The business of mining coal is dangerous and disagreeable to the last degree. Coal miners, when they are at work, seldom see the day. They go from the night of the surface to the night of the mines. They breathe such dust as never blew in the filthiest street. When a fall of slate comes or an explosion of firedamp, their mangled bodies are all that is left for their weeping widows and orphans at the mouth of the mine. If they escape death by accident, they cannot escape the death that comes from the unhealthfulness of their calling. No life insurance company wants much to do with a coal miner except at the highest rates. No tuberculosis exhibit is complete without the blackened lungs of a coal miner in a jar of alcohol. There is nothing for a coal miner when he is alive but a cheerless existence of the greatest drudgery—and nothing for him when he is dead but an unmarked grave on the hillside. Yet 76,000 human beings thus spend their lives in the anthracite coal mines, and hundreds of other thousands in the bituminous mines. All of this great toll of human misery that the nation may burn coal. If the nation could not get along without coal, there might be some excuse for this colossal sacrifice. Even then, it would be hard for those who might be compelled to make the sacrifice and, if we were to be fair about it, we might have some difficulty in determining who should go to the mines and who should go to the opera. If we were to be fair about it, perhaps some of those who now go to the opera would go to the mines sometimes. But the nation could easily get along without sending anybody into the mines. Water power and fuel oil will do everything that coal is now doing. Please consider the water power question. In a report made to President Taft in 1912 by Commissioner of Corporations Herbert K. Smith, these statements appear: Steam and gas engines are creating in this country approximately 19,000,000 horsepower. Water wheels, in this country, are developing 6,000,000 horsepower. The water power of this country, capable of development, is approximately 19,000,000 horsepower. These statements mean that there is enough undeveloped water power in this country to more than take the place of every coal-burning steam engine. This water power, if converted into electricity, would do everything that steam does and more. It would run machinery. It would light streets. It would heat houses. Moreover, the water power, once developed, would not have to be dug out of the ground every year. “White coal,” as the Italians call water power, is mined by the sun and thrown into the furnace by the force of gravitation. Railroads need not haul it. Nobody need deliver it. It hauls and delivers itself.