THE RUBBER INDUSTRY ON THE AMAZON Rubber, the elastic gum bled from certain trees and shrubs, has been so long associated in thought with the sweltering, shadowy forests of the great Amazon river, that it is not a matter for wonder that for many years after Wickham made his famous experiments with rubber seeds, first in Kew and then in the East, both Brazilians and the general public paid little heed to the possibility of plantation rubber as a commercial rival of the Amazonian product. It was not until 1910 that manufacturers began to take plantation rubber seriously and to use it freely, and not until 1912–13 that production from these sedulously cared-for trees drew level with and surpassed the output from Brazil. Today, with plantation rubber offering something like one hundred and fifty thousand tons of crude rubber, and Brazil maintaining her average output of about thirty-seven thousand tons, the race would be a very uneven one if it were not for one factor, the wonderful resiliency of “hard fine Pará” which renders it unequalled in quality. The two industries, that of Brazil and of Malaysia, are strikingly at variance in almost everything except the fact that they deal with extraction of the latex of _hevea brasiliensis_. In Brazil we have enormous areas of dim, sultry, water-bordered forest, where wild rubber trees are sought for amongst eighty or so other varieties of trees: where the labourer is, or at least imagines himself to be, a free agent, bound only by his debt to the central store, working when he thinks fit, living in a solitary hut without society, and making a little balance of profit at the end of the season if he is lucky; he buys all his necessities of food and tools in the dearest market in the world, and sells at the price forced upon the Amazon by the rival industry half the world distant. In the East is an organized industry operated by wealthy companies, where land was cleared, rubber planted methodically, hired labourers working under control, paid by the day, where the latex is coagulated in factories, milled into fine sheets, and goes to market in a form that does not bear outwardly any relation to the big black balls, smoke-cured in the seringueiro’s hut, sent out from the Amazon. Nevertheless it is the unorganized, unscientific industry which yields the product with the highest price on international markets, and, huge as is the deluge of plantation rubber today, there is no good reason why the Eastern and Amazonian industries should not continue side by side. Arabian coffee has not been commercially ruined on account of Brazilian production of _coffea arabica_.