Septkmbf.r 1, 1913.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



607 



NOT ALL RUBBER GATHERING INHUMANE. 



T 



[irolection lor the Indians as well as an arrangement for 

 localizing native labor. 



HE report of the House of Commons Committee on "l-'or that purpose Brazil is divided into ten regions, 

 the I'utumayo situation, mentioned in the July is- each in charge of an in.spector and several employes, 



sue of this publication, contained the following para- 

 graph : "The committee further expresses the belief 

 that the rutunuiyo incidents are but a shocking instance 

 of the coiiditii-in.s tiiat tire fnuud <iver a wide area in 

 South America." 



A correspondent who has passed five years in tbt; 

 Amazon coinitry as manager of a rubber gathering com- 

 pany, sends Tiii': I.ndi.v RfiusEK W'oki.d a letter — which 

 will be found on a later pa^e in this issue — in which he 

 takes very strong exception to this particular statement 

 of the House of Commons Committee and goes on to 

 describe in considerable detail the conditions under which 

 rubber is gathered along the Amazon, as typified by the 

 station with which he was connected. 



Of course, no one believes for a moment that the situ- 

 ation in the Putumayo has any duplicate along the 

 Amazon. Hardships there necessarily are, but the letter 

 of our correspondent is extremely interesting as showing 

 under what humane conditions this work can be carried 

 on. Undoubtedly his camp as he describes it is a type 

 of many others along the great rubber river. Naturally, 

 the manager of such a rubber gathering station is su- 

 preme — his word is law — and the conditions of the camp 

 are very much as he chooses to make them. The chief 

 explanation for the horrors of the Putumayo lies in the 

 system of practical .slavery that has obtained there, under 

 wliicli the rubber gatherer when once in debt to the com- 

 pany — and that occurs practically as soon as he begins 

 to work for the company — comes completely under its 

 power and so remains until he has worked off his debt, 

 which, in the majority of cases, is a matter of so much 

 difficulty as to amount practically to an impossibility. 

 Along the Amazon, where the rubber gatherers are free 

 agents and no such system of peonage obtains, the bar- 

 barities of the Putumayo could not occur. 



The counsel of the Brazilian embassy in this coun- 

 try, Mr. C. L. Chermot, corroborates our correspond- 

 ent in regard to the treatment of the rubber gatherers 

 along the Amazon. Being interviewed a few days ago 

 on this subject, he said that the situation of Indians liv- 

 ing in Brazil is very different from that described in the 

 Putumayo district. He continues : "They have been con- 

 stantly cared for by the government. Since 1910 there 

 has existed in the agricultural department a bureau of 



chosen with great care, all of them being subordinate to 

 a central bureau in Rio Janeiro. Four of those regions, 

 are situated in the basin of the Amazon, from which 

 comes the principal rubber |)roduction of Brazil, and it 

 is well to notice that for this .service Urazil, as shown by 

 the budget of la.st year^ spent over ^Cif/tflOO." 



INSURANCE IN WHOLESALE LOTS. 



M^' 



'CH has been said during the last decade about the 

 ever increasing efficiency of our American busi- 

 ness methods, but there is one particular branch of in- 

 dustrial activit} which certainly has been open to the 

 charge of wastefulnes.s — and that is the system of life 

 insurance for wage earners. As it has been carried on, its 

 cost has been out of all proportion to the results obtained. 

 There has been altogether too much machinery for the 

 output. The working man and working woman have been 

 insured for small amounts, against which there have had 

 to be charged the commission of the agent, the doctor's 

 fee for examination, and then the extremely expensive 

 weekly collections, where the collector went from ])olicy- 

 hcjlder to policv-holder, getting 10 cents, or even less, at 

 a time. The extravagance and general inefficiency of this 

 svstem are obvious. 



But a new sort of insurance has recently been intro- 

 duced to cover just this class of people, which eliminates 

 all this waste. It is "Group Insurance" — insurance by 

 wholesale — under which a blanket policy is written for 

 a large number of people, without the expense of medical 

 examination. While the insurance covers many lives, 

 there is but one policy and but one transaction. For in- 

 stance : A Chicago company employing about 3,500 men 

 took out a policy which gave each man in its employ in- 

 surance equal to twice the amount of one year's pay. 

 The face of the policy was for over $6,000,000, but by 

 the avoidance of commissions and medical fees and much 

 clerical work, there was an initial saving of $50,000 on 

 the transaction. Insurance companies have foimd from 

 experience that it is a perfectly safe risk to insure a body 

 of working men — whose condition of health permits 

 them to discharge their duties efficiently — ^without any 

 individual examination, as in such a group of men a nor- 

 mal death rate can be relied upon. 



A good many employers are availing themselves of 



