Lima, Indiana 93 per cent. Appalachian 70 per cent. Colorado 65 per cent. Illinois 51 per cent. But Mr. White himself admits that there are in the United States many oil-fields insufficiently exploited or even still unknown. As for Mexican petroleum, which is said to be threatened by salt water, there is no need for uneasiness. Exploitation there is only just beginning and will produce many pleasant surprises. Lord Curzon, moreover, sweeps aside all statistics with a disdainful gesture. We cannot trust their accuracy, he says. But this gesture did not impress the United States; they were determined to obtain satisfaction at any price. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 27: This amount has since been more than doubled.] [Footnote 28: By the contract already mentioned which expired in 1922.] [Footnote 29: _Revue Universelle_, October 15, 1920.] [Footnote 30: They did not sacrifice themselves for nothing!] [Footnote 31: Report of the American Director of the Bureau of Mines, Van H. Manning, to the Secretary of State for the Interior.] [Footnote 32: _Times_, April 6, 1921.] [Footnote 33: In reality, at the date of this Note, the United States were only producing 64 per cent., and a great part of this output is in British hands (_Royal Dutch-Shell_).] [Footnote 34: The question, however, has not been settled as they desired.] CHAPTER XV THE AMERICAN RETORT The United States began to retort by feverishly carrying out a naval program which aimed at depriving Great Britain of the supremacy of the sea. They built an immense merchant marine, which already numbered, on June 30, 1920, more than 28,000 ships. And their dockyards were busy constructing battleships more powerful than those of Britain. At the Washington Conference, Great Britain was obliged to renounce her claim to the sole naval supremacy. Besides, she could not have continued to struggle for it. The United States can devote hundreds of millions of pounds to their fleet without inconvenience, but Great Britain, who has suffered more from the War, and whose budget--if we are to believe her statesmen--is balanced with difficulty, could not do so. The British people are so over-burdened with taxation that it would be impossible to obtain more from them. If Great Britain is no longer sole mistress of the seas, what use, in case of war, would be the enormous oil-deposits of which she has secured the possession in Central America, Mexico, and on both sides of South America? What would be the use of all the work of the _British Controlled Oil-fields_? But if Great Britain still possessed naval supremacy _in the same proportions as in 1914_, it would be sufficient for America to have _a fleet equal to the former German fleet_ in order to prevent her access to the Caribbean Sea. The British fleet would never dare to venture there. It would do as it did from 1914 to 1919!