and dividends, the mine operators must pay for colliery improvements and interest on borrowed money. The total of these two items will average no less than 20 cents a ton. A recent bill signed by the Governor of Pennsylvania putting an ad valorem tax on anthracite production will further add to the cost of mining hard coal.

Recently I talked with Percy C. Madeira, president of the Anthracite Operators' Association, and secured from him some interesting facts which bear on the cost of mining hard coal. Eighteen tons of water, on an average, are hoisted from the mines for every ton of anthracite marketed. In some mines, as much as twenty-seven tons of water are raised for every ton of coal produced. The pumps in the anthracite collieries have a capacity of 823,641,120 gallons for every twenty-four hours, or an amount equal to the water consumption of the city of Philadelphia for two and a half days. The weight of the water hoisted in the hard-coal mines each year is from 30 to 40 per cent. greater than the weight of all the coal-anthracite and bituminous mined in the United States in 1918, the year of greatest production.

In 1919 the anthracite mines used more than 50,000,000 pounds of explosives and about 775,000 tons of timber (nearly 500,000,000 board feet). This means that in producing a ton of coal the operator consumes eleven ounces of explosives and about seven board feet of timber. Each and every minute one and four fifths tons of air are forced into the anthracite mines for ventilation. One quarter of a ton of air is handled for every ton of coal shipped, and it takes a lot of air to weigh a quarter of a ton. In many anthracite mines, one half ton of rock, dirt, and other refuse is hoisted for every ton of coal produced. It took years to build the Panama Canal, and yet the anthracite miners in less than three years remove from the depths of the earth a greater yardage of rock and coal than the United States Government handled in ten years in Panama.

mine owners had little or nothing to do with the establishment of the wage scales now prevailing. On a long haul, approximately one half of the price paid for coal goes to cover freight charges. A few years ago coal could be shipped from the mines in southern West Virginia to Hampton Roads for $1.40 a ton. At the present time this haulage cost is about $2.38. Five years ago coal could be shipped by water to New England for 50 cents a ton; to-day the charge is from $2.50 up, an increase of 500 per cent. At the commencement of the war, coal could be shipped from the Georgia Creek field in Maryland to a near-by Eastern city for $1.18; the present charge is $2.53. The cost of bringing coal from this same field in Maryland to a float on the Hudson River at New York is $3.36. In other words, it costs more to bring a ton of bituminous coal from the mines to a big Eastern city than it does to mine the coal and put it on the railroad cars. It is not at all unusual for the freight charges on a ton of coal shipped from West Virginia to certain points in New England to reach the high figure of $8.00 a ton. Five years ago the cost of handling a ton of coal from the local yard in a town or city to the householder's cellar averaged about 75 cents; to-day this cost averages from $1.50 to $2.50.

In justice to the producers of coal, it should be stated that the mine operators generally have no more control over the prices that consumers pay for coal than have the farmers in the West, who raise cattle and sell hides to be made into shoes, over the prices that people pay for shoes. That there has been profiteering in coal-both bituminous and anthracite-no one who has investigated can deny. But is it wise to legislate restrictions on the country's most important industry, simply because a few mine operators and many groups of retailers have been unscrupulous and unfair in their practices? In every country there are revolutionaries working on the master scheme of a general strike. Such a plan to be successful must commence with the coal mines, and nationalization of our two great coal industries would make the scheme far easier to execute. The recent coal strike in Great Britain cost that country more each day than the World War cost the British daily, which serious situation shows that while it is easy for a government to meddle with an industry, the return of the business to normal operation under private ownership is not nearly so

simple. In enacting laws to regulate industry, the important consideration is not so much the length of the step, but its direction.

Before the war, the citizens of this and other nations found resources within themselves to remedy their troubles. To-day the universal cry is for legislative action to solve each problem. The chief trouble in the United States at the present time is that our industrial life is out of balance. The Government's policy during the war was to get production at any cost, and as a consequence the wages in those industries which were operated under Federal control still remain at record levels, which condition is seriously retarding the readjustment of industry. Notwithstanding our recent experiences in substituting official incompetence for the efficiency of private management, there is a wide-spread belief that the Government is infallible. Federal employees receiving three or four thousand dollars a year are permitted to render decisions of the greatest importance with regard to the regulation of industries, the practical problems and principles of which are entirely foreign to their experience and training. There is great danger in encouraging the idea, now being advanced in Great Britain, that it is proper to tax the public to pay high wages to workmen in basic industries.

THE RADICALS AND DECREASED PRODUCTION

HE United Mine Workers here in the

TUE
United States have adopted the nationali-

zation idea permanently, and well-informed people former Governor Cornwell of West Virginia being one of them-assert that there⚫ is a close agreement between the radical union mine leaders in this country and in England. For the first time in many years, the anthracite and bituminous mine workers have joined forces and have arranged their contracts with the operators so that the wage agreements in both the hard and soft coal fields expire on the same date-March 31, 1922.

In the meantime, the production of bituminous coal for the first seven months of this year was 50,000,000 tons less than for the same period of last year. If there should be a recovery in business this fall, and the year's demand for soft coal should equal that of 1920, there is little doubt but that the nation will be face to face with another serious fuel situation. Notwithstanding slack business, there is now practically no surplus of bituminous coal above ground anywhere in the United States. Experience has shown that a coal surplus cannot be accumulated during the winter months. All of which indicates the probability of an acute situation in our fuel markets early next year, when the new wage agreements in both the hard and soft coal fields are being negotiated. Most people are expecting a recovery in business, certainly by next spring, but let no one leave out of his calculations that vital consideration—an adequate coal supply.

The public is clamoring for lower prices for coal. The miners' leaders have stated definitely that the present wage agreements must not be altered until their contracts expire at the end of next March. If business begins to mend before that time, will the mine workers agree to a reduction in their present record wages? There might be hope for a satisfactory settlement, in view of the lower cost of living, if the miners could be assured of more regular employment than they have been given in the past. However, the seasonal nature of coal mining appears to be an unchangeable element of the problem. Men who work only 200 days or less each year cannot be expected to be happy with a wage which is on a par with the wage of other workers engaged in more congenial occupations, and employed 250 or 300 days annually. The public will be sorry if it fails to give close attention to developments in our national coal situation during coming months.

CAME again into Sherif Abdulla's tent, and announced my complete recovery and an ambition to do some damage to the Hedjaz Railway. Here were men, guns, machine guns, explosives, and automatic mines. Let us use them.

Abdulla, though he was Feisal's elder brother and the first instigator of the Arab revolt, seemed apathetic and wanted instead to talk about the royal families of Europe. The slow march of his own war bored him. But I fired to enthusiasm Sherif Shakir, his cousin and second in command, and by his help secured license to do our worst. Shakir loved the Ateiba and swore they were the best tribe on earth, so for our main body we would take Ateiba. Then we thought we might take a mountain gun, one of the Krupp veterans, and there was also a queer little mountain howitzer, sent to us from a Nile gunboat, which I wanted very much to try. It looked like a vegetable marrow on wheels, and lay back on the ground to be fired. I could not conceive that it was any use. Shakir promised to collect the force, and it was settled that I should go ahead to search for a good target. If possible it was to be Aba el Naam, a near and important station.

My companions were Fauzan el Harith, a famous warrior, and Mohammed el Kadhi, a son of Dakhil Allah, hereditary lawman of the Juheina, whose old father had guided the Turks down to Yenbo last December, but who was now one of our patriots. Mohammed was about eighteen, heavy and reliable. We rode off down Wadi Ais with twenty five men, but after three hours the heat was too much so we stopped by a great lotus or jujube tree (but the fruit was scarce) and rested under it during the middle of the day. These trees are very shady, and there were few flies, unlike Abdulla's camp. Wadi Ais was luxuriant with thorn trees and grass. There was a cool east wind, and the air was full of white butterflies and the

fragrance of flowers. In the late afternoon we mounted again, and in an angle of the valley passed a ruined terrace and cistern. There were once populous villages in this part making important use of subterranean waters. To-day all is waste.

We started at five next morning after a long night, and passed through the last hills and out into the Jurf, an undulating open space which runs down to Jebel Antar, a remarkable crater twelve miles to our south, and a landmark from afar, with its split and castellated top. We turned half-right in the plain, crossed to the low range of hills which cuts it off from the valley where the railway lies, and stopped at last by the final hill, over which lay Aba el Naam, quite close but well screened from sight. We could spy out our enemy from the hill-top, and thither we climbed in easy stages before sunset. The hill was about a thousand feet high and very steep, and from it we saw the station clearly, less than three miles off. It had a pair of large two-storied houses of basalt and cement, a circular water-tower, and other buildings, with many bell-tents and huts in the station yard. There were trenches but no sign of guns, and we could see only about three hundred men in all. A large bridge north of the station had its own post of a dozen tents on a black knoll behind it. We had heard that they patrolled their neighborhood very actively at night. This seemed undesirable, so we sent off two men to each blockhouse with orders to fire a few shots at them in the dark. The Turks thought it a prelude to attack and stood to arms all night.

We meanwhile were comfortably asleep and rose early next morning. At first it was very cold, with a restless dawn wind blowing across the Jurf, and making a noise in the great trees around our camp. As we climbed the hill, however, the sun came out, and an hour later it was hot. We lay in the long grass among

the stones of the foremost cairn on the hilltop, like lizards, and saw the garrison parade. There were three hundred and ninety infantry, little toy men who ran about when the bugle sounded, and formed up in stiff lines below the black buildings, and then with more bugling scattered, and then the smoke of cooking fires went up from all sides. A herd of sheep and goats came out from the station and moved toward us in charge of a little-ragged boy. Before he reached the hill there was loud whistling down the valley from the north, and a tiny train puffed slowly into view, crossed the bridge, and halted in the station, panting out white breaths of steam.

THE

THE FAITHFUL SHEPHERD

HE shepherd lad kept on steadily and drove his goats with shrill cries up our hill. The best pasture was on the top and down the western side. Hussein, one of our men, moved behind the ridge along which the boy must come, and as soon as he was safe from observation from the station, jumped out and caught him. The lad was a Heteimi, one of those outcasts of the desert, members of no recognized Arab stock, whose children commonly hire themselves out as herds to the tribes about them. He cried continually, and made efforts to escape from us whenever he saw one of his flock straying uncared for about the hill, so that in the end the men lost patience and tied him up tightly. Fauzan tried to talk to him, but all his anxiety was for his goats, and he could tell us nothing about his Turkish masters.

These shepherd boys are a peculiar class. From infancy they follow their calling, and it takes them in all seasons and weathers, day and night, to the wild places of the hills. They are condemned to absolute loneliness. For ordinary Arabs the coffee-hearth is a university and their world revolves about it. There they hear all the best talk and news of the tribe, its poems, histories, love-tales, law-suits, bargainings. By constant sharing in the hearth-councils, they grow up to be masters of expression, dialecticians, orators, able to hold their own in any company and never at a loss for the words that move men. The shepherds lose all this. Their lives are in the wilderness, with nature's dry bones, and they grow up naturals, hardly sane in outlook, knowing nothing of the affairs of mankind, but very wise in edible plants, wild animals, and the habits of their own goats and sheep. They

are paid miserably, but they get their food free when in camp, and in the desert the abundant milk of their charges is their perquisite and mainstay.

We kept this lad prisoner all day while we watched, and at dusk climbed down again to our party, bringing with us all we could gather of the flock. There we learnt that Shakir would arrive that night, so Fauzan and I went out across the plain toward the railway till we found a convenient gun-position among some low ridges less than two thousand yards from the station buildings. On our return, very tired, we saw fires burning among the trees, and found Shakir just arrived, and his men and our men roasting goat-meat contentedly. The shepherd was tied up hand and foot to a tree, for he had turned violent when he saw his charges unlawfully slaughtered, and had tried to defend them with his own body. He refused angrily to taste any of the supper, and we only forced bread and rice on him by threats of instant punishment. The men tried to convince him that we would take the station next day and kill his master, but he would not be comforted.

S

MINING THE RAILROAD

HAKIR told me after supper that he had brought with him only three hundred men instead of the eight or nine hundred he had hoped to bring, so we had to modify our plans considerably. We would not take the station, we would frighten it. The simplest way was to open an artillery action from the front, and to mine or cut the railway to the north and south, in the hopes of catching the train still waiting there. Accordingly we chose out a dynamite party to blow up at dawn a section just north of the bridge, and I went off with a mine, and a machine-gun and its crew, to lay a trap south of the station, the side from which help would most probably come. Mohammed el Kadhi guided us very well up to a deserted part of the line which we reached just before midnight, and I laid the mine; it had a Martini action, to fire into twenty pounds of blasting gelatine when the weight of the locomotive overhead depressed the trigger.

It took about an hour to lay, and then we posted the machine-gun in a little bush-screened watercourse in full command of the spot where we hoped the train would be derailed. The crew was to remain here while the rest of us went down

farther south to cut the telegraph wires. When we had gone as far from camp as we reasonably could, we turned in to the line again, and again were fortunate to strike it in an unoccupied place. Unhappily it then appeared that none of the four Juheina with me could climb a pole, and eventually I had to struggle up one myself. It was all I could do, after an illness, and when I cut the third wire the flimsy pole shook so much that I lost grip, and came slipping down sixteen feet with a crash upon the shoulders of Mohammed who ran in to break my fall, and got nearly broken himself in consequence. We took a few minutes to recover breath, but after that were both able to walk off to our camels, and eventually got back to our camp just as the others were saddling up to go forward into position by dawn.

We let them go and I fell down under the trees for an hour's sleep, without which I felt I would collapse utterly. It was only just before daybreak, the hour when an uneasy sense is in the air, affecting all animals and making even sleeping men turn over on their sides. It wakened Mohammed who wanted to see the action. To get me up he came across to me and cried the morning call to prayer in my ear. I sat up and rubbed the sand out of my swollen eyes, discussing with him the merits of prayer and sleep. He suggested that there was not a battle every day, and exhibited to me the cuts and bruises he had sustained during the night, in helping me. I had as many myself, and my hands were full of splinters besides. When fully awake we rode off to catch up with the army, after untying the still unhappy shepherd boy, and advising him to wait there for our return.

A LOCOMOTIVE BLOWN UP

HE tracks of the others were easy to follow and we reached the guns just when opened fire. The howitzer was as eccenas we had expected, but the mountain did excellent work and smashed all the floor of one building, damaged a second, a hole in the water tank, and hit the pump 1. One lucky shot struck the first wagon he train, which caught fire and burned usly. The locomotive cast off and went to the south. We watched her eagerly e approached our mine; and when she was there was a puff of dust and a report, and ame to a standstill. The damage was only

to the front part, as she was going backward, and the charge exploded late. We waited and watched in vain for our machine gun to open fire, while the drivers on the engine jacked up the front wheels and tried to make temporary repairs. Then we learned that the gunners had become afraid at their loneliness, and had packed up and started back when they heard our gun-fire. It was too late to do anything to fill their place, and half an hour later the engine went on again toward Antar station, going at a foot's pace, and clanking loudly, but still going. It was sad.

MEA

VICTORY FOR THE ARABS

MEANWHILE all the wood and tents and trucks around the station were burning and the smoke was so thick that we could no longer shoot. So we started to go closer to see what were the results. On the way an outpost of nine Turks tried to surrender to us, but the Arabs mistook their signs, and killed them with a volley. We found there a protected train, with double-skinned trucks, lined with shingles. It was burning very hotly, and the Turks were too close, so we did nothing more. Shakir came away with us, and we decided to break off the action; the Ateiba could have rushed the station, but possession of it for the few hours we could have held it did not seem worth a casualty. We had captured thirty men, and killed and wounded seventy of the enemy, and had had only one man on our side slightly wounded. Traffic on the line was stopped for three days, while they repaired damages, so that our experiment was justified to that extent.

We rode straight back to Abdulla's camp which we reached on April the first. Shakir, who is splendid in habit, held a grand parade, and thousands of joy-shots were fired in honor of his victory. I found the little Heteimi lad a billet as shepherd to Dakhil Allah, Mohammed's father. This consoled him for losing his former place without a reference, and his consolation was turned into active joy when we gave him a new shirt and a colored head cloth. He asked for the kindness of a rifle thrown in!