We are told that all this is in the interests of peace. The truth is that the peace of the world is never menaced

except by these same armies and navies that are supposed to preserve it. Nations are like individuals: the con

sciousness of strength makes them bullies, and bullies are always cowards. That is why in all the wars of the last century no nation has ever picked out a foe of its own size. Big Russia bullied little Japan and got the thrashing it richly deserved. If Russia had not possessed a standing army of 1,200,000 men, including those loudly vaunted Cossacks, there would have been no Russo-Jap

anese war.

England bullied a little handful of Dutch farmers in the wilds of Africa beyond human endurance. Fifteen thousand children perished miserably in the concentration camps established by the British in the war that followed the bullying. That was only a minor incident in the tragedy in referring to the result of which the Bishop of Truro said:

"God has added to this empire a diamond field, a land whose harvest is pure gold."

Without a great army and a greater navy England would not have played the part of a bully, the harvest of pure gold would have gone on just the same and a

good many thousand innocent people would have lived to enjoy their share of it.

Germany has been unable to find an opportunity to preserve the peace on a large scale with her standing army of 620,000 men. But here is a peace preserving incident in Southwest Africa as described in a German paper: A party of German scouts captured five native women. As a body of two hundred natives was known to be in the immediate vicinity it unsafe to shoot the women. So the officer in command ordered ten men to fix bayonets. Placing five men in front and five behind the women they were stabbed until they were quite peaceful.

Five million soldiers at an annual cost of two billion dollars to preserve the peace among people who have not the slightest desire to fight! If we cannot do better than that let us start that universal war of which so much has been said, kill each other off as fast as possible and leave the world vacant until a race of beings with more sense than we have comes along to occupy it.

TURNING COAL

SLACK INTO COKE

By WM. R. BOWKER

D

URING recent years, in Great Britain and elsewhere, "coal slack" from the mines is being converted into a kind of cokecharcoal. This process is being exploited by German and Belgian inventors and financiers, and the process yields a handsome margin of profit; in fact, it is claimed that more money is made, weight for weight, from the conversion of slack into coke than in the coal-mining itself.

In a few words, the principle of manufacture is to compress the coal slack into a rectangular solid mass, and transfer it to a highly heated furnace or coking oven and after subjecting it to a prolonged high temperature to withdraw the heated mass and rapidly cool by subjecting it to a finely divided spray of water.

As a preliminary, the coal slack, as it comes from the mine screens, is elevated to a slack tower. The slack elevator is electrically driven by a motor. Here it is washed and, if necessary, passed through a disintegrator, so as thoroughly to pulverize it, after which it is stored in huge slack bins, which are fed by the action of gravity from the tower.

From the bins it is fed, by gravity, as required, into a compressor, which consists of a strong metal trough, above and over which there travels from end to end a duplicate stamper, consisting of metal plungers with flat cast iron feet.

The vertical movement of the two stampers exerts a compressing effect on the coal slack, and at the same time the mechanism travels horizontally to and fro, by automatic reversal, from end to end of the compressing trough, thus allowing the plungers thoroughly to compress the mass of pulverized slack. After being prepared by this process the motor-driven

ELEVATING AND DISINTEGRATING TOWER USED IN THE COKE-CONVERTING PROCESS.

charging plunger moves forward and pushes the compressed mass into the furnace or coking oven.

To convert the slack into coke-charcoal occupies from one to two hours. The size of the mass of compressed slack is about fifteen feet long, from two to three feet deep, and from eighteen inches to two feet wide. When sufficiently heated and thoroughly baked, the front and rear oven doors are opened, the charging plunger moves forward, being supported and guided over rollers, and driven by a rack mechanism, and the red-hot mass of converted slack is pushed out. It falls on a sheet-metal floor. Immediately it is cooled by means of the cold water spray, which causes it also partially to break asunder into smaller pieces. These larger pieces of coke require breaking into smaller pieces suitable for general use. After this, it is drawn to one side and thoroughly cooled and then is loaded on trucks and shipped.

The furnace may have anywhere from twenty to thirty hives or coking chambers. It usually takes from twenty to thirty minutes thoroughly to compress the prepared slack into a moderately compact mass. The stamper plungers alternately strike the slack about forty to sixty times a minute. Each stamper foot weighs about 25 to 35 pounds and has a vertical drop of eighteen to thirty inches.

TELL you, Brown, that press looks good to me, all right, but I think. before I lay in any more machinery I'd better tinker myself up a bit. Here I've put thirty thousand dollars into new iron the past year, while my own body is about ready for the scrap heap. Tell me how I can get myself to running as smoothly and noiselessly as that jobber you're trying to sell me and I'll talk business with you."

"Is that a go, sir? Shake on it!"

And the young man, a salesman for an eastern printers' supply house, proceeded to unfold a story that was simplicity itself, but which, put to the test, made a mental machine of his client that rivaled in efficiency and working capacity the new printing press which he afterward ordered of Brown.

"It lies pretty much in the stoking.' said Brown. "Most people need automatic stokers a whole lot more than their furnaces do. They load food into the body when the system does not need it, and in quantities that would stagger a locomotive. As for quality, you might as well try to heat a ten-apartment house with grout as to keep the body and mind in a strenuous working condition on a coffee and cruller diet.'

The salesman was right. Run over the list of business and professional men of your acquaintance and observe how few of them enter their office in the morning with an alert, buoyant step, a pair of clear eyes, eager, positively eager, for the work of the day. Seldom will you find a good "attack," to borrow a musical term; the orchestra lacks ginger, and the composition, written as a march, is rendered as a dirge. Then ponder the fact that ninety per cent of all sickness and inefficiency can be traced back to disorders of digestion, and the supreme importance of stoking becomes apparent.

A man, after all, is but a glorified locomotive. Fuel, in the case of the engine is "burned," in man digestedin the one case quite as literally as in the other it is a matter of combustion. In both engines poisonous gases are produced in the process of burning: in the locomotive these gases escape with the smoke through the smokestack; in man they leave the body by way of the kidneys, the exhaled breath, and the skin.

We must assume that Nature in making her blue prints of the first human machine provided sufficient outlet for these poisons. That original sketch. showed, not an inert mass of flesh and bones propped up before a desk all day and calling it work, nor a woman holding in her delicate, blue-veined fingers a bridge-score pencil and calling it play. The structure of our bodies is the only clue we have of the original plans of our architect, but these show conclusively that work and play were meant to involve vigorous action in the open air.

Now physical exertion is work in exact proportion as the kidneys are overworked. Work hard enough to utilize all your food in the manufacture of energy, so that your kidneys have comparatively few poisons to eliminate, and the hardest kind of work becomes mere recreation. Reduce at once the strenuousness of your occupation and the size of your grocery bill and your work is still recreation. Then put on a boiled shirt and collar and other togs to match, hire an office and dedicate your remaining days to sedentary employment, and you will still find it a comparatively simple matter to keep in the pink of condition-merely by going in for what to your grocer will look disgustingly like a boycott.

On the other hand, continue to hold down your "position" on three, or, may