July 15.
We published recently the report of an interview, secured by a correspondent of a home paper, with Sir H. Dennis Readett-Bayley, x.B.E, ete, who promises to rid the city of Nottingham of its smoke nuisance. This opens up an alluring prospect of thought. No one who has given any attention to the subject can have the slightest' doubt of the terrible nature of the plague of smoke with which the old country is afflicted. There is, first of all, the inexcusable waste of it, The fact that Britain must pay more than $50,000,000 annually for oil supplies, which could, if the coal were turned! into gas instead pf being converted in crude furnaces into smoke, he saved to the nation, must ' surely appeal to every business man. We are paying away millions of money to' liquidate our war debt to the United States and our own debtors are paying us nothing. That £50,000,000, if kept in the country, would' lighten'. pereeptibly the load of taxation which must be carried. if we: are to meet our foreign commit ments.
Smoke is good carbon mixed with certain gases. These are deleterious to those who are unfortunate enough to have to breathe them but are capable of being converted into valuable' products of which oil is the best known. Everyone will remember that during the war we were dependent on the by-products of the distillation of coal into gas. for our most powerful explosives. Mr. Lloyd-George enunciated at that time a scheme whereby all the coal mined in Great Britain was to be converted into gas at the spithead. The gas, after giving up certain valuable constituents, was to be used for the produc tion of electric power and this, in turn, to drive the wheels in our factories and for all industrial purposes. The idea seems, like some other big projects, such as the widening and deepening of the Clyde and Forth canal, to have been abandoned. The stimulation of the war provoked big thinking, but with the advent of peace we have fallen back into our old narrow groove and once more think parochially. Particularly in regard to the smoke nuisance sterling for so.many win smoke! Yes, but.fairy tales have 'a hibit of coming true. Everyone remembers the great heaps of unsightly: slag that disfigured the dreary landscape of the black country in the midlands. Many of those slag heaps are now disappearing. It has been discovered that cement can be made from slag and the thing that was not only worthless, but worse than worthless, as money had to be paid for 'a place to dump it in, has now become a valuable property.
When it has been demonstrated that there is money in smoke perhaps we shall even see the day when the dirty little launches that belch forth volumes of poisonous, black fumes on the front will mend their ways. Visitors, tell us what a magnificent boulevard the Bund seems to be when looked at from the river. If we can banish the smoke fiend there is hope both for the Bund and the garde They will be worthy of the encomiums lavished on them by those who have never inhaled a whiff from the funnels of the noisy craft that pollute the waters of the Whangpoo.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.