Now let us turn from this well-established nationalized service to one that might be nationalized, and that concerns every housekeeper in the country very intimately. I mean the coal supply. Coals have become a necessary of life in our climate; and they are dreadfully dear. As I write these lines it is midsummer, when coals are cheapest; and a circular dated the 16th June offers me drawingroom coal for thirty-six and threepence a ton, and anthracite for seventy shillings. That is much more than the average cost. Why must I pay it? Why must you pay it? Simply because the coal industry is not yet nationalized. It is private property. The cost price of coal varies from nothing to a pound a ton or more, without counting what it costs to carry and distribute the coal throughout the country. Perhaps you do not believe that coals can be had for nothing; but I assure you that on the Sunderland coast when the tide is out coals can be picked up on the shore by all comers as freely as shells or seaweed. I have seen them with my own eyes doing it. A sack and a back to carry it on is all that anybody needs there to set up as a hawker of coals in a small way, or to fill the cellar at home. Elsewhere on our coasts coal is so hard to reach that shafts have been sunk and mines dug for miles under the sea, the coal not having been reached until after twenty years work and a heavy expenditure of money. Between these two extremes there are all sorts of mines, some yielding so little coal at such high cost that they are worked only when the price of coal rises to exceptional heights, and others in which coal is so plentiful and easily got at that it is always profitable to work them even when coal is unusually cheap. The money they cost to open up varies from £350 to over a million. But the price you have to pay never falls below the cost from the very dearest mines. The reason is this. What makes prices high is scarcity: what brings them down is plenty. Coals rise and fall in price just like strawberries. They are dear when scarce, cheap when plenty.