The United States uses three-fourths of the world’s rubber output and grows none of it.  What is the use of tropical possessions if we do not make use of them?  The Philippines could grow all our rubber and keep a $300,000,000 business under our flag.  Santo Domingo, where rubber was first discovered, is now under our supervision and could be enriched by the industry.  The Guianas, where the rubber tree was first studied, might be purchased.  It is chiefly for lack of a definite colonial policy that our rubber industry, by far the largest in the world, has to be dependent upon foreign sources for all its raw materials.  Because the Philippines are likely to be cast off at any moment, American manufacturers are placing their plantations in the Dutch or British possessions.  The Goodyear Company has secured a concession of 20,000 acres near Medan in Dutch Sumatra.

While the United States is planning to relinquish its Pacific possessions the British have more than doubled their holdings in New Guinea by the acquisition of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Land, good rubber country.  The British Malay States in 1917 exported over $118,000,000 worth of plantation-grown rubber and could have sold more if shipping had not been short and production restricted.  Fully 90 per cent. of the cultivated rubber is now grown in British colonies or on British plantations in the Dutch East Indies.  To protect this monopoly an act has been passed preventing foreigners from buying more land in the Malay Peninsula.  The Japanese have acquired there 50,000 acres, on which they are growing more than a million dollars’ worth of rubber a year.  The British Tropical Life says of the American invasion:  “As America is so extremely wealthy Uncle Sam can well afford to continue to buy our rubber as he has been doing instead of coming in to produce rubber to reduce his competition as a buyer in the world’s market.”  The Malaya estates calculate to pay a dividend of 20 per cent. on the investment with rubber selling at 30 cents a pound and every two cents additional on the price brings a further 3-1/2 per cent. dividend.  The output is restricted by the Rubber Growers’ Association so as to keep the price up to 50-70 cents.  When the plantations first came into bearing in 1910 rubber was bringing nearly $3 a pound, and since it can be produced at less than 30 cents a pound we can imagine the profits of the early birds.

The fact that the world’s rubber trade was in the control of Great Britain caused America great anxiety and financial loss in the early part of the war when the British Government, suspecting—­not without reason—­that some American rubber goods were getting into Germany through neutral nations, suddenly shut off our supply.  This threatened to kill the fourth largest of our industries and it was only by the submission of American rubber dealers to the closest supervision and restriction by the British authorities that they were allowed to continue