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Show IS IT TOO LATE? Secretary Lane's prediction that within sixty days railways and factories fac-tories will be closed for want of fuel unless the oil-leasing bill is passed, appears ap-pears to be an astonishing admission. The approaching shortage of oil has been emphasized from time to time, but the administration and congress evidently have not been sufficiently impressed by the danger. The public will suspect that if our margin of safety safe-ty is only sixty days, it is not enough to prevent the catastrophe the secretary secre-tary fears. However favorable the leasing bill may be to development, it would seem as if the new law could not of itself provide sufficient impetus to prevent a shortage of fuel oil. Steps should have been taken earlier to avert disaster. If necessary, the government should have organized the development work itself on a gigantic scale. It appears to have limited itself to the making of a comparatively com-paratively long drawn-out survey to determine actual conditions. The mere suspicion that we were nearing a fuel-oil fuel-oil famine should have been enough to set governmental agencies rapidly at work to develop new oil fields and to energize the development in the old fields, Unless the administration arrives at decisions more promptly and executes its plans with the utmost vigor, we shall soon hear the cry raised against our government that has constantly been hurled at the British government the ory of "too late, always too late. ' ' |