Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/131

Rh ninety per cent profit. This plant should soon be topping all the oil production. It is better than a gold mine so long as gasolene keeps up in price; it is a mine with the gold minted as a by-product. Yet the buyer who transports it, further refines it and makes distribution, gets almost as much more out of it. Doheny believes in division as the proper way to attain results in addition.

Nevertheless, the Mexican Petroleum Company is completing a two-million-dollar refinery at New Orleans, which should soon be in operation.

And, speaking of oil refining, my mind is still working over the problem of where the wealth from oil in the future is to be, whether from the mining or the refining end.

The Standard Oil people, operating only in American territory and desiring to mine only ten or fifteen per cent of the oil they transport and refine, have taken in dividends, and created in value, more than five billion dollars from the transportation, refining, and marketing of oil. This is a sum five times our recent national debt. It is also the sum of the cost of prosecuting our