The forces

Geologists assume that coal deposits will be exhausted in a few years...
So much the better!
Yes, I know! Coal has shortened distances to a certain extent and reduced the weight of loads. It has allowed the railway, the steamboat and the gigantization of industry... Some blame it for having, in doing so, scuttled the sailing navy, made horizons accessible to all imbeciles and killed the family workshop in favor of rectangular abominations, as Edgar Poë called factories...
They are exaggerating... The creations of coal have their virtues and their benefits. But it is black and dirty. Is it the bread of industry? Bread of misery! Down with coal!

Its reign must end: it has lasted long enough. We have never seen a more universal and more cumbersome tyrant. Its black horror begins at the mine, at the bottom, where it must be extracted, in the aches, sweat, pain and night, with blows of picks. The miner's eyes, his skin, his lungs, catch, absorb and spit out its dark dust. It mourns entire regions, around the shafts. And the locomotives, all the machines are sooty.
The dockers, the housewives, the drivers paint themselves with it funereal paint. It creates every day, throughout the world, more Negroes than Ham gave birth to by his descendants.
The metallurgies pant and scrape, in the monstrous breath of its coke. Regions, vast as homelands, are capped with its mists and smoke. The ports cannot wash themselves of it; the railways make Indian ink on the firmament: Paris is smeared with it. Since Paris has wit, it slips into this crepe veil the lamés of its lights, but it cannot prevent six million lungs from being withered and all its monuments from being eaten away.
By skips, wagons, barges, trucks, bags, buckets or shovels it makes its way towards our eyes; saddens them, if it warms us. And, if fairies still existed, they would be afraid of dirtying their wings and hair with it. They would have it reburied by the gnomes and they would stick their tongues out at it, from afar: Oh! the filthy one, !

We must throw down the tyrant coal. Now we can.
Electricity is the magician who will make this thing possible: the color of the fields and houses restored; no more black faces, no more aging smoke. Less tuberculosis: hell far from work and no more of these people who spend a third of their lives miles underground, these black people, a horrible legend, barely believable for our descendants. No more black coal, sepulchre of the prehistoric force of the Sun, corpse of its antediluvian marriage with the decomposed forests!
There is the white coal which is the soul of the eternal cascade of waters and clouds which play with the living force of today's sun.
There is the blue coal which is the force of the wind.
The green coal which is the movement of bitter water attracted by the star of the day and the star of the night.
The golden coal which is the heat of the sun directly collected and used, oh remember that little printing press which worked by the sole force of the rays, in the middle of Paris! But what happened to Mouchot who was one of the Argonauts of this modern golden fleece?
Fire coal that must directly use underground heat and volcanoes, we have already started in Italy.
And silver coal that will draw refrigerants from the polar circles, from the ice floes.
Chimeras, that? But no, we are touching them: hydroelectrics, air and tide mills, villages that are heated with thermal waters, cities that are lit with waterfalls…

Ah! lady! there is still work to be done: we have not conquered everything! But we are going at a good pace!
Since Galvani's frog, the man-Prometheus has grandiosely chipped away at the domain of lightning. And what he has made it do best so far is to transport force over a distance.
Force... forces... Their reservoir is inexhaustible, around us. It is a question of taming them. Man has this ally Electricity. With it, he can capture all the others. He just has to want to and take care of it.
Not to mention that, in doing so, the Man-of-the-brutal-gesture, the Man-of-the-bloody-soul and the Man-of-trusts will be less war-mongers.

Down with coal!

Emile SOLARI.