tion of steel and output, but a fear
that we may not be able to get enough rubber to shoe the expanding host
of cars. You have only to look at the change in price to get a hint of
the growth of this feature of the business. In 1900 crude rubber sold
at sixty-five cents a pound; now it brings about two dollars and fifty
cents.

The facts about rubber have a peculiar human interest. When you sit
back comfortably in your smooth-running car, you may not realize that
the rubber in the tire that stands between you and the jolting of the
road was carried on the back of a native for a thousand miles out of
the Amazon jungle; that for every twenty pounds of the crude juice
brought in from the wilds, one human life has been sacrificed. No crop
is garnered with so great a hazard; none takes so merciless a toll.

The natives who gather rubber in the wilds of Brazil, in the Congo, in
Ceylon, and elsewhere must combat disease, insects, war, flood, and a
hundred hardships. The harvest is slow and costly. Only the planting of
vast new areas in Ceylon has prevented what many believe would have
been a famine in rubber, and this would have been a serious check to
the development of the whole automobile business, for as yet no man has
found a substitute for it. In such a substitute, or in a puncture-proof
tire, lies one of the unplucked fortunes of the future.

Meanwhile, it has started a speculative mania that almost rivals the
tulip excitement in Holland. In London alone hundreds of fortunes have
been made by daring plungers in a crude article which only a few years
ago was regarded as being absolutely outside the pale of the gambling
marketplace.

Closely allied with the rubber end of the trade is the growing demand
for sea-island cotton, which is used in the tires. A few years ago we
used only fifty thousand yards a year; now we absorb ten million yards,
worth seven and one-half millions of dollars.

Now take machinery, and you find that the automobile business has
created a whole new phase of this time-tried industry. In many
motor-cars there are three thousand parts. In view of the extraordinary
demand for cars, the machinery to produce them must be both swift and
accurate. The old standard tools and engine lathes were inadequate to
perform the service. The automobile-makers had to have new machinery,
and have it in a hurry.

This demand came at a heaven-sent moment for the tool-manufacturers.
They were staggering under the de