"But war's demands mount so rapidly that even with full speed ahead production can not make the pace. _A fuel deficit can be averted only by the most intensive conservation._ Conservation, economy, savings, sacrifice must fill the gap between the possible increase of production and the greater increase of demand. If every user of coal will join the army of fuel conservationists, realizing that the need for steel to carry on this war is practically unlimited and that every ton saved means an additional five hundred pounds of steel, there is prospect--the figures show it--that the work of the miners will not be in vain. Our increased production, plus conservation, the Fuel Administration believes, can furnish the coal, and hence the steel needed for the war, and still leave none of our people cold." SIDE ISSUES OF FUEL CONTROL Economizing coal involved all kinds of unexpected side issues. As an illustration of the far extended reach of the Fuel Administration there was the example of the skip-stop plan in street railway traffic enforced by the Federal administration. A writer in the Chicago _Engineering and Contracting Journal_ suggested, September 4, 1918, that the Government should adopt and extend the policy of compelling individuals and corporations to use economic methods and machines: "Conceive, if you can, what could be accomplished in America in the way of increased productivity and economy if our Federal Government had the authority to make every individual and every company adopt any method or device that had been proved to be economic. No engineer acquainted with the application of the principles of the science of management can doubt that if the universal adoption of those principles could be forced upon producers in general, this nation could increase its productivity fully 25 per cent. That would alone add more than twelve million dollars annually to the national income. But that is not all. The application of the principles of the science of management is only a fraction of the total enginery at our disposal. We have literally countless labor and material-saving machines and appliances that are scarcely used, although many of them are generations old. Does this sound incredible? Certainly not to any engineer who has a wide acquaintance with the literature of engineering.