The sensational leaps in prices that have occurred in world markets since rubber became commercialized have brought great quantities of money to the Amazon; many fortunes rocketed to the skies, and there was a period when a golden flood flowed up the river as well as down, when Manáos, the rubber city of the riverine interior, displayed more luxury for its size than Paris, and the best diamond market in the world was in this remote spot. Anything sufficiently extravagant could be sold; a stream of jewels, silks, fine wines and foods, furniture, carriages, adventuring people and solid cash went up the Amazon, passing for a thousand miles nothing but the green matted walls edging the huge yellow river and an occasional palm leaf shack perched half in the water, and one or two trading points, to find their objective in the brilliant little mushroom town on the Rio Negro. There was one year when the yield of taxes from rubber to the public revenue of Amazonas was twenty-three thousand contos of reis, and this at an exchange of over £66 to the conto, means £1,520,000 or nearly $8,000,000. Practically the whole of this money was collected and spent in Manáos, then (1899–1900) a city of fifty or sixty thousand population—much of it “floating,” as its present reduction to about forty thousand demonstrates. It was in the golden period of Amazonian rubber exports that both Manáos and Pará clothed themselves in all modern civic graces; fine public buildings, well-paved streets, street-cars, good sanitation, water-supplies of unimpeachable source, electric light, and numbers of splendid private dwellings remain as a return for some of the floods of money earned by the gum of the deep forests. There was at the same time tremendous waste and an enthusiastic “graft” era, which has left a heavy burden of debt upon the Amazon. Numbers of unfinished buildings, some begun at great cost, still stand in Manáos, eloquent witnesses to the headlong gambling spirit that informed this city a few years ago. The Amazon refused to believe that any but temporary shadows could fall upon the rubber industry: there had been several periods of depression from various causes before plantation rubber loomed into view, but always “something happened to help the Amazon,” whether quickened demand or a fall in exchange which reduced local costs; now the European War is operating to stimulate American demands for Brazilian rubber, and to that extent faith in good luck is again justified, but the rubber-producing centres will need good works as well as faith if the present rewards, comparatively modest as they are, are to be maintained.