It is pointed out authoritatively that, to begin with, and even with our present knowledge, we should be capable of retaining in the form of electricity 25 per cent of the energy in the coal. That is to say, where we now burn 150 million tons, we should use at most 60 million tons. Coal, converted at many centres into electricity, would be supplied in the form of current at, say, ⅛d. per Board of Trade unit. With cheap current available, imagine the growth of electro-chemical processes now in their infancy, the application of this force to all our industries, to all our domestic arrangements, to all our transportation, and to all our agriculture, which latter would be further reinforced by fertilisation. These are speculations, it may be said. But the speculations of to-day are the statistics of to-morrow.
Yet the truest and widest ground for confidence in the coming expansion of our productive capabilities is to be found in man himself. He has progressed so slowly hitherto because evolution has put in the forefront of his nature the wrong faculties for exact research and discovery. His senses, forged in primeval epochs, and the crude fabric of geologic time, came to birth ages before science, thus being utterly out of date for her present purposes. Therefore, the practical man must follow ever more closely and more humbly and more hopefully at her heels; and when she tells him that she will lead him to vaster power than he has dreamed of, and to more knowledge
