Then came the steam engine. Its use in manufacturing stimulated the growth of old cities and caused new ones to spring up; its use in transportation tended in the same direction and shifted ocean commerce from the small shallow ports to the large ones with deep harbors. Nevertheless, the general regions which had formerly been most active in manufacturing and commerce still maintained their supremacy. Switzerland, for example, had no coal, but it felt the stimulus of steam power almost as much as did England. So too with the Netherlands, whose ships obtained their coal from England; and with New England, whose manufacturers brought coal from Pennsylvania, 300 to 500 miles away. Even today great numbers of New England factories are located near the waterfalls and rapids which first turned their wheels, although 75 per cent of their power now comes from coal.
The Real Part Played by Power in real function of coal, water, or any other source of power may be under stood from an illustration. Suppbse a score of cabinet makers are at work, each in his own shop. All are making tables by hand, but some build square-cornered tables of undressed pine, others construct care fully dressed pine tables with legs turned in a foot-power lathe, and ' Itl $ , - - a; . h . .4 ....
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0 . 4 a1 . c E 1 o ..,; .1 C° ° a still others are carving and polishing beautiful tables of hard walnut and mahogany. Each does his best, but none has good tools. Now suppose one of the most skillful cabinet makers invents a power lathe run by a waterfall. What will be the effect? The owner of the lathe I will make more and perhaps better tables than before. The other 1 men who are equally skilled will either set up lathes if they have water power, or will hire the owners of the power lathes to do their turning for them. The man who is only skillful enough to make undressed tables with square legs will not bother about the new invention even if he has a fine waterfall of his own.
This illustrates what happened when the steam engine was invented. The people who were already skillful and who had coal of their own soon profited greatly. Belgium, northeastern France, western Ger many, and Pennsylvania were the chief regions of this kind aside from England. Other skillful people who had no coal began at once to import it. Switzerland, Sweden, and New England are among the chief
examples of this type. The moderately skillful manufacturers in Italy, Spain, Russia, and Louisiana imported or mined what coal they needed, hut did not increase their manufactures nearly so rapidly as did the regions where manufacturing was previously well developed. The unskilled manufacturers of China, India, and Siberia, even though having fine supplies of coal, paid no attention to the new methods until the people from the more highly developed regions forced them to do so. The presence of coal or any other source of power has never made any nation civilized, nor has it greatly changed the relative posi tions of the nations in manufacturing or commerce. It has, however, greatly stimulated the countries that were already active.
No source of power illustrates this better than petroleum. The United States happens to be the world's chief producer and chief consumer. But some of the largest consumers are Great Britain, Ger many, and France, all of which have only scant supplies within their own territory and in the regions which they control politically. Although the entire British Empire, previous to the British mandate over Meso potamia, produced less than 1 per cent as much oil as the United States, Great Britain equipped many of her naval vessels as oil burners. She knew that the energy of her people would secure the oil, though it might come from backward regions in Mexico and Russia. Thus the progressive countries are stimulated by the discovery of new sources of power, even though those sources lie outside their own territory.
The Relative Distribution of Coal and rela tive distribution of coal and of manufacturing is well illustrated in Figs. 35 and 3G. The first, of these shows the value per capita of the manufactured products in the various states. The per capita value added by manufacturing (Table 31 K) is a still more accurate test of the intensity of manufacturing, and a map of the percentage of the population engaged in manufacturing (Table 8 E) affords an equally good test. The resemblance of all these maps to the maps of progress (Fig. 22), health (Fig. 21) and clirriatic energy (Fig. 23), is so close that the connection of the whole series can scarcely be doubted. On the other hand, Fig. 36, showing the amount of coal mined per capita in the various states, is wholly different from the other maps. It seems td have no connection with them.