Of course, the day came at last when the public began to feel they were playing a reckless game. Newspapers were warning them of the risks they were running; rumours were abroad that certain shares were not worth a penny, since they represented partnership rights in land which had not been cleared of jungle, let alone planted up with a single rubber-tree; hints were going round that the rubber-trees on some of the genuine plantations were being overtapped in order that for the moment big profits should be made at any cost, to compare well with the present high price of shares. People saw themselves losing heavily, sooner or later, if their shares were left on their hands. Now everyone was feverishly anxious to sell, and hardly anyone wanted to buy. Prices which had risen so rapidly went down with a slump even more rapidly. More fortunes were lost in that Slump than were made during the Boom, and some of the folk who were most badly hit in the end were people who had won large sums at the beginning of the game, and had thus been tempted to go on playing more and more recklessly. Among the few who profited in the long-run were men who had pinned their faith to plantation rubber long before the Boom. Some of them had brought the rubber plantations into existence, had worked hard at clearing jungle and planting rubber-trees, had struggled to pay their way whilst they brought up those trees to producing stage, in the days when the public would not have risked a penny on any such hazardous venture as rubber-growing, even if they had been wide awake enough to know that a few enthusiasts and a few hard-up planters were trying to establish this new branch of agriculture. When these men had been obliged to get a few friends to help them turn their property into a partnership concern, because they wanted ready money to go on with, they had taken some of the purchase price of their property in the form of shares, so that they themselves could be partners. Fortunes were also cleared by outsiders who had had enough faith in plantation rubber to buy shares when the earliest planted estates were turned into companies, for all the people who had taken over or bought shares for a small sum were able to sell their partnership rights at a big profit in the early days of Boom. Many of them bought back shares when prices fell, and bargain after bargain was picked up during the Slump by people who knew which companies possessed the best plantations. You must not imagine that the crash put an end to rubber-growing. True, the faith of the public in this industry had been roughly shaken at the critical time when that faith was just beginning to bud; but the industry was sufficiently well-established to withstand this check, and go on fighting to attain its main object--to become more popular than Wild Rubber with the manufacturer. CHAPTER XIV WILD RUBBER _v._ PLANTATION RUBBER