to Genoa of $35 per ton on coal! And there is no tonnage to carry it even at that rate. If by any means Italy could get the coal, where are the vessels to bring iron ore from Algiers and Spain?

Contrast with this the situation of Austria. Germany is the greatest steel producer in the world, after the United States. The Germans are helping the Austrians out. But Austria has mighty steel works of her own, the Skoda munitions plant ranking with Krupp, Schneider and Vickers. It is Skoda and Krupp that are driving the Italian armies down into the plains of Italy.

The world could not have a better demonstration of what wins wars, nor a better illustration of the fallacy of counting male populations and estimating the strength of fighting nations thereby. Italy's teeming millions will not avail against the machines and tons of steel against which human arms cannot stand. Russia's hordes do not bring victory to her; her industrial heart, Poland, is in the hands of the enemy. To-day the Russians are shifting men to the western front, where the allies have shells enough to protect them. It is vain for the Czar to send his simple moujiks against the German trenches in the east: Let him stamp a steel industry out of the earth if he can.

In the future handbooks of war, statistics of populations and even of standing armies will play a minor role. The compelling facts will be the statistics of steel production. The overpowering influence of artillery in war is creating a totally new basis for military supremacy, just as the submarine is shifting the basis of sea power.

We look amazed at the working

of a fate that plays into our hands. We have half the steel production of the earth. Organized, co-ordinated with a trained citizenry, it will make us invincible on land. We are separated by wide oceans from all nations powerful enough to attack us, oceans which our fleets of submarines can make the certain grave of any expedition that comes against us.

A kind Nature conspires with the course of development of military art to provide us with the means of certain and impregnable defense. If we do not even care to learn to use the weapons thrust upon us, we shall deserve the defeat and conquest that we shall some day suffer at the hands of a people for whom fate did less but who were willing to do more for themselves.-May 25, 1916.

AMERICAN EFFICIENCY

These days are furnishing us with instances of the marvelous America in which we live, of the great efficient industries which stand ready to serve us, and which, once properly co-ordinated with a national system of training our manhood and assembling material for them to use, will make us invincible and immune from attack. Since this Mexican border mobilization began, the Ford and Packard Motor companies have, in the quiet way that great things are done, shown us what such industries mean to us.

The Ford Motor Company was asked by the War Department how long it would take to make and have ready for shipment 1,000 trucks of a certain type. The Ford Company said that they would need a little notice; that if they were notified at

4 o'clock on the afternoon of one day the cars would be completed and ready for shipment at the close of the next day.

An official of the War Department called the Packard Company on the long-distance phone from Washington and ordered twenty-seven armored motor cars made and shipped to the Mexican border as rapidly as possible. The Packard people were asked to supply expert driver and mechanician with each car. The Packard Company went to work on the cars and engaged the men to operate them. A train of freight cars was put on the Packard siding, attached to it a Pullman and diner. In twenty-two hours after the telephone was hung up the twenty-seven armored motor cars were made and loaded, and the train was moving southwest from Detroit with the right of way to destination. In fifty-one hours more the motor cars were unloaded and ready for service "somewhere on the border."-July 6, 1916.

COAL

The enormous rise in sea freights has, it is true, raised the price of coal to almost prohibitive figures, and although wood is being used in increasing quantities as a substitute, the supplies so far have fallen short of the demand, and much additional expenditure has been incurred.-From a report on the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway in the "Statist," of London.

Coal at the mine mouth costs from 60 cents to $1 a ton in the United States. The cost of transportation to the seaboard is less than $2 per ton. In Buenos Aires soft coal sells at from $30 to $40 a ton. American coal men cannot market their coal in the Argentine

or elsewhere because they cannot get ships.

This would be ludicrous if it were not such a sorrowful indictment of our national neglect, our disjointed, haphazard way of doing things, our failure to plan and to act logically and coherently.

Occasionally a man does a thing that should open our eyes to some of the opportunities that are about us. A man did this some years ago in this department of coal. The man was H. H. Rogers. He had made a great fortune in Standard Oil. He had vision and courage. He saw in the mountains of West Virginia a vast region underlaid with coal which was undeveloped because it was so difficult to reach. Difficulties appealed to Rogers. He had been wrestling with them all his life. He determined to master this one. He built a railroad from the sea up to and across the mountains. The building of a railroad through the Grand Canyon was easy in comparison with what the men engaged on the construction of Rogers's railroad had to contend with. There are some miles of line on that route that cost probably more than a similar amount of main line anywhere else in the world.

And all this, it must be understood, Rogers did to get volume of tonnage of the lowest class of freight, traffic on which the net profit would not be more than a mill per ton per mile.

Despite all his wealth, influence and power the building of that road almost ruined him. He poured out his money as if there were not end to it never wastefully, but freely where he saw the expenditure of a million meant the lessening of a grade to a degree that would com

pensate for the outlay. The road was to be his monument. It was to be the creation of one man, the greatest, best and most admirably equipped and economically managed freight line of the world.

He was caught in the panic of 1907 and it nearly broke his heart to find that bankers to whom it was customary for him to give orders now demanded the instant payment of loans he had negotiated; that he, who had been imperious, now had to be a suppliant; that the treasures he had piled up through a lifetime of wonderful success he had to sacrifice to save his one cherished project; that instead of being a superman financially he was brought down to the common level in time of terror.

He sacrificed much to save the railroad. To have lost that was something unthinkable to him.

He finished the building of the line, and then he died. He had given to the country an artery through which a great flood of the rich blood of commerce could flow. While he depended on the coal business of the Atlantic coast states for the bulk of his business, he had the vision to see that with the cheapest freight rate in the world from the mine to the sea a tremendous trade with the nations to the south of us might be developed; that instead of Great Britain selling millions of tons of coal in Latin America, the United States might have the trade and that such commerce would develop return cargo for this country that would ramify in ways beyond appreciation.

Rogers was an economist. Waste to him was something always to be fought. The pride he took in the Virginian Railroad, for that was the name he gave to his property, was

in the remarkable manner in which Nature's obstacles had been overcome to reduce grades to a minimum, to employ the power of gravity to the highest possible degree and to bring the line as near perfection as was humanly possible.

And of what avail was the effort of H. H. Rogers and other great Americans whose vision has been broad? Of what use is it to blaze a way to new and richer fields if those for whom you would work are indifferent and would rather idle in older pastures?

There is a coal concern at 1 Broadway that had an opportunity to sell millions of tons of coal to France, 500,000 tons a year for five years or ten years, or a million tons a year for five years if it could make delivery. It has been unable to find vessels for one-fifth of the amount required in the first year. It chartered Greek ships and British ships. After one of its British ships had delivered two cargoes in France, it was taken over by the British government, ostensibly for transport purposes, but really to break the charter.

This was one of the many embarrassments to which the coal people were subjected. It seemed as if, although Great Britain was unable to supply coal to France, Spain, Italy and the countries on the north coast of Africa, except in limited quantities, she did not intend any other country should enter the trade.

France, Italy, Spain, want coal. The prices they pay are fabulous, but America can do nothing, for America has not the ships. Some American coal men, inflamed by the prospect of profits, have gone so far as to plan to send coal across the ocean in barges, as coal is sent

along the shore in this country. Lately there has been a radical improvement in towing. By means of a spring hawser the slack of a rope is taken up automatically and held taut at all times, no matter how heavy the sea may be. There are sea students and shippers who believe freight will be carried across the ocean before long in trains of barges as freight is carried on land in trains of cars.

But of what good is all this today to the Virginian Railroad, or the Norfolk and Western, or the Chesapeake and Ohio, or the coal miners of West Virginia or Pennsylvania?

South America is burning wood because, although willing to pay $30 to $40 a ton for coal, she can get no coal.

France, Italy, Spain, in desperate need of coal, can get no coal except as England doles it out.

And America, the richest country in the world, a nation with nearly two-fifths of the wealth of all the nations and with the largest coal deposits on earth and the best railroads and the cheapest and best land transportation of any land, is helpless when it reaches salt water. Its financial statesmen are busy making commissions.

What a pity!-August 26, 1916.

"A FINE THING FOR KATY”

When our pénétration pacifique of Mexico was determined upon, speculation began in the stocks of southwestern railroads. A financial paragraph in a New York paper thus

described the situation:

In case the government is forced to transport large masses of troops to the Mexican border, this business should prove very remunerative to the railroads. Wall street recalled yesterday the characteristic remark of a director of one of these properties, the M. K. and T., made at an early date when war with Mexico seemed imminent, that "it would be a fine thing for Katy."

Already the talk is of what the railroads will get out of the nation's emergency, not of the service they will render. The prospective character of service is being indicated by the reports of congestion and delay in handling troops and supplies for the tiny force which is sampling the large job of clearing those Augean stables south of the border line.

It is not that Katy is malicious. It is that she has never been taught that her business is less important than the national business. Ask the railroad officials whether they have a set of freight and passenger time tables for military trains, worked out in detail for emergency, whether their equipment and their lines near the border are built to serve army as well as civilian needs. No; the government's is like any other piece of emergency business for which no

particular preparation has been made.

Later, when we have a real enemy on our vulnerable Atlantic and Pacific borders, we shall pay the full penalty for this haphazard co-ordination of our military and industrial resources for the common defense. Then perhaps we shall learn that in war, as in everything else, whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.

Our performance in this children's battle in the south may be trying for the rest of us. But "it will be a fine thing for Katy."March 17, 1916.

A FREE PORT IN NEW YORK

Barcelona has established a free port district and Spain has added another to the limited list of free ports. Three years ago the Merchants' Association of New York interested itself in the matter of a free port for New York. It may not be an inopportune time to revive the matter.

The model of all free ports is Hamburg. The port district of Hamburg-the water area and the land immediately adjacent-is surrounded by a paling of the German customs department. The free port is treated like foreign soil; goods pay no duty until they cross the customs line. A ship sails up the Elbe into the free port of Hamburg and discharges with no surveillance of the customs authorities.

Goods are stored in the free port