The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Ltd., which is closely allied to the Burmah Oil Company (capital, £6,000,000) by reason of its large interest therein, has come into prominence during recent years, owing mainly to its agreement with the British Government, in which the latter has invested over £4,000,000 of the public moneys in the enterprise. The Company acquired its petroliferous concessions from several interests, including the Burmah Oil Company and the late Lord Strathcona, which had been granted to them by the Persian Government. When I mention that the Company’s concessions cover an area of, approximately, half a million square miles, and on which petroleum has been found in quantity on the majority of the small areas already examined, the significance of the enterprise will be somewhat appreciated. There is no doubt that the company’s success is doubly assured, and, from this point of view, the investment of the public moneys in the undertaking has been sound finance, especially when one considers the important part which petroleum products under British control must hereafter play. As a matter of fact, the proposition is a well-paying one to-day, and it is asserted that the Government’s interest is already worth no less than £20,000,000. Persia as an oil-producing country will occupy a very prominent place. The Company has immense petroleum-producing fields: it has its pipe-line to seaboard, and its refineries, situate on the Persian Gulf. It has possibilities without end, and it is rapidly availing itself of them. The Company also now owns the entire capital of three formerly German-owned concerns in London--the British Petroleum Company, Ltd., the Homelight Oil Company, Ltd., and the Petroleum Steamship Company, Ltd. Consequent upon these acquisitions, the Anglo-Persian Company, Ltd., is making arrangements to enter the English market as distributors of Persian petroleum. The question of transport need not here be considered, for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company owns the entire capital of the British Tanker Co., Ltd. The Company thus has the producing and refining possibilities: the acquired concern of the Tanker Company, together with that of the Petroleum Steamship Co., will suffice to bring its products to the English market, while the large distributing organizations of the British Petroleum Company and the Homelight Oil Company, owning depots all over the country, will offer easy facilities for the distribution of the petroleum products imported. My argument all along has been that the advent of the British Government into this enterprise--I will not call it a speculation, though at one time it looked like it--places all that private enterprise, which in the past has brought all the products of petroleum to our own doors at a reasonable and competitive price, at absolute discount. Ever since the petroleum industry assumed proportions of international magnitude, and we became more or less (I should have said