March i, iqio.] 



THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD. 



2i; 



A Sensationalist Writes on Rubber. 



THE KEPLY OF A PLANTER. 



TO the Editor of The India Rubber World: An article en- 

 titled "Rubber Slavery in the .Mexican Tropics," which ap- 

 peared in a February magazine (The American), gives 

 such a one sided, distorted, and unjust view of rubber planting 

 in Mexico, that I can speak for many of your subscribers when I 

 say that an answer in your columns will be appreciated by those 

 who are interested in knowing the truth. 



I made a trip to the rubber belt on the Usumacinta river in 

 Chiapas, Mexico, and I failed to see any signs of slavery, 

 although 1 was on four rubber plantations with American 

 managers. The laborers were not forced to work in that dis- 

 trict. None of the managers carried arms of any description, 

 and good results were obtained without friction by giving piece 

 work to the natives, and paying for work done instead of for 

 hours spent at work. When the allotted number of rows of 

 rubber trees which constituted a day's work was cleaned, the 

 laborer quit for the day, or helped out some slower friend on 

 his stint. I could see the laborers come fr.nu the fields as 

 early as 2 o'clock and none later than 6 p. m., and I could 

 see them loaf and smoke and play their musical instruments 

 in the afternoon. As to the "prison huts" mentioned in his 

 "barbarous" article, you have but to look at the photographs 

 enclosed to see that each family on this plantation (which is 

 similar to three others which I visited) has a home of its own 

 and that there is no building for the "herding and guarding of 

 men, women and children by night." 



How much exaggeration there is by the author of that 

 magazine article can be determined by his own statements. He 

 says: "Promoters have sown the country [United States] a 

 foot deep in the last few years with their glowing advertise- 

 ments and impossible panphlets" ; of the battle when an armed 

 force of planters fell upon an unarmed band of escaping 

 enganchados, and "simply strewed the ground with lopped 

 fingers, hands, and arms that were raised to protect heads from 

 the keen machetes"; and, in speaking of laborers at work, 

 "their pantings could be heard at a hundred yards." 



After such statements are we not justified in thinking his 

 imagination overheated and his judgment warped, notwith- 

 standing that he says "it is incumbent upon one to go slowly 

 and keep inside the facts"? Facts! Why he uses the mere 

 statement of an uniformed man in Vera Cruz to color his article 

 and convey the impression that there is no rubber in Mexico, but 

 only experiments. 



How ignorant of rubber culture the author is, I leave you to 

 judge from his reference to the experimental tapping of seven 

 year old trees from which were obtained the disappointing ( ?) 

 average of two ounces per tree. "This caused me," he .says "to 

 revise the notions of a pound of rubber per tree, gained from 

 advertising pamphlets." Now I know of no company which 

 claims to get one pound per tree per tapping. Several tappings 

 throughout the year are necessary to get a pound a tree from 

 such young trees. Yet two ounces per tapping is four times as 

 great as the amount obtained from Hcvea trees at seven years 

 of age in Ceylon and Malaya, whose plantation companies listed 

 on the London stock exchange were reported some time ago, 

 in The Financier and BuUionisi to have an average market 

 valuation of $615.00 per acre for trees averaging three years old, 

 in 80 companies. 



That magazine writer will do a great injustice to some small 

 investors if he causes them to throw up their rubber investments 

 in honestly managed companies. He not only runs down the 

 industry but all company management as being dishonest. Such 

 wholesale censure is worth no more attention than the man who 



gives it. No business man would be influenced one way or 

 another by such a prejudical writer who is looking for notoriety 

 to advertise the book he writes. He is a sensationalist, and 

 paid for being one. A sane article would not be as readable in 

 some quarters. 



I for one would rather get my information on rubber culture 

 from United States and Mexican government reports; from 

 such reputable journals as The Financier and BuUionisi, and 

 The India Rubber World, the Editor of which latter has 

 traveled in nearly all the rubber producing districts of the 

 world, and who has studied rubber culture for so many years, 

 than to be guided by a novelist, who has spent only six "months' 

 on some out of the way rubber plantations that are no criterion. 



W. L. HASEROUCK. 

 Second Vice President The Castilloa Rubber Plantation Co 

 (Portland, Oregon). 

 Syracuse, New York, February 17, 1910. 



BY WAY OF COMMENT. 



There is much in the point of view. Once on a holiday the 

 writer of these lines, in walking about New York with a man 

 of large attainments and national reputation, pointed out that 

 the section in which we happened to be was filled with people 

 who, in their native lands, were oppressed to a position beneath 

 cattle. They were people who, as immigrants crossing the 

 Atlantic— or any other ocean— were treated on shipboard even 

 worse than cattle, and it did not occur to them to resent it. Here 

 they had imbibed ideas of self respect; their children were 

 clean faced, not in rags, and had shoes on their feet. Here 

 was improvement in conditions which later would make their 

 descendants free and equal citizens of the United States. What 

 followed was a signed article in an important periodical by the 

 writer's friend, whose heart bled at seeing such miserable con- 

 ditions in America's leading city. The surroundings were such 

 as he would not like to have his own family subjected to. 



The writer's friend doubtless would be shocked to see the con- 

 ditions under which some men work in producing rubber on 

 every continent. To begin with, the production of rubber has 

 been brought about by foreigners coming in and starting the 

 natives to work; else there never would have been any rubber 

 m any civilized or other market. It is not implied that rubber 

 gathering necessarily involves cruelty to or inhuman treatment 

 of a single individual who happens to become employed in this 

 work. But conditions which up to date are inseparable from 

 the work of getting out forest rubber may prove repugnant to 

 one wdiose knowledge of life takes no account of cotton factory 

 conditions in England or of coal mining in certain parts of the 

 United States— to go no farther for comparisons. 



The magazine to which our correspondent alludes, edited by 

 able minds as it is, owes its success to providing its readers 

 with "thrillers"— stories of life that shock its readers that such 

 things can be, and yet they flock to read such magazines as 

 certain misguided ones flock to see opium smoking and other 

 horrors in "Chinatown," with the result that the "heathen 

 Chinee" is always in waiting to give "slumming" parties every 

 thrill they are looking for and more— with details previously 

 unknown in Chinatown. The particular issue of the magazine 

 referred to contains a thrilling story of New York life— "The 

 Young Girl." No doubt such "young girls" have lived in New 

 York, and in every other city, and in many villages, but is the 

 "Ida" of Mr. Oppenheim's story typical of civilization in the 

 United States? And if it is, does the imaginative writer sug- 

 gest any remedy? By the way. the writer on Mexico fails either 

 to show that the conditions he claims to exist are typical, or to 

 propose remedies. 



