Later, the coal in other lands has gradually come to be used. Through France, Germany, Austria and Russia runs the European coal belt, where ages ago, to be reckoned by hundreds of millions of years, on the hot, swampy, slowly-sinking shore of an ancient con tinent, great reedy trees grew in rank profusion, whose remains, sealed undecayed between layers of mud and sand brought by river or ocean, are now called on to give up that energy which the chemistry of life stored within their growing tissues. Not everywhere even on this belt was coal formed, and even when formed it has in many places been entirely removed owing to folding and erosion during the long ages which have passed. In other areas, too, coal of a later date is found, but this is for the most part of less importance both in quantity and quality.
According to varying circumstances, then, these states have in varying degrees been able to utilize the energy thus provided. In France this coal is found only in the north-east, where the coal belt bends round and crosses below the Straits of Dover to connect with the Kent coalfield long known but only lately used. Some coal does indeed exist on the southern highlands, but even so the total amount is not great, and, while reap ing the advantages which knowledge of improved methods gives to a people of taste and skill who are able to import coal from other lands, France remains predominantly agricultural.
Germany is somewhat more fortunate. Though there is a disadvantage in the fact that the coal belt holding to the southern edge of the plain is thereby at some distance from the sea, yet areas in which coal remains in profitable quantities are so great that a very great deal of the progress of modern Germany must be ascribed to the supplies of energy found within her borders ; while the deliberate centring of railways in Berlin, because it was the governing centre at the time when railways began to be made, tends still further to increase its value as a centre from which Germany may be governed, and gives a certain guarantee of stability, which is, however, set off by the gathering of population on the coalfields away from that centre. The coalfield of the upper Oder is shared with Austria, which, besides, has small and scattered supplies of much inferior quality, and with Russia, which possesses also, north of the Black Sea, coalfields extensive, but, as might be expected from her past history, comparatively little worked.
In the lands of China and India the past history has not been such as to make it possible for the coal they possess to be utilized quickly. The coal supplies of the other continents, with one exception, need scarcely be considered. That exception is North America. No land has benefited more than this from the discovery of coal power. It has been estimated that the coal resources of the world amount to 7,397,533 million tons. Of this Canada is estimated to have reserves of 1,234,269 million tons, the United States 3,214,174 million tons. Whether this is exactly true or not, it is evident that an extraordinary proportion of the coal of the world is in North America. And, if we examine the position of the coalfields, we see that three-quarters of the states united under the central government at Washington have coal, while the greatest amount lies right in the track of the great natural advance by way of the Hudson and the Mohawk. Thus North America differs from all other lands, in that the greater part of it has been developed from the first by the use of new methods. For every man on the continent north of Mexico at the beginning of the nineteenth century there are a hundred now. Energy has been used on a great scale by people who, accustomed to hard work, have already scrapped some old notions, and are ready to adopt new ideas without prejudice. It is not only that men of European races were tempted to lands like their own, neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter for work, yet hot enough for the growth of plants, cold enough to stimulate thought. Unsuited to early conditions, it is exactly
such a land as might be developed quickly by men of Northern Europe with all the advantages which the possession of enormous supplies of coal energy gave them.
For three centuries there was settlement and con solidation on the eastern coast; the mental and moral type was fixed, the language was fixed, and then, just when the way was being found by the Hudson-Mohawk, and by the more difficult ways to the south, from the eastern coast to the central plain, the possibility of the new discovery began to be realized. It was in 1807, eighteen years before the Erie Canal was opened, that the first steamboat made its way from New York to Albany, 150 miles, in twenty-four hours. It is idle to question what the United States might have become, had there been no industrial revolution, but this we know, that when it did have an effect, the United States leapt to importance. There had been improvements in agri culture, in the introduction of new crops and of new and more efficient instruments, so that more was ob tained from the soil than before. Not a little of the stored capital, by the possession of which Britain emerged victorious from the Napoleonic wars, was due to those improvements, and no doubt would have had effect, and indeed did have effect, on the west as on the east of the Atlantic. We may better gauge the import ance of the change to America by the actual change in Britain. There had been in America land which for two centuries before the industrial revolution was called New England, but a newer England still rose on either side of the grass-grown Pennine moorlands when coal came to be mined there. Till then the land was empty ; people lived on the more fertile land to the southward. Now on the lowland plains of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and even on these grass-grown moors, men crowd each other to aid in directing the coal energy into channels where it will do most work. In the United States the importance of the change is masked by the development of agriculture, but the development of agriculture in its most important forms is indeed only one manifesta tion of the change. In his canoe the aboriginal Indian had been accustomed to move on river and lake, and by river and lake and then by canal the successors of Fulton's steamboat opened up the country more quickly for agriculture than could possibly have been done in any other way. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York was fixed as the commercial gateway of the state. Then the railways were made, first along side those lakes and rivers and then out into the wilder ness, the use of them saving energy and allowing man to use his own bodily energy to greater advantage. Even so there was little evidence in the middle of the nine teenth century of what would happen by the end; the first result of the use of coal in industry for spinning and weaving, for hammering and drilling, had been rather to fix population where it existed. In New England mill-wheels could be, and had been, turned by water power; there the coal was taken, since there was a population, such as existed nowhere else, skilled to use machinery even of a simple kind ; but gradually popula tions with skill have grown up on the coalfields all along the western edge of the Appalachians, then in the central area south of Lake Michigan, and now extend ing farther south-westward still. The more recently developed areas are not yet able to compete on quite equal terms with those where skill has been handed down or transmitted or taught, it matters not which, but are beginning to rival those areas where historical momentum helps most. Cotton manufacture can be carried on profitably in Alabama, and at present rates of increase the coalfields round the southern end of the Appalachians will, ere long, turn out as much as that produced in New England.