Fuel and steam-power have been urgently required by all mankind. Englishmen supplied these wants. Their urgency was primary and they were first supplied, even though the bowels of the earth had to be penetrated in order to obtain them. In the present exceptional and precocious degree of exhaustion of our coal treasures, we have the _effect_ not the _cause_ of British industrial success. If in a ruder age our greater industrial energy enabled us to take the lead in supplying the ruder demands of our fellow-creatures, why should not a higher culture of those same abundant energies qualify us to maintain our position and enable us to minister to the more refined and elaborate wants of a higher civilization? There are other necessary occupations quite as desirable as coal-digging, furnace-feeding, and cotton-spinning. The approaching exhaustion of our coal supplies should therefore serve us as a warning for preparation. Britain will be forced to retire from the coal trade, and should accordingly prepare her sons for higher branches of business,—for those in which scientific knowledge and artistic training will replace mere muscular strength and mechanical skill. We have attained our present material prosperity mainly by our excellence in the use of steam-power; let us now struggle for supremacy in the practical application of brain-power. We have time and opportunity for this. The exhaustion of our coal supplies will go on at a continually retarding pace—we shall always be approaching the end, but shall never absolutely reach it, as every step of approximation will diminish the rate of approach; like the everlasting process of reaching a given point by continually halving our distance from it. First of all we shall cease to export coal; then we shall throw up the most voracious of our coal-consuming industries, such as the reduction of iron-ore in the blast-furnace; then copper-smelting and the manufacture of malleable iron and steel from the pig, and so on progressively. If we keep in view the natural course and order of such progress, and intelligently prepare for it, the loss of our coal need not in the smallest degree retard the progress of our national prosperity. If, however, we act upon the belief that the advancement of a nation depends upon the mere accident of physical advantages, if we fold our arms and wait for Providence to supply us with a physical substitute for coal, we shall become Chinamen, minus the unworked coal of China.