The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. Purchase of this book includes * trial access to -books.com where you can read more than a million books for *. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COAL CONSERVATION 1. Final Report of the Coal Conservation Committee. Ministry of Reconstruction. 1918. 2. Report of the Fuel Research Board. Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. 1917, 1918. A BELIEF is coming to the fore that in many of our principal industries neither commercial competition nor voluntary co-operation is sufficient by itself to bring those industries into the high state of efficiency which the national welfare demands. It is argued that the long view which a nation ought to take is not natural to individuals working for immediate or early profits, and that however far-sighted and enlightened private management may be from the commercial point of view it tends to ignore those future consequences of present activities, the effects of which are likely to fall not upon the commercial concern itself but upon the nation as a whole. There is at least a plausible basis for this creed, and if we hesitate to take steps to give effect to its consequential demands it is because we doubt the capacity of our national councils to improve upon the results of our individualistic system, and because we fear the inevitable alternative to individual enterprise, namely the bureaucratic endowment of mediocrity. The report of the Coal Conservation Committee may well inspire both the belief and the fear. The enquiry originated no doubt in the conviction that we were not making the best use of our great national reservoir of heat energy, that we were likely to want it badly in a future not very remote, and were tapping it too f