82 CENTRAL AMERICAN RUBBER TREE. 



German coffee-plantation syndicates of Guatemala. And } r et it is no 

 uncommon occurrence for managers to resign such positions and go to 

 planting- for themselves. Great physical endurance, unusual executive 

 ability, inflexible integrity of character, and extensive practical and 

 local knowledge must be combined in a man who is able to handle suc- 

 cessfully and honestly the complicated affairs of a large tropical planta- 

 tion. He must be expert, or at least efficient, in everything from 

 ditch digging to diplomacy, and when he is once well established and 

 well acquainted with the country and with native customs, languages, 

 and laws he is, as it were, master of the situation, and can make moiie} 7 

 many times as fast as any " new comer, 1 ' no matter how capable. 

 Many of the estimates of the cost of opening rubber plantations over- 

 look the cost of management entirely, while others place it at a ridicu- 

 lously insufficient figure. Some rubber plantations are being opened 

 by men who have other remunerative interests which have enabled 

 them to accumulate tropical experience and local knowledge, and 

 who can be replaced only with much difficulty and much additional 

 expense. 



Investors in rubber plantations can not, as a rule, give personal 

 attention to the points detailed above, but they have at least the respon- 

 sibility of deciding whether the home officers of their companies have 

 considered these and other obvious requirements for success. Without 

 entering further into details, it ma} T be said that, if many of the compa- 

 nies conduct their plantations as recklessly as they make advertising 

 promises, the plantations and the promises must alike fail, or succeed 

 only by the merest chance. It is, perhaps, unfair to impugn the honesty 

 and intelligence of the officers of such companies, but it is certain that 

 their advertising matter is being prepared by persons who know little 

 about tropical agriculture in general or rubber culture in particular, 

 or by those who carelessly or intentionally misrepresent the facts. The 

 appeal is to the cupidity rather than to the good sense of the investor, 

 though it is probably superfluous to warn those who have not yet learned 

 that safe investments, bringing annual dividends of from 20 to 200 per 

 cent do not go begging in the newspapers and magazines, while millions 

 are available for anything which can assure returns at 5 per cent. It 

 is a fact full of significance that during two decades and upward, in 

 which man}' experiments were made by individuals and small com- 

 panies, no large and well-advised interests invested in rubber culture. 

 The importers and manufacturers of rubber in particular constitute a 

 very intelligentand well-endowed financial community, which has from 

 the first been keenly alive to the future of rubber production, and } T et 

 it is only within comparatively recent years that capital from this 

 quarter has gone into rubber plantations, and even this has been applied 

 in experimental quantities rather than in amounts indicative of estab- 

 lished confidence in the prospects of rubber culture. 



