Rubber

The Secretary of Commerce, short and rotund and intent on business, appeared last week again before the House Committee on Commerce, which he recently provoked into an investigation of foreign price-control of rubber, coffee and other products. He declared that since the committee began investigation prices had fallen from $1.10 a pound to 85-c- (and even lower) on rubber; that users had already planned two corporations to seek relief -- one with a capital of $10,000,000, the other with a capital of $50,000,000. He repeated that he did not favor reprisals, but declared that if prices continued upward, reprisals might be demanded by public opinion, and the Administration was foreign monopolies in raw materials. He specifically suggested that the Federal Trade Commission be given permanent authority to collect data on the profits on foreign raw products in which there are monopolies in order to keep the country posted. discouraging loans by bankers to The British side of the picture was explained by Sir Esme Howard* the British Ambassador, at a luncheon given him in Manhattan by the Advertising Club of New York. He said: "I refer to that most useful material known as rubber, especially provided, one would suppose, by nature to ward off inconvenient and unpleasant shocks, but which latterly seems to have lost this pleasant quality, and to be charged with an all too electric-shock creating power."

He went on to describe his own attempt at rubber growing many years ago: "I traveled for two years at my own expense, in the Amazons and in Mexico and the West Indies, accompanied by a botanist who has since risen to eminence in the University of Cambridge. Well, in spite of that, to make a long story short, we planted the wrong kind of rubber tree in the West Indies, and after waiting for over ten years to see if the tree we planted, the Castilloa Elastica of Mexico and Central America, would bear productively in plantations, we found it would not, and were obliged to cut them all down. I lost my time and my money and what was worse, the money of my friends who had joined me in the venture.

"I saw the other day in a paper that when the word 'rubber' was mentioned, an Englishman's expression was like that of the cat caught by the empty cream jug or the empty canary cage. You will understand that the word 'rubber' does not produce that particular kind of satisfaction in my soul." He told of the ups and downs of rubber planting; told of hard times immediately following the War when "it was literally a case with many plantations of 'To be or not to be--aye, there's the rubber!'" He concluded: "Although prices for crude rubber touched exceedingly high levels for a few months last year, the average price for the whole year was only about 73-c- a pound, and the average for the past five years has been only about 32-c- or 33-c-. "Neither the Government of Great Britain nor that of the Straits Settlement gets anything out of it except so far as increased prosperity increases revenue derived from ordinary taxation. Further, it is in no way discriminatory or aimed at the American consumer, for the British consumer all over the world pays just as much as the American, and incidentally, seems to be objecting to doing so. "In these circumstances I hope you will agree with me that the words extortion, holdups, gouging, etc., which have been frequently used in this connection, are, to put it mildly, as Mark Twain said of the reports of his own death, perhaps a trifle exaggerated. If, to quote an old English proverb: 'Soft words butter no parsnips,' neither are hard words milch cows from which we extract the milk of human kindness."

* The Ambassador's son, 12-year-old Henry Howard, attending Newman School, famed Catholic preparatory institution at Lakewood, N. J., was one night last week forced out into a driving sleet storm when fire demolished his dormitory.