OLD KING COAL

"He called for his pick, and he called for his shovel, and he called for his gougers three." So, apparently, runs the ancient anthem of the coal states as unearthed by the Coal Commission. The song should strike a responsive chord within the undergraduate shivering by his sputtering lump of coal as well as within struggling householders and large manufacturers. But contrary to expectation the Commission puts the blame for high prices upon the wholesalers rather than upon the retailers. That the retailers are blameless should, however, be evident enough anyhow, for with the large number of retailers, each must deal fairly or lose his customers.

Strange to relate, there is also a large number of wholesalers, but in spite of this last competition among them has failed to keep prices of coal within the bounds of reason. And therein the Commission has found the catch. While in every crisis consumers have blamed the retailers, retailers have blamed the railroads, and everyone has blamed the miners, who of course must have been perched in Luxury's lap, wholesaler after wholesaler was pocketing his "bit" on the same ton of coal. In their "banner year", indeed, of 1920 each wholesaler who did not handle shipments himself and therefore was merely speculating made an average profit of 15 cents per ton--a return of about fifty-five per cent, on capital invested. If this profit had been confined to mining companies and wholesale handlers of coal alone, the price of coal would not have been so sinfully high. But when distribution has extended through a line of speculating wholesalers whose only apparent reason for existence was to empty the contents of the consumer's pocket into theirs, it became a bit too thick.

The natural conclusion is that there are too many wholesalers, and while they may make very fine broth for themselves, they most certainly ruin the consumer's. Public control of industries has never been looked upon with favor and the Coal Commission has apparently fallen in with this sentiment by suggesting as a remedy the setting up of a "skeleton regulative machinery" over the entire production and interstate distribution of coal to be used only when the President judges that "an emergency exists". No doubt the Commission is right in implying that such profiteering exists only when there is or is expected to be a shortage. But even in fair years the industry has its ups and downs; and since these "dummy" wholesalers have their teeth continually whetted for every vicissitude, the Commission would have done well to suggest something at least a few degrees more effective.