Mr. Redwood was thus rather neatly cornered, for he had to admit in his report that this statement was still true. So he had to lay the chief stress on the danger of burning oil escaping on to the water—which the experience of nearly twenty years has proved to be a very trifling risk. The directors of the Suez Canal Company took a very accurate measure of this report when they replied :— Without entering into the question whether the work of Sir F. Abel and Mr. Boverton Redwood is not merely a criticism of our regulations bearing too exclusively the impression of the anxiety of parties interested in the present mode of trans porting petroleum to the East, we, &c.
After this the agitation fizzled out, and the transport of oil in bulk still continues. The subject was referred to at the Institution of Civil Engineers in February, 1894, when Mr. (now Sir) Fortescue Flannery invited Mr. Boverton Redwood to state how his prophecies on the carriage of bulk oil through the Canal had been fulfilled. Mr. Redwood replied thus (Proceedings Inst. C.E., vol. cxvi. p. 250) :— He could only say that if, as appeared to be the case, the transport of petroleum through the canal had been going on with entire absence of anything approaching to an accident, he was very glad to hear it. He did not know, however, that that was to be taken as absolute proof that no risk existed. Time alone, and a longer time than had as yet elapsed, would demonstrate that.
Nearly twenty years have now elapsed ; the Standard Oil Trust itself has tank steamers which convey oil through the Canal, and Mr. Henry in his work shows that between 1892 and 1906 2,000,000 tons of oil were thus trans ported.
With the collapse of its artfully engineered agitation on this subject the Standard next turned its energies to diplomacy. It devoted great arts to Ludwig and Manuel Nobel, the millionaires who had grown rich out of the " gushers " of Baku, and cherished dreams of becoming the Rockefellers of Russia. The Standard's emissaries played on their vanity and induced the Nobels to form the Russian Refiners' Union, which 80 per cent. of the trade had entered in 1894. The idea was that the Russian export output should be limited to an amount agreed with the Standard, and that Nobel Brothers were to be the sole agents in Europe. Each refiner was to send out a certain quantity of oil according to the capacity of his refinery. At the same time there were certain distributing firms in Europe which had been dealing chiefly in Russian oils, and as Nobel Brothers did not require them, the good, kind Standard agreed to buy them up. It is in this
way that the Italian Petroleum Company, the Bremen-American Company, and Reith & Co. of Antwerp (all mentioned in my list of foreign marketing companies) came under the control of the Standard. At the same time they acquired the Kerosene Company, which had a great storage installation close to the Anglo-American plant at Purfleet. The Trust continued to run these businesses in their old names, and it was some time before the truth began to leak out. Production, in Baku was at that time so tremendous that before the three years during which the union was to last had expired, the Russian refiners were quite tired of it. Then the pleasing result was realised that, with the exception of Nobels, none of them had any selling organisation in Europe, and that the Standard had so perfected its control of the kerosene trade that people who wanted Russian oil could only get American. The first firm to take action were the Paris Rothschilds, who are the owners of the Caspian and Black Sea Company at Baku, and next to the Nobels the largest refiners in Russia. They established in 1898 in this country at vast expense a new selling organisation called the Anglo-Caucasian Oil Company, afterwards merged in the Con solidated Petroleum Company, and a vigorous contest took place for their share of the English kerosene trade.
The Russian oil trade has always been a commercial switchback. At the time just mentioned the Rothschilds and Nobels were exporting largely to Europe, and the Man tascheffs were sending large quantities of Russian oil to the Far East. Then came the Baku riots of 1905, when murder and incendiarism stalked through the oil-fields and the production fell off tremendously. It was a stroke of luck for the Standard, for it crippled their (at that time) strongest rival. Since that day the exports of petroleum from Baku have not been large, most of the reduced output being consumed in Russia, where oil fuel is used far more extensively than it is here. Then early last year came the Maikop " boom," a vast number of French and English companies being floated to work oil on the borders of the Black Sea. The majority of them will never produce a barrel of oil, but the good properties will soon be pumping oil, and their product is bound to have its effect on the European market. Hence no doubt the Standard's second reason for embarking on the recent oil war— the desire to stifle these infant companies at their birth, when they are still subject to the diseases of inexperience, experimental work, and bad management.