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90 from the beginning, the biggest oil producer in the world, nobody seems to have taken the slightest interest in building up a mercantile marine for the United States on the basis of the cheapest and largest oil supplies on our side of both oceans.

While the British government announces in Parliament that its mercantile shipping is within five or ten per cent of what it was at the beginning of the war, except so far as it is commandeered for war service, and at the same time declares that its naval forces are so rapidly expanding that at the close of this war it will have a tonnage equaling the entire naval tonnage of the rest of the world, it is not unmindful of the future in its mercantile shipping, especially in relation to improvements and developments in connection with oil supplies.

While the British navy is probably taking twenty thousand barrels a day from the Mexican Eagle Company, a British steamship company is negotiating with the Mexican Petroleum Company for a very considerable part of its production in the future.

The Mexican Petroleum Company may elect to deliver the oil at Tampico or elsewhere around the world on six months' notice. Of