ENGLAND AND HER RESOURCES.
The prosperity of England is involved in the duration of her coal-fields. The exhaustion of her mines must sap the foundation of her strength. The subject engages the attention of her people; and all available means are taken to economize this great and primary source of her prosperity and power.
It is estimated by the staticians of Great Britain, that their available supply of coal will be exhausted, under the present rate of consumption and increase, in 300 years from the present time.
A rather fanciful writer—the author of a little English book entitled "Our Coal and Our Coal-Pits"—thus expresses himself:— "Without coal our steam-power would be annihilated, and with that our prosperity as a nation, and possibly our supremacy. Our steam-engines would rust unused, for lack of suitable fuel, our steam-vessels would be dismantled and decaying in dock, and all our processes of manufacture would be deteriorated; and the future historian of the revolutions of empires would date the decline and fall of the vast dominions of Britain from the period when her supplies of mineral fuel were exhausted and her last coal-field worked out.
"An ancient writer has drawn a picture of the exiled Marius sitting on the ruins of Carthage and musing and mourning in proud grief. A modern historian has drawn an equally striking picture of a New Zealander sitting and musing on the ruins of London at the debris of the fallen St. Paul's. It has been reserved for the author of this book to conceive the picture of some one of his lineal posterity sitting on the top of the ruins of a great but exhausted New-Castle colliery, and mourning and moralizing over the fate of fallen Britain. Should such a picture ever be drawn, its subject will be more pathetic and powerful than that of proud Marius or the feathered New Zealander."