This was an amazing and illuminating demonstration of the fact that our greatest national resource could be administered for the benefit of the whole nation. It was no longer a mere possibility, the thing had been done. It has been said that this achievement was possible because during the war the people had a common object which so challenged their higher ideals that they were able to subordinate their individual and special group interests to the service of the nation, to make their consciousness of kind as a people triumphant over the acquisitive instinct. Again it is said that human nature being what it is, similar unselfish consecration is not to be expected in the sluggish days of peace. But if the historical record teaches us anything it is the essential falseness of this assertion. That record shows us the gradual irresistible spread of the consciousness of kind from one realm of human activity to another as the acquisition of a surplus makes this possible. It shows human understanding reaching out to give all men religious freedom, to assure them equal political rights; shows it asserting human brotherhood in the right to education, health, happiness--and these things not under the stress of war, but in the conditions of peace. The possibility hangs not on any technical inability, but on the better preparedness of the minds of men, on their clearer vision, their ability to see the spiritual implications of their technical triumphs. CHAPTER V THE AWAKENING OF THE MINERS With the declaration of the armistice and the removal of the incentive to cooperation in public service which the war gave, the Fuel Administration and its elaborate system of statistical control of production and distribution was broken up as rapidly as it had been organized. During the war, there had been gross examples of profiteering just as there had been occasional local strikes, but by and large the operators like the miners had conducted themselves conscientiously as servants of the republic. To a remarkable degree they subordinated their acquisitive instinct to their consciousness of kind as citizens of the nation whose life was threatened from without. But within a year after the armistice, speculative profiteering was rampant and the coal industry was paralyzed by a general strike. Mr. Herbert Hoover, addressing the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, described the situation as a "national emergency," due to the fact that "this industry, considered as a whole, is one of the worst functioning industries in the United States."