prove. The New York man who feels that any attempt to improve on Broadway would be sacrilegious, naturally cannot appreciate "the state of mind" which is Kansas.

What other people, for instance, ever produced a state official who declined an appointment as United States senator because he preferred to stay at home and write poems on pork, odes on oats, and sonnets on alfalfa for circulation among a lot of farmers? F. D. Coburn is the Kansas Horace and the bulletins which are issued by the Kansas State Board of Agriculture under his direction, are SO different from any other similar documents as to raise all

COUNTY FAIR.

KANSAS CORN.

This twenty ears of corn weighed twenty-seven pounds. four ounces,

sorts of suspicions in the commonplace mind of an ordinary dry-as-dust, agricultural expert. Coburn's productions are bound bound and printed in the style of art booklets and bear such alluring titles as "Alfalfa's Affinity." "The Hog's Happy Habitat," and "The Lay of the Helpful Hen," also the convincing facts and figures which Coburn knows so well how to present, are spiced with bits of verse-all, like the hogs and poultry, native products of the Kansas soil. First is printed a table, showing that according to the nationa! government an average Kansas hog is worth more actual cash than a porker from any other state in the union. Then, just below the figures, Walt Mason, the Emporia bard, bursts into song:

"Kansas: Where we've torn the shackles From the farmer's leg;

Kansas: Where the hen that cackles.
Always lays an egg;

Where the cows are fairly achin'

To go on with record breakin'; And the hogs are raising bacon By the keg."

The significance of all this lies not in the fact that Mr. Coburn happens to be a man of literary tastes, with a graceful method of expressing himself, but in the really remarkable appreciation with which his outpourings are received by the mass of Kansas farmers. Nothing could be more eloquent of mental alertness and a high quality of general intelligence.

The reports of the Kansas State Board of Health may also be fairly classed as literary productions. Its inspectors and experts travel continually about the state, analyzing the water supply, printing boldly the constituents of patent medicines, making public the names and addresses of firms who violate the pure food law, keeping close track of contagious and infectious diseases and in every way helping the people to make what is already the lowest death rate in the world still lower. The results of

their labor are printed monthly in a bulletin which is sent free to any citizen who cares to ask for it. And sprinkled about among the statistics and tables are quotations from Emerson and Carlyle, essays on Abraham Lincoln, and fugitive poems, selected with fine taste and discrimination.

Another thing which leads Eastern people to the conviction that Kansas people are cranks is the remarkable if misguided, unanimity with which Kansans continue to remain residents of their native state. To the typical New York man whose sole idea of heaven is the Great White Way, the fact that anyone should voluntarily and by preference live anywhere but on Manhattan Island is primâ facie and complete evidence of insanity. How men like William Allen White and Ed Howe, who could get good jobs on New York magazines, who have written famous novels, dined with

K

presidents, and who really seem to have a certain degree of culture and refinement, can willingly stay in Kansas, is beyond all understanding! They are cranks-that's the only way to explain it from the Eastern standpoint.

Meanwhile, Kansas and its farmers keep on moving, growing bigger and richer and more intelligent. When a new idea comes along that seems to promise improvement in living conditions, the Kansas people meet it at the front gate and invite it in to take off its coat and have a bite to eat. They are all alive out in Kansas. Sockless Simpson, Carrie Nation and "Whiskers" Pfeffer were all Kansas products and the state is not ashamed of them. Each in his way served at least to focus public attention

on some evil that might otherwise have remained unnoticed.

A state that leads the country in the production of wheat, with a corn crop. vastly greater in value than the wheat; a state with the lowest death rate and the highest standard of intelligence; a state where people are more interested in changing their minds than in changing their clothes! Above the mellow hum which comes from behind the screen of sunflowers-it is the hum of Kansas poets, not grasshoppers---rises one clear voice:

Life's burdens bear the lightest,
Home fires burn the brightest :
Her friendships are the strongest ;
And love's light glows the longest;
Out in Kansas.

W

HEN the gigantic Mauretania makes her stately way into the harbor, or steams majestically out of the North River on her way to sea, there is nothing in her appearance to suggest the by-product-yet such she is. Her huge bulk is of steel, in whose manufacture waste steam was used, making energy equal in value to the steel itself. Though she was constructed but a stone's throw from the biggest coal-fired power-house in all Europe, the power which lifted her plates in place was derived, not from that power-house, but from waste gas captured in coke ovens, sixty miles or more away.

The ancient adage about carrying coals to Newcastle is proof enough that for centuries this Tyneside city has been, as she is today, the greatest coal export city in the world. Yet, while she exports

more coal every year, less and less is used at home, within her own boundaries. And, paradoxically enough, this diminution in the use of coal is coincident with an industrial progress unequaled in all Great Britain. One of the chief products of the district is coke. The coke, as exported today, is as valuable as ever it was, but the industries of Newcastle take their toll of power before they pass on the residue to less fortunate communities. Newcastle can give a demonstration on conservation of energy that shows what really can be done when a nation has felt the pinch that comes of waning resources.

America is now in the throes of controversy over the conservation of nattural resources. First the forests were sheared off with prodigal wastefulness, wood grew too dear to burn and coal took its place. When it became evident that the coal mines cannot last forever,

the cry rose "Save the coal by the development of Our unused water power." Now comes the water-power question, and so the argument travels round and round, like a squirrel in a cage, with every new reform discussion and doesn't get anywhere. What is perfectly clear, however, is that when the power is exhausted we shall have to get it elsewhere or do without. This problem has confronted England for a long time; but she was saved preliminary discussion because she had no natural resources to waste. It is the same problem as ours, but worse. Having no forests to chop down and no water powers to use, England's attention is directed toward but one object-making coal go as far as it can. The aim is to get every ounce of energy out of every pound of coal. Electricity, as usual, is the agent used to accomplish this end, and one of the great power companies in northern England has gone so far as to generate less than fifteen per cent of its energy direct from coal. All the rest of its huge output comes from coal which has already performed its ordinary industrial service.

The advantage of getting energy from a pound of coal, instead of a pound of flesh and blood, is that the coal cannot be overworked. There is no eight hour day for coal. It can do a fair amount of work and blow off steam the rest of the time, or it can be made to do more work after it has performed that service.

One of this company's generating stations is at an iron works on the river

Tees, where a tremendous amount of live steam is used in blast furnaces. For years this steam was allowed to blow off as exhaust, even though it contained an incalculable amount of energy. In devising methods for conserving the resources of the district, the power company set about to utilize the waste steam from these blast furnaces by transforming it into electrical energy. So now, when the steam has done its work in the blast furnace, it is not turned loose to shower the passer-by, but is piped across the yard into a steam turbine, where it becomes electric power, to be used perhaps fifty or sixty miles away in some Tyneside shipyard.

This new utilization is of no inconvenience to the iron works. In fact, it is a help, for now the steam is condensed by the power company and returned to the iron works as water, where formerly it exhausted into the air and was not recoverable in any form. The iron works, therefore, not only makes a profit on the steam sold, but has its water bill reduced as well, and the power company, of course, makes a profit on its own use of the waste steam. Thus, this live steam used in making the plates and ribs for the Mauretania, has become as valuable as those plates and ribs themselves. And, it still passes on to do other work and achieve other results quite as profitable as, though perhaps less spectacular than, the construction of a mammoth steamship.

In other cases-at collieries, for example-the waste gases in the manu