one. If the five-day term clears the railroads and the Monday holidays set the trains running with their former clocklike regularity, the Sun added, we can resume being the 'busiest nation on earth, instead of being an industrial paralytic.' While recognizing that the order struck Utica and all cities in the designated territory 'a staggering blow,' the Utica Press holds that there is really nothing a patriotic city could do about it save to accept the situation with as good grace as possible, and if the result hasten the end all will agree that it was a good investment. The Chicago Herald considered the order 'a tremendous decision' carrying with it a 'tremendous responsibility,' and while the chief industries of the principal part of a nation can not be stopped even for a day without disorganization and loss, still the country is willing to pay the price 'if it is the necessary cost of preventing the suffering of hundreds and thousands, perhaps millions, of individuals and of keeping certain indispensable war and public functions going at their accustomed speed.'"

Copyright by Underwood & Underwood

Harry A. Garfield

As Fuel Administrator during the war he issued orders for coal conservation of a most startling character. Factories east of the Mississippi were ordered shut down for five days beginning January 18, 1918. Monday was decreed a holiday for ten weeks "on which offices, factories and stores must use only such fuel as is necessary to prevent damage."

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THE GOVERNMENT'S EXPLANATION

From Fuel Administrator Garfield's explanation of the necessity of the order the following passage is taken:

"The most urgent thing to be done is to send to the American forces abroad and to the Allies the food and war supplies which they vitally need. War munitions, food, manufactured articles of every description, lie at our Atlantic ports in tens of thousands of tons, while literally hundreds of ships, waiting, loaded with war goods for our men and the Allies, can not take the seas because their bunkers are empty of coal. The coal to send them on their way is waiting behind the congested freight that has jammed all the terminals.

"It is worse than useless to bend our energies to more manufacturing when what we have already manufactured lies at tidewater, congesting terminal facilities, jamming the railroad yards and side tracks for a long distance back into the country. No power on earth can move this freight into the war zone, where it is needed, until we supply the ships with fuel.