With such teaching and training the future generations of England will make the best and most economical use of their coal while it lasts, and will still advance in material and moral prosperity in spite of its progressive exhaustion.
“THE ENGLISHMAN’S FIRESIDE.”
During the investment of Paris, the Comptes Rendus of the Acadamy of Sciences were mainly filled with papers on the construction and guidance of balloons; with the results of ingenious researches on methods of making milk and butter without the aid of cows; on the extraction of nutritious food from old boots, saddles, and other organic refuse; and other devices for rendering the general famine more endurable. In like manner, our present coal famine is directing an important amount of scientific, as well as commercial, attention to the subject of economizing coal and finding substitutes for it.
A few thoughtful men have shocked their fellow-sufferers very outrageously by wishing that coal may reach 3l. per ton, and remain at that price for a year or two. I confess that, in spite of my own empty coal-cellar and small income, I am one of those hard-hearted cool calculators, being confident that, even from the narrow point of view of my own outlay in fuel, the additional amount I should thus pay in the meantime would be a good investment, affording by an ample return in the saving due to consequent future cheapness.
Regarded from a national point of view, I am convinced that 3l. a ton in London, and corresponding prices in other districts, if thus maintained, would be an immense national blessing. I say this, being convinced that nothing short of pecuniary pains and penalties of ruinous severity will stir the blind prejudices of Englishmen, and force them to desist from their present stupid and sinful waste of the greatest mineral treasure of the island.
One of the grossest of our national manifestations of Conservative stupidity is our senseless idolatrous worship of that domestic fetish, “the Englishman’s fireside.” We sacrifice health, we sacrifice comfort, we begrime our towns and all they contain with sooty foulness, we expend an amount far exceeding the interest of the national debt, and discount our future prospects of national prosperity, in order that we may do what? Enjoy the favorite recreation of idiots. It is a well-known physiological fact that an absolute idiot, with a cranium measuring sixteen inches in circumference, will sit and stare at a blazing fire for hours and hours continuously, all the day long, except when feeding, and that this propensity varies with the degree of mental vacuity.
Few sights are more melancholy than the contemplation of a party of English fire-worshipers seated in a semicircle round the family fetish on a keen frosty day. They huddle together, roast their knees, and grill their faces, in order to escape the chilling blast that is brought in from all the chinks of leaky doors and windows by the very agent they employ, at so much cost, for the purpose of keeping the cold away. The bigger the fire the greater the draught, the hotter their faces the colder their backs, the greater the consumption of coal the more abundant the crop of chilblains, rheumatism, catarrh, and other well-deserved miseries.
The most ridiculous element of such an exhibition is the complacent self-delusion of the victims. They believe that their idol bestows upon them an amount of comfort unknown to other people, that it affords the most perfect and salubrious ventilation, and, above all, that it is a “cheerful” institution. The “cheerfulness” is, perhaps, the broadest part of the whole caricature, especially when we consider that, according to this theory of the cheerfulness of fire-gazing, the 16-inch idiot must be the most cheerful of all human beings.
The notion that our common fireplaces and chimneys afford an efficient means of ventilation, is almost too absurd for serious discussion. Everybody who has thought at all on the subject is aware that in cold weather the exhalations of the skin and lungs, the products of gas-burning, etc., are so much heated when given off that they rise to the upper part of the room (especially if any cold outer air is admitted), and should be removed from there before they cool again and descend. Now, our fireplace openings are just where they ought not to be for ventilation; they are at the lower part of the room, and thus their action consists in creating a current of cold air or “draught” from doors and windows, which cold current at once descends, and then runs along the floor, chilling our toes and provoking chilblains.