Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/175

 Rh as much a source of power as the water-wheel. Thus as earlier sources of power, lumber waste and coal are exhausted, one may turn to oil or gas, or use water power to develop electric heat or grow fuel either as four-foot wood or as peat, whichever shall be proved by scientific experiment to be the most economical.

A Frenchman has recently suggested setting a coal mine on fire and pumping down just enough air to make water gas and then burning this gas as it comes to the surface. If this idea proves feasible it will add untold millions to the wealth of this state in seams which it will not now pay to burn. But in any case by the time our coal is gone we should be ready with our streams already dammed and copper cables covering the land to furnish more power from water than we now use from coal.

So again little by little the unfertilized farm will become less fertile, for in spite of all the care and skill of the Michigan farmer, the wheat product per acre of the lower four tiers of counties of Michigan does not bear the same ratio to that of the state that it once did. It is well worth while, therefore, to see that we are getting our money's worth in buying fertilizer to replace the fertility. It should be worth while to see that we do not squander valuable potash salts in making table salt, or burning lumber waste, etc. Again, as the forests depart, not only should we cherish what is left, but with the proceeds, before we are left naked, poor and desolate, we should plan and develop substitutes, tile and slate for shingle, cement, sand-brick and stone for building, stone, cement and steel bridges for wooden, and paving brick and macadam for cedar block and corduroy.

So too by the time the present iron ores are becoming exhausted scientific chemists should have found some economic method of smelting leaner ores or, better yet, of handling that vast bulk of iron ore, of which we now know, that is made refractory by only a few per cent, of titanium, and geologists may have found for us new ranges, or extensions of the old ones. Moreover the necessary consumption should be as little wasteful as possible. Legislation which is such that 'we skin through as fast as we can and then throw the land back on the state' is not wise legislation. There are, indeed, two parties in politics and in economics as to whether the state should hold for itself these natural resources. But if it be granted that the state should put these in the hands of individuals to exploit, it is certainly short sighted to then so legislate in the hope of getting back again 'unearned increments' by taxation that the individual is tempted or even forced to rush through the development, squandering a large proportion of the resources, in order to get the utmost possible returns to himself.

In the same way the policy of taxation which leads those with accumulated property to leave the state and transfer the money which they may have made from its resources to some other clime and their