-A PEACEFUL INDUSTRY For more than half a century, and until recent years, the exploitation of petroleum was pre-eminently an American industry. It was in the United States that oil was first discovered and worked. " Wild cat " hunting (the Ameri cans call a boring a " wild cat ") is a singularly hazardous occupation. Mr. O'Donnell, President of the American Institute of Petroleum, asserts that, out of every hundred borings, ninety-eight are unprofitable. But for fifty years the 2 per cent. which succeeded sufficed for the consumption of the world. The prospector who chanced to strike a gusher " made a fortune. Consequently, the quest for oil reproduced the frenzy of the rush for gold. Innumerable " wild catters " ransacked the wildest mountains of Pennsyl vania, California and Oklahoma ; huge quantities of capital were invested in these undertakings. To-day there are more than r6,000 companies engaged in the search, and there must be very few Americans who have in their safes no share certificates bearing the word " oil." It is a kind of popular lottery The main difficulty is not to produce oil, but to transport it. Since it is found very frequently in desert regions, it used to be a big task to deliver it at the centres of consump tion. Then Rockefeller had a daring idea : he thought of laying pipe lines—aqueducts as it were—through which the oil would flow like a river into immense reservoirs within reach of the refineries, whence tank wagons and tank steamers would carry it all over the world for domestic use. The genius of Rockefeller created all this equipment of pipes and pumps, wagons and tankers, and raised the huge capital required for the purpose. Thenceforward, since the oil was transported almost automatically, its price fell considerably. All the producers became tributaries of the pipe lines, and the Standard Oil Company obtained practi cally complete control of the market. But it remained essentially a transport and refinery undertaking, and even to-day it does not contribute i8 per cent. of the American
production. It has allowed all the small producing com panies which are compulsorily its clients to continue to exist ; only, as controller of the market, it fixes prices. By means of its powerful organisation, it has succeeded in making petroleum a remarkably cheap commodity, world wide in its distribution ; and the octogenarian Rockefeller has amassed one of the most colossal fortunes in history.' Naturally, the grand old man has had imitators. The Rothschilds have exploited the oil of Baku in a similar way. The Dutch, controlling the rich fields of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, have made the Royal Dutch (Koninklijke Nederlandsche Maatschappij) a powerful enterprise, though inferior to the American trust. Then British, French, German, and Austrian companies began to work the fields of Rumania and Galicia. The human race, eager for light and heat, absorbed as much as it was offered ; and all these undertakings prospered.
In the meantime, France, Britain, and Germany, which produced nothing and consumed much, remained passive spectators. They saw these companies contend for their orders, and, by playing upon this competition, they some times obtained oil at a lower price than the producing countries ; in addition, these companies provided profitable investments for their capital. Hence, their Governments did not intervene to quarrel about so valuable a product. If the political world occasionally troubled itself about oil, it was merely to fight the tendency towards trusts, a domestic question pure and simple. Oil had not yet entered the danger zone of diplomatic conflicts. For fifty years it was the most peaceful of industries ; no one could have imagined that one day it would trouble the peace of the world.