If we turn to the trading figures for the fiscal year 1913 we find that we imported petrol to the extent of 100,588,017 gallons for which we paid £3,803,397--$19,016,985. This money was sent out of the country. Even our Dominions did not reap much benefit from our liberality. Turning to the other side of the account we find that during the self-same period we sold to foreign purchasers 30,415 gallons of motor spirit _made in the United Kingdom_, and valued at £1,420--$7,100! Our delightfully unbusinesslike way of doing things left us £3,801,977--$19,009,885--on the wrong side, when really we ought to have shown a substantial balance in our favour. Benzol is not only essential to the motor industry, but it is absolutely indispensable to numerous other trades. Without it the vast range of synthetic colours, marketed by the German firms, could never have been attained. Had Germany embarked upon an economic instead of a military war she could have forced the whole world into abject surrender within a few months by withholding supplies of these dye-stuffs, medicinal preparations, synthetic drugs, disinfectants, and chemicals. This is borne out by the abnormal prices realized from the sale of the small quantity of dyes which were smuggled across the Atlantic to the United States of America by the commercial submarine _Deutschland_. One small box containing 100 lb. of sky-blue colouring realized £190 or 38s.--$950 or $9.50--a pound! Before the war the self-same dye-stuff could be purchased readily for 2s.--50 cents--a pound. By making the plunge along industrial lines Germany could have brought our cotton, woollen, silk and other textiles, paper, paint--in short, every trade into which colourings enter--to a dead standstill within a very short time. The United States of America, France, Italy, and other countries would have been forced into a similar condition of stagnation and disaster. Germany, by virtue of her unlimited supplies of these essentials to contemporary industry, would have been in the position to have supplied the whole world--upon her own terms. Fortunately for us, a bloodless victory to secure world-wide domination did not appeal to the Teuton temperament. The official attitude, so far as this country is concerned, towards the reclamation of the volatile liquid constituent, or waste, from coal has always been one of negation. Contrast this tendency with that obtaining in Germany, which set out to support private enterprise by installing a comprehensive plant upon Government property to win 6,000,000 gallons of benzol a year from state-owned and state-mined coal. The British official attitude is additionally remarkable when it is borne in mind that adequate supplies of this material are absolutely imperative to the maintenance of our national security, because benzol constitutes the backbone of modern high explosives.