In the world war fuel fought, and food, and steel, as well as men. Fuel quickly became as much of a fighting necessity as were the munitions which could not be made without it and the food for whose transportation it was necessary. It was a war of manufactures, of applied science, and the foundations of both are laid in fuel. And therefore fuel, which means chiefly coal, had to be mobilized for war and its production and distribution so managed that its potency could be applied where needed and when needed without unnecessary detriment to civilian welfare. During the first months of our participation in the war and for nearly a year previous there had been a menacing coal situation in which the increasing demand for coal, inadequate transportation and storage facilities and other causes had combined to send prices to four and even five times their former level and to cause uneasiness and dissatisfaction among consumers and in the ranks of both labor and capital. As soon as Congress gave the necessary authority, in August, 1917, the President fixed schedules of provisional prices and appointed a Fuel Administrator for the United States. Before the Fuel Administration was created there had unfortunately been published unauthorized and unwarranted assurance of prospective better conditions in the coal situation which had led many to postpone their usual summer and autumn purchases. When the winter set in, at an unusually early date, with its unprecedentedly long continued and bitter cold and frequent storms, this delay on the part of so many buyers added much to the universal difficulties and discomforts. To all the usual demand for coal and the extraordinary demand due to the unwonted weather, there were added the large and increasing fuel needs for war manufacture, for the bunkering of ships, for the heating of the many cantonments and camps, each a goodly sized city in itself, and other war activities. And with all this increased demand, there were fewer workers in the mines, for many had joined the fighting forces or gone to work in munition factories, and transportation facilities were disorganized by the strain upon them and disabled by storms and zero weather. This was the situation with which the Fuel Administration was contending three months after it began its work. The total coal production of the country during 1917 amounted to 651,402,000 net tons, of which approximately 100,000,000 tons were anthracite and the rest bituminous. This was an increase over all previous production records of more than 60,000,000 tons, but it did not meet the ever increasing demands of the war machine, whose requirements for bituminous coal for 1918 went above this amount by nearly 100,000,000 tons. It was necessary to stir production in the mines to utmost endeavor, to facilitate that production by prompt and adequate distribution and to induce such fuel saving among consumers as would supplement production sufficiently to meet war needs.