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stabilizing employment, the problems of getting coal out and competing with other fuels, which by this time had begun to catch up with them as other fuels had come into the market - were ever present. Oil was seen as being of importance. The coking process was crowding out straight coal. The utilization of water power as a substitute for coal power in the production of electric power had given them problems to think about that they didn't think they could cope with.

The exhaustion of old mines and the increasing cost of operating those mines which had once been good was, of course, a world-wide problem in coal. There was a report by the English Committee of Parliament that made an investigation of the coal situation in England. It was a Parliamentary “Blue Book” report just before the First World War - 1910-11, in there somewhere. It's well worth reading. It's a very dramatic affair. They held the hearings eventually in the King's Robing Room in Parliament. The hearings were very dramatic as they pressed these owners to state on what basis their claims to enormous coal mining areas rested. In England the owner never operates the coal mine. He owns it and then rents it out and collects a royalty.

The same conditions that are described in that English investigation of the exhaustion of once good mining areas and the consequent losses on them, with the necessity for