The Austrian journals have been chronicling the absorption of the principal refineries of Austria and Hungary by a combination, of which the Rothschilds are the most important members, as they are of that in Russia. This combination, which first appears in 1892, has by 1894 accumulated a reserve of 3,000,000 gulden on a capital of 1,000,000 gulden, and its profits for 1894 are expected to be 100 per cent. The Prager _Lloyd_ of April 26, 1894, giving these and other facts, adds that "the government of Austria as well as of Hungary takes the ground that if a petroleum monopoly is to be formed it should be in the hands of the State, not of a corporation, certainly not of a foreign corporation, least of all an American one." This remedy of a State monopoly as an alternative to private monopoly, as suggested in Austria and Germany, has as yet had few advocates in America. Our public opinion, so far as there is any public opinion, restricts itself to favoring recourse to anti-trust laws and to boycotting the monopoly and buying the oil of its competitors. But there are too few of these to go around, and they are shut out of most of the markets. The shrewd monopoly is itself the most diligent caterer to such American demand as there is for the "anti-monopoly" product. It does business under hundreds of assumed names, and employs salesmen at large salaries to push the sale of "opposition oil" in our disaffected provinces. With the news from Germany came the announcement that similar control had been obtained of the business of the firm at Venice which did most of the oil business of Italy, and a new company had been formed, of which the American "trustees" own a majority. In a letter sent to Minister Phelps, at Berlin, a resident representative of the American oil combination says, as quoted in the New York _Tribune_, October 5, 1891: "For the furtherance of our programme and as participators in the large European investment which this programme involves, we have sought and been fortunate enough to secure the co-operation of a coterie of well-known merchants, who have been long and prominently identified with the petroleum commerce of the Continent." The Società Italo-Americana del Petrolio (the Italian-American Oil Company) is in Italy what the concerns just described are in the countries to the north of it. The head of the oil combination was quoted by the New York _Tribune_ of July 1, 1891, as saying: "The cable despatches are substantially correct as regards our interest in the German and Italian companies."