Political And Commercial Geology And The World's Mineral Resources
9781465679864
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
With the rapid increase of the world’s population and the exploring and exploiting of the hitherto undeveloped natural resources, competition for this wealth has become and will still become keener. In past ages war, pestilence, and starvation held down the earth’s population; and in the last few years all these grim spectres have returned in force, suggesting the possibility of a permanent return of the old primitive days. Nevertheless, modern science and organization, if not quenched by vast social disorders, will so safeguard life, as in recent times, that the world is in a fair way to become crowded. All of us, like Germany, yearn for our “place in the sun,” and our share of comfort and power. Of all the fundamental necessities for this, nothing is so much in the nature of a fixed and unmultipliable quality as the metals; they constitute the basis and foundation of our modern civilization and power over man and natural forces. Other raw materials are of vegetable or animal origin; they propagate and duplicate themselves in successive incarnations according to the law of life; they are born in some magical fashion of air and water, with a minimum of the earth, and they return their loans faithfully to air and water and earth with the passing of each generation and the dawning of a new. There is the hint of such a law of growth in the mineral kingdom, but it is so vastly slow that the evanescent animal man has no personal interest in it; for all his purposes and by all his standards of measurement it is inert, and these riches, once dug and used, will never again be available. The treasures of commercially valuable ore-deposits have been hid by nature whimsically throughout the earth, here and there, by no rule of geography or latitude, and with a great disregard of equality. A nation’s needs or desires for mineral wealth have no stated relation to its actual mineral possessions; what it needs is often in the territory of another nation which does not need it. Commerce is thus born, and the nation which must have the metal or ore in question backs up its commerce and helps it to fasten its claims for permanent control of the deposits in question, by legislation, by diplomacy, and, if need be, by war. In the case of war, the metallic prize falls to the strongest—usually the nation which before, through its necessities, exercised only commercial control, but which, as the result of the trial of strength, now frankly asserts its sovereignty. Have we as Americans realized these forces? Absolutely not, I should say. How many realize that the Alsace-Lorraine question is and was not a sentimental one, but a struggle for the greatest iron deposits of Europe and the second largest in the world, which gave Germany her immense growth and power, and may now transfer that wealth and power to France? That the dispute between Poland and Germany as to Upper Silesia is not a question of nationality, sentiment, or even territory, but concerns the greatest coal field of Europe as well as great deposits of lead and zinc? If Poland gets this, she may rival Germany in wealth and importance; if Germany loses it, she may drop into the position of a second-rate power, now that she has also had to give up Alsace-Lorraine. To submit such a question to the vote of the native population is of the same order of fitness as tossing a coin for it; but how many of us have understood this? Population shifts and changes, swells or shrinks, may be at one time predominantly Polish and at another time mainly German; but the coal deposits are fixed. To clarify these things we should in place of Silesia say Coal, in the place of Alsace-Lorraine, Iron, and so on.
