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strike, 418,000 tons of anthracite were displaced by oil in New York City alone. The use of coke is rapidly increasing. Coke is a product of bituminous coal. When a ton of bituminous coal is put through by-product ovens, it yields, among other things, from seven to ten thousand cubic feet of gas, and also some fifteen hundred pounds of coke or smokeless fuel similar to anthracite. The United States Geological Survey has issued a pamphlet in which it demonstrates that coke is in some ways a better domestic fuel than hard coal. The editorial director of the "Gas Age Record" says: "before many years have passed, fuel consumers in great cities, getting all their heat units through pipes, will look back in horror to the day when raw coal was burned and the people submitted to the evils of smoke, ashes, unnecessary waste and needless labor. It

will be just as easy in the future to turn on the gas in the cellar as it is now to turn on water in the bath-tub."

The advantages of gas need not be confined to large cities. Owing to our vast inheritance of natural gas, there are already great networks of gas-pipe lines reaching into hundreds of small towns and farm-homes. "Just as whole regions will be supplied with electricity for power purposes from one great central plant, so whole regions

will be supplied with gas from

enormous central plants. No modern practice is more ridiculous or more closely linked with a primitive age than our present methods of distributing and burning coal." Like my acute Chinese student, the editor of "Gas Age Record" finds comedy in our American coal situation.

This large-scale development of coke dgas for domestic as well as indus

trial uses, like the large-scale development of electricity, depends upon the full application of the giant-power idea to bituminous coal, with anthracite as a minor ally. The conversion of coal into electricity at or near the mines in plants equipped with ovens for byproduct recovery has a most vital bearing upon industrial relations in the coal industry, because without it the net income of the industry will be insufficient to meet the reasonable demands of owners and workers. Since the days back in the seventies when Marcus A. Hanna lead the progressive coaloperators in the recognition of the union in exchange for the pledge of John Siney, the miners' leader, that there would be no strike without previous resort to arbitration, all attempts to establish permanent peace in the industry have broken on this problem of earnings. Waste breeds war. It has a fundamental bearing upon business stability, for the stability of industry largely depends upon the stability and cost of the fuel supply. It has a profound bearing upon the convenience of domestic life and the maintenance and increase of our American standard of living. It is technically feasible and economically imperative.

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What, then, delays the coming of giant-power? Among other things, the vast investment in raw coal-burning machinery, for whose capitalized waste the public pays. Take the single case of the railroads. Competent engineers have figured that the electrification of our railroads under a giant-power system might easily save $800,000,000 a year. At least a third of our railroad mileage lies in territory of sufficient traffic density to make im

mediate electrification good business. But there are the thousand of steamlocomotives already in existence, together with the locomotive works that built them. Burning raw coal costs the railroads a heap of wasted money, but, then, a third of their profitable freight load is coal. For the stupidity of hauling coal up and down the country instead of sending its energy through pipes and wires, the public pays in high freight and passenger rates and in railroad inefficiency generally.

Then there are the small electric light plants whose owners prefer not to be disturbed in their present inefficient, but profitable, business. These small plants use from two to three times as much coal per unit of electricity produced as the large modern plants. But they are a vested interest, and hitherto the public, spellbound by the still novel wonder of electric light, has seemed willing to pay for their extravagance. There are the large electric light and power companies owning valuable franchises and wanting to extend their business along the established lines of least resistence. They want to enlarge their present franchises in advance of the full flowering of the giant-power idea, so that when the public awakens to the idea that coal is electricity and gas, the question of ownership will be largely an academic question. For it is obvious that a giant-power system involves the development of a giant monopoly of the nation's fuel and power resources. Owing to knowledge of this fact, the ghost of public ownership already haunts the houses of the great electric utility corporations. They are entirely certain that private ownership is better for the public as

well as for themselves, but the ghost walks just the same.

But the greatest cause of delay in the coming of giant-power is the persistence of the ancestral idea of coal in the official and lay public mind. We have just had a federal coal commission whose reports, according to one of the commissioners, represent the expenditure of a million and a half dollars. These reports are bulky with facts about the coal industry as traditionally conceived. The commission plead for the recognition of the coal industry as one affected with a public interest, in the technical sense, as a public utility. For years, senators, congressmen, and governors-notably since the last anthracite strike, Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania-have tried to find legal ways of bringing coal under public control as a utility. But so long as coal is treated merely as coal, the courts have held that this cannot be constitutionally done. There are thousands of coal companies, ten thousand coalmines. Coal as such is no more a public utility than wheat. But put it on wires and into gas pipes and it becomes a recognized public utility at once. Electric transmission lines, like gaspipe lines, are essentially monopolistic; their construction involves the use of public highways and the exercise of the sovereign power of eminent domain. Giant-power is the necessary forerunner to the solution of this quaint paradox in which common sense says coal is a public utility, but the common law says it is not.

We are like sleep-walkers in a dream. But once we awaken to the idea that coal is not merely coal, but gas and electricity, the comedy of coal will draw to a close.

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Merchants

BY KONRAD BERCOVICI

OME to Damascus, the old city steel into famous blue blades, are still of Damascus!

"The sand-laden wind of the desert polishes the tops of the mushroom-like, flat, round towers. Patches of gold glitter in the sun, when the sirocco, the wind of the desert, has let up; glitter between the cracks of the greenish roof copper sheeting, reminding of the old glory of the city of the califs, Damascus, the key city of the world. The narrow, crooked streets upon which look small, high ironbarred windows from overleaning, heavy, white walls, the cobblestones of the pavement, the praying men wrapped in shawls and rugs at the street corners, the braying ass groaning under the load of calfskin water-bags bulging down to his hoofs-all this cries aloud that Damascus is still Damascus, as it has been a thousand, two thousand years ago, as it will be in all eternity. Bagdad has changed, Alexandria has become transformed into a modern city, Tyre and Nineveh are gone and forgotten; Damascus still remains, as Paul of Tarsus had seen it, as the califs of Ommiads have willed it.

"The small anvils, the steel of which has been half eaten away by the blasts of sand that have passed over them, spiked six feet underground, upon which twenty generations of swordmakers have hammered the thin, cold

glistening in front of the bazaars. There is an old and a new minaret near the gate. Both towers are painted green. The new one is over a thousand years old. The stalls of the heavy, columnar bazaars hang with rugs, groan with brocades and embroidered shawls and engraved yataghans, razor sharp on both edges, with hilts covered with inlaid mother of pearl, 'sideef,' and poignards with silver handles made by the men of the desert under the shadows of palm-trees, while the camels sun themselves, and the tiger and the lion look at one another from behind the golden sand hillocks.

"Come to Damascus!" my father urged.

And so we went to Damascus. For generations and generations my forefathers have brought their offspring to Damascus to acquaint them with, on the outskirts of the city, a few ruined walls behind a cobblestone-paved yard, where lean goats were angrily tearing the grass and moss that grew between the cracks. It was our ancestral home. One did not belong to the family unless he had slept a night between those walls. It was home, the only home. The other place we lived in was "the abode."

And so we slept between those walls the first night of our arrival, although the wind blew the sharp sand into our

faces, and big, cold lizards crept over and under our blankets.

In the morning, the cold blue morning of the desert, father, after having drunk deeply from the moss-covered wooden pail of the thousand-year-old well, kept fresh by neighbors who went for water to it daily, proposed that we go to town, "to see the bazaars," he said.

"And to find lodgings," I suggested.

"As you say," he answered, but his eyes dimmed. When he had visited "our home" with his father, they had made it their home while they were there, and cooked their meals in the iron kettle still hanging on the iron tripod over the stones of the deep old fireplace.

Although I was dressed in European garb, father had put on Arab pantaloons (shalvaris), and covered his shoulders with a grayish dolman of camel's-hair, the "sourtouk" that reached to his feet, on which he wore, stockingless, a pair of heelless, pointy papoutchi. The turban on his head completed the change. I hardly recognized him in that garb. His spare, wiry black beard made his face look almost wax pale. He looked taller and broader and stronger than he was, an Arab just come up out of the desert.

"We go to the bazaars," he announced curtly, having lost his loquaciousness of the day before, when he was still a European.

In the open domed curves of the bazaar sat long-bearded, turbaned men drawing from long pipes the cool smoke that passed through rosescented water, while the thick morning coffee, as black and thick as pitch, was allowed to cool in the small, longhandled pots in which it had been brewed.

"As Mohammed is our prophet," called out one merchant at the sight of my father, "Ali, my friend Ali, come from strange lands again!" He rose to his feet. The two men embraced, patting each other's backs tenderly.

"Murad! Murad!" my father repeated, retreating and looking at the man. "I hope Allah is as good to me as he has been to you. You look not one year older than when I last saw you, fifteen years ago."

"Allah il Allah, Mohammed Rassoul Allah (God is God, and Mohammed is his prophet)," Murad answered, bowing low, and touching his heart and forehead with his hand.

"This is my son, come with me to see Damascus."

Murad looked at me just fleetingly; disapprovingly, I thought. Then the two men sat down to a few puffs from the narghile and a few sips of coffee. "And you will make your abodewhere?" inquired Murad.

"That I shall see."

"I am the first to have bid you welcome, Ali. Therefore you and your son are my guests. We shall be waiting for you with the evening pilaff after sundown," Murad answered, and returned to sit placidly in the doorway after rekindling the small charcoal fire in a brass bowl over the jar of the narghile.

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We tramped between the stalls in the narrow, crooked streets. At every few steps my father was recognized and greeted and offered a smoke and a sip of coffee. And every one invited us to be his guest, only to be told that Murad had seen us first; to which every one replied he wished Allah had been as good to him that morning.

Heavily laden mules passed us, going back and forth, led by barefooted young boys. Gray camels from the deserts sprawled and kneeled, barring the way, obstructing all movement. There was a rumbling noise calls, disputes, between merchants and customers. Children ate barbuzes (watermelons), squatting on the cobblestones, and heavily veiled women glided like shadows along the walls, stopping here and there to finger a piece of yellow silk, a bit of heavy green atlass (satin), or to have a few words with the jeweler or the goatbearded, squatting silversmith, who answered without raising his eyes from the small anvil spiked in the ground. But in all this bustle I saw no money, no actual buying or selling. It seemed like a make-believe, yet fundamentally more real than the manner of buying and selling in civilized cities.

Toward sundown, with feet blistered and aching, we made our way to Murad's house, a sprawling stone mansion set back of a well paved yard not far from the "New" Giamie. Murad showed us our room, with two low divans. The walls were hung with three thicknesses of rugs. There were no chairs; only a round table with legs not a foot high. And cushions, cushions, cushions, and rugs in the hundreds. Never had I seen so many cushions in one room.

A while later a girl, with uncovered face, came to serve us the evening meal. I had never before been as awkward with the two-pronged wooden fork. It seemed to go everywhere but my mouth, for the girl, the servant girl, "Jusuph's daughter,' Murad informed my father, was beautiful.

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"Jusuph's daughter a servant!" my

father exclaimed. "He was a rich merchant, the richest!"

"He has come upon evil days. He had to pay blood-money to save his son from the hangman. His son Mustapha having killed a man, he had to pay blood-money to his widow or see the boy die. And so he paid. May the sun again shine on his house!"

"I had heard about that," my father answered.

Thereafter they sat silent. The two men looked at each other and smoked while I had my eyes on the rug that served as a door and through which Hazi flitted back and forth, bringing and taking the dishes, serving the coffee, blowing the charcoals of the smoking narghile, arranging the cushions, smoothing out the blankets on the divans. She was tall and lean and hard. Her bare arms and legs were sinewy, and the long muscles rose and fell and swelled with every movement. Her face was a perfect oval. Her firm, full lips smiled. Her long eyelashes lowered themselves when I looked at her, surprising her looking at me. During the meal-time she had not said a single word. She served noiselessly, walking to and fro in her bare feet; then, while the men smoked, she sat down in a corner and waited. From the harem, at the other end of the house, came the sound of a well played tchiulea, a sort of mandolin, accompanied by a strongly rhythmed tambourine.

panied by

"The women of the harem. They know I have guests to-night. My wife will soon come to greet us."

Murad had hardly finished the words when a rather stout woman, her face veiled, but her fat arms and shoulders bare, came in to bid us welcome. She remained only a minute

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