Were we to recover the whole of the benzol content of coal we should not only be able to satisfy the whole of the needs, aggregating about 150,000,000 gallons a year, of the domestic motor industry, but we should be able to meet the requirements of the other industries to which benzol is indispensable. There would be no need to grow apprehensive concerning our coal-tar dye industry and the manufacture of other products dependent upon materials derived from coal. The British dye industry is in its infancy. At the moment its benzol requirements are modest, being approximately 4,000,000 gallons a year. But it is an industry which, given full opportunity, promises to thrive and to expand amazingly, and so one may safely anticipate that its benzol needs will advance by leaps and bounds. Moreover, one must not forget that, as yet, benzol itself is but little understood, because it has not received the attention it deserves from the chemist. If we decide to exploit our coal to the extent which prudence dictates, the wizards of the laboratory will be encouraged to embark upon further original research, and it is quite possible that they will reveal other and equally promising applications for the spirit of coal. While domestic users have not been fully alive to the possibilities of British benzol other countries, notably France, were eager buyers of what we ourselves failed to appreciate. We need not sacrifice this export trade: rather we should be able to cultivate and to expand it to a very pronounced degree. In view of the part which benzol played in the war one hopes that the Government will consider the situation in a more enlightened spirit. The circumstance that we might be able to retrieve a round £28,000,000--$140,000,000--a year should offer every inducement towards compulsory modernization of methods in this particular province. Benzol should be made a national issue. To compel the use of coke, instead of coal, in the household, would go a long way to relieve the coking-ovens and other distillation plants of all apprehensions of glut accumulations of coke, and would tend to steady the output of this fuel, as well as to bring about the abolition of the wickedly wasteful bee-hive oven. Our gas standardization system should be overhauled to ensure the sale of gas by its calorific rather than its luminous value. The country might even do worse than to nationalize benzol, taking over the whole of the output as a corollary to the compulsory distillation of all bituminous coal. As the alternative it might undertake to purchase what the trade could not sell, for naval purposes, inasmuch as in the Senior Service the consumption of petroleum oils has reached an impressive figure from the increasing use of oil fuel, practically the whole of which at present has to be imported. CHAPTER XVII FERTILIZERS FROM WASTES