COAL COMFORT.
TOCUBLIC opinion," as it is called—that is, the favour or 1. disfavour of those who know nothing about the matter— will not matter greatly to the miners now or recently on strike. They are too numerous and too separate to be influenced by the community, and are, besides, too strongly possessed with the peculiar pride of experts. They understand their peculiar and highly burdensome labour, and the ablest of their critics do not. They would probably ask Mr. Goschen, if he gave an opinion on their struggle, whether he had ever wielded a pick, and regard Mr. Herbert Spencer with scorn, as a man who had never been a hundred yards below bank. That professional pride is a defence to them, as it is to sailors, and on this occasion is peculiarly required, for it is certain that most men and all women of the sunlit world are decidedly against them. The men cannot like the interruption to their trades, and the women feel keenly the discomfort which every rise in the price of coal produces in every house not occupied by the very rich. It is as bad as a rise in the price of bread, and acts as directly in reducing the family's spare cash. To the millions of working women, indeed, it is a veritable misfortune. They are compelled, by want alike of capital and of room for storage, to purchase coal by the hundredweight or leas, and the rise of price caused by such an event as a strike, comes home to them with startling suddenness and severity. In St. John's Wood, for example, on Saturday, the very day of the strike, coal was being hawked about on carts in minute quantities at the rate of 2a. a hundredweight, and in sacks at ls. 4d. the hundredweight, that is, the price, still only 27s. a ton for large buyers, had risen to 40s. a ton for the extremely poor, with the additional encouragement that it would next week be higher still. There is no avoiding the increase, for the coal literally cannot be stored in larger quantities—the English poor have not learned, and probably, from their strong individualism and dislike to be "spied upon," will never learn, the secret of combination in distribution—and the amount consumed can hardly be re- duced. Coal even now is hardly burned by the poorer work- people of London for pleasure, and they already burn only the minimum which will suffice with their unscientific grates for cooking. It is true they spare the fuel in a wonderful way, putting it on in handfuls, and being wise in many little arts for preventing quick combustion ; but still, they cannot cook without heat, and a very poor family indeed will burn nearly a hundredweight a week, and feel the sixpence added to its price, for no reason, as they think, except the dealers' greed, as we should feel a new income-tax of sixpence in the pound. Coal, when really dear, is the next item to rent, and, like rent, is a direct tax to be paid for on the spot, and in silver. As we rise in the middle class, the suffering becomes less, but we do not know that the exasperation does. Coal is one of the economies of all good housewives. They watch its price as they watch the price of meat or milk ; and the moment it wanders far from the traditional guinea a ton, which in their
eyes is the " natural " price of coal, they begin cutting off their fires, and =king servants and children wretched by their animadversions on the smallest waste. They count scuttles, though not handfuls. The extra price is probably only the price of five tons extra a year, but they feel somehow as if it were sinful to pay it, and if sparing can help them, they simply will not do it. They feel a sense of resentment altogether out of proportion to their loss, and due, we believe, to the fact that they have in their minds about coal, as they have about bread, and in a less degree about meat, a traditional standard which they feel it an oppression to depart from widely. Philanthropy is in the very air of London ; but you will never hear a housewife say even a tolerant word of coalminers who strike, or discuss the great coal middlemen without a trace of the feeling sometimes shown about butchers, that they are not so much tradesmen seeking a living, and bound to secure a profit on their capital, as extortioners preying on a powerless com- munity.
It would be odd that, in presence of a feeling so intense and so widespread, a more determined effort should not have been made to economise the consumption of coal, were it not that in this matter the housewives are nearly powerless. They do not build the houses, or provide the grates, or know with any- thing like accuracy why one fireplace burns coal so fast, and another does not. Most of them pass their lives, for instance, quite unaware why a bedroom fire, perhaps fifteen feet from the outlet of the chimney, burns so much less coal than the dining-room fire, perhaps forty feet from the same point. They hear of high factory chimneys, but never remember that the first object of the height is_ to intensify draught. They despair from the beginning of saving the coal except by lessening the flames, which their men and their servants silently resist, and accept their chimneys, the grand cause of waste, as they accept their roofs or skies. They have, too, one argument on their side. A real reform in the heating of houses would be a most difficult and costly thing to accomplish without rebuilding. It could be done, we believe, in one of two ways, and both are intolerably obnoxious to the ordinary British mind. One is the much-discussed Continental way of substituting close stoves for open fireplaces ; but this to most Englishmen destroys half the amenity of home, while it has not the advantage, which summer heat has, of diffusing warmth equally through the room. To be warmed by a German or French stove, you must be near it, and there is no adequate return for the loss of the pleasant ap- pearance of the blazing grate, which suggests warmth even if, as often happens, it does not give it. The other, and, we are told, the much better method, may be called the Poor- house way, and consists in abandoning stoves and grates together, and indeed chimneys except as ventilators, and warming the house entirely through hot-water pipes. We are told that a very small furnace properly built with a scientific boiler will keep up the necessary supply, at a cost for coal enormously less than that of grates, while the extreme incon- venience and loss of labour involved in carrying coal upstairs, the dirt which irritates housemaids, and the carbonic gas which destroys bindings, are all alike avoided. It is not even necessary that there should be a furnace for each house, for the pipes can be run through a whole block, and the supply regulated in each room by its inmates almost as accurately as the supply of gaslight. There would then be only one necessary fire in each house, that for cooking, and even this might, if we were resolute, be dispensed with, gas doing all that portion of the work. This determined reform, the only complete one yet suggested, would, however, in- volve extensive rebuilding and considerable original outlay, all paid to the distrusted caste of plumbers—who are, however, it is said, improving at last—and would require long experience to remove the prejudice, quite unfounded if the pipes are pro- perly placed, that such a scheme must greatly increase the danger from fire. A notion that any hot-water or hot-air system must " desiccate " the house, has got into the popular mind, and is thus far true, that as wood will dry when exposed to heat, the original arrangement of the pipes requires scientific care. The domestic consumption of coal could, however, be reduced in this way ; and if ever coal rises to 60s. a ton, as some economists have predicted, it will be. The alternative will be to live as many German and Swiss families live, with one fire for cooking, and no other effective source of warmth at all. Health can be preserved in a climate like ours by proper clothing and exercise—the clothing to in- clude a covering for the head—and as to comfort, we must just resolve to do without it.
There is little, we fancy, to be hoped from any fuel other 'than coal. The man who could invent one would make a !ortune beyond the dreams of avarice, and we believe the efforts are never intermitted ; but very little has come of them. Wood is a perfect substitute, but it costs more than coal, and if it came back into general consumption, the price would either go up till the fuel was generally useless, or the supply would suddenly come to an end. We are consuming the forests of the world as it is at a fearful pace, and democracy has not the self-restraint or steadiness of purpose to replant them. Gas is only coal in another form, and in spite of the splendid inventiveness applied to its use as fuel, it is not, we are assured, a cheaper form, though it has the advantage of involving no waste either of time or material. As for the compositions of all kinds offered in the market, none of them really succeed. Firebricks reduce consumption very little, and asbestos is a costly article, besides requiring rather intense heat immediately applied to it. It does for gas stoves, but not well for ordinary grates. Poor people say the best substitutes for coals are briquettes—we are a little doubtful of the spelling—small bricks made of coal-dust cemented with pitch ; but they are sometimes maddeningly slow in lighting, and they are, after all, coal in another form, and would go up in price as coal itself increased. It is, indeed, difficult even to think of a substance which could replace coal, except perhaps petroleum, as fuel, and that would demand extensive and costly substitutes for our grates, and perhaps increase very considerably the risk of fire. Petroleum can be made perfectly safe in covered stoves, but it requires great care in storage. It is cold comfort to offer to the housewives of England, but we fear the true alternatives before them, should a coal-famine ever be produced by miners' discontent, is to introduce hot-water pipes, or to pay the new demand.
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