It cannot be deemed uninteresting to inquire what are the repositories
of coal that can supply the metropolis and the southern counties, when
no more can be obtained from the Tyne and the Wear. The only coal-fields
of any extent on the eastern side of England, between London and Durham,
are those of Derbyshire and those in the west riding of Yorkshire. The
Derbyshire coal-field is not of sufficient magnitude to supply, for any
long period, more than is required for home consumption, and that of the
adjacent counties. There are many valuable beds of coal in the western
part of the west riding of Yorkshire which are yet unwrought; but the
time is not very distant when they must be put in requisition, to supply
the vast demand of that populous manufacturing county, which at present
consumes nearly all the produce of its own coal mines. In the midland
counties, Staffordshire possesses the nearest coal districts to the
metropolis, of any great extent; but such is the immense daily
consumption of coal in the iron-furnaces and founderies, that it is
generally believed this will be the first of our own coal-fields that
will be exhausted. The thirty-feet bed of coal in the Dudley coal-field
is of limited extent; and in the present mode of working it, more than
two-thirds of the coal is wasted and left in the mine.

If we look to Whitehaven or Lancashire, or to any of the minor
coal-fields in the west of England, we can derive little hope of their
being able to supply London and the southern counties with coal, after
the import of coal fails from Northumberland and Durham. We may thus
anticipate a period not very remote, when all the English mines of coal
and ironstone will be exhausted; and were we disposed to indulge in
gloomy forebodings, like the ingenious authoress of the "Last Man," we
might draw a melancholy picture of our starving and declining
population, and describe some manufacturing patriarch, like the late