our coal-fields, which recent inquiries have placed at a more distant date than was expected a few years ago, is a thing that is inevitable sooner or later. Actual exhaustion is not so much to be feared as inability to compete with foreign producers. The question is adjourned, but it will presently be forced upon public attention again. When it becomes too pressing to be neglected, then, possibly, there will be a chance of the condition of our miners being ameliorated; but it is improbable so long as gigantic public subscriptions pay for the effects of private neglect, which actually tend to perpetuate what they are intended to cure, that the chief sinners will take proper action. When they take alarm, then perhaps there will be salvation for the pitmen. The fact that two hundred of their men lose their lives every year by fire-damp explosions will not move British pit-owners so readily as the disagree-able truth that the time is rapidly approaching when they will be unable to compete with foreign markets, unless they work with greater economy. We have heard times without number that miners are careless; that they will smoke their pipes where they ought not; that they will carry forbidden matches, or even break open their safety-lamps to get a light. It is useless to combat such habits by repressive enactments, and childish to talk of double-locking lamps because single-locked ones are found ineffectual. The more difficulty there is in obtaining a light, the more men will struggle to get one. The only way to prevent explosions is to render them impossible, and that can be accomplished, to a large extent at least, by better ventilation. Coal can be got more economically, and the ventilation can be improved, by the use of one and the same means. Steam machinery cannot be used in coal-pits for the same reason that it could not in the great tunnel of the Alps; but machines moved by compressed air can. A machine for coal-cutting worked by compressed air was patented so long ago as 1861, and has been successfully at work in a pit in Yorkshire[1] for a long time. Its action is an imitation of that of the miner's pick; it cuts
- ↑ The West Ardslev.
