Gold Hill daily news. [volume] (Gold Hill, N.T. [Nev.]) 1863-1882, 1865-10-13
Power of England on the wane

Some countries, says the London Spec
tator, have been abandoned and renewed,
witness the wonderful structures lying
desolate amid the jungles of Cambodia,
and the artistic temples lying in heaps OF
ruin amid the forests of Yucatan, and why
not all: That is mere speculation !; but it
is not speculation to say that there will be
immense transfers of civilization, that
England, for example, will in all human
probability lose much of her pre-eminence
in manufactures, that unless science can
make a great leap forward, the exhaustion
of heat-givins material will occur here.
Wood. as q fuel competent to sustain
manufactures, has disappeared from among
US, and coal is rapidly going too. Mr..
Jcvons, lecturer TO the Owens College in
Manchester, who has devoted years to the
inquiry, reports his conclusions, conclu-
sions supported by figures which, wild as
they may appear TO those who have never
reflected on the subject, seem to us almost
unauswerable. To prove them, we must
republish his book, but the steps which
he considers proved can be easily summa-
rized. He holds as a demonstrable fact
that coal cannot be raised by any known
appliances or probable improvement Of
appliances from q depth of more man
1000 feet below the level of the sea, or
10000 feet below the deepest existing
mine; and that the quantity of coal now
existing above that depth is eighty-three
thousand millions of tons. The existing
consumption is at the rate of eighty-three
millions of tons a year, and, if it did not
increase, the supply would last with an
increasing cost nearly a thousand years.
But unfortunately it does increase with
the development of population and manu-.
features at a startling rate, namely. three
and a half per every year for the last
eighty years. Surprising that rate to
continue, and the tendency is to
increase very much quicker than con-
sumption would, in 1861, be at the
rate of 1907 millions of tons a year, and
by that time the whole existing deposit Of
coal will have been consumed. That rise
in consumption is, however, impossible,
as with exhaustion would come the all
powerful check Of rising price, but this
only means that the check to our progress
must become perceptible considerably
within a century from the present time,
that the cost Of fuel must rise, perhaps
within q lifetime, to a rate threatening our
commercial and manufacturing suprem-
acv, and the conclusion is inevitable that
our present happy progressive condition is
a thing Of limited duration" In short,
the indefinite duration of English pro-
g~ressive development, which is based upon
a boundless supply of coal close to the
iron fields and seats Of manufactures,
must in about q century stop. "Suppose
our progress to be checked within half a
century, yet by that time our consump-
ton will probably be four times what it
now is there is nothing impossible or i'm
probable in this it is a very moderate
supposition. considering that our con-
sumption has increased eight-fold in the
last sixty years.
But how shortened and darkened will the
prospect Of the country appear with mines
already deep, fuel dear, and yet a high
rate of consumption to keep up if we are
not to r~etrograde." There need not be
positive retrogrcssion for years after that,
| but the power Of limitless progress will
pass away from Great Britain and be
transferred to the localities where coal is
still on the spot in its old abundance, i. G.,
to the North American fields. That, sup
posing coal to continue the one artificial
heat-giver, is as certain as any result in
multiplication. Science may Of course
long before that have arrested the on
sumption-may, for instance, have dis
covered a light infinitely superior to
lighted coal smoke-we seem on the brink
of that, a motor cheaper and more power
full than steam, and a smelling contrivance
simpler and hotter than coal fire, but that
is as yet an assumption, and even if a cor.
rect one. the new discovery u be one
the use of which will not be limited by
locality, and the special advantage Of Eng
land among the nations of the world must
pass away.