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"I won't trouble you," said Sir Richmond, "with any long
discourse on the ways of getting fuel in this country. But
land as you know is owned in patches and stretches that were
determined in the first place chiefly by agricultural
necessities. When it was divided up among its present owners
nobody was thinking about the minerals beneath. But the
lawyers settled long ago that the landowner owned his land
right down to the centre of the earth. So we have the
superficial landlord as coal owner trying to work his coal
according to the superficial divisions, quite irrespective of
the lie of the coal underneath. Each man goes for the coal
under his own land in his own fashion. You get three shafts
where one would suffice and none of them in the best possible
place. You get the coal coming out of this point when it
would be far more convenient to bring it out at that--miles
away. You get boundary walls of coal between the estates,
abandoned, left in the ground for ever. And each coal owner
sells his coal in his own pettifogging manner... But you know
of these things. You know too how we trail the coal all over
the country, spoiling it as we trail it, until at last we get
it into the silly coal scuttles beside the silly, wasteful,
airpoisoning, fog-creating fireplace.
"And this stuff," said Sir Richmond, bringing his hand down
so smartly on the table that the startled coffee cups cried
out upon the tray; "was given to men to give them power over
metals, to get knowledge with, to get more power with."
"The oil story, I suppose, is as bad."
"The oil story is worse. . . .
"There is a sort of cant," said Sir Richmond in a fierce
parenthesis, "that the supplies of oil are inexhaustible--
that you can muddle about with oil anyhow. . . . Optimism of
knaves and imbeciles. . . . They don't want to be pulled up
by any sane considerations. . . ."
For some moments he kept silence--as if in unspeakable
commination.
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