The French government a year ago lowered the tariff on petroleum one-half. This was followed, the French press reports, by the erection of a refinery by the American trust at Rouen, and the purchase by it of land in Marseilles, Cette, Bordeaux, and Havre for other refineries. The machinery needed was shipped from America. Large offices were opened at Paris by the American combination for the administration of the industry in France, which was to be concentrated into its hands like that of the rest of Europe. The sequel, if the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, a prominent German commercial paper, is correctly informed, is that the French refiners, as the Scotch did before them, have come to terms with the American trust. It has agreed not to start up its refineries in France, not to sell any refined oil in America for shipments to France, and not to allow any American outsiders to compete with the French refiners. There was a report in June, 1892, that a Dutch company had succeeded in refining petroleum in Sumatra, one of the possessions of the Netherlands' East India colonies, and selling it in India. The solicitor of the trust, asked about it by the New York _Times_, June 5, 1892, said, "It cannot be true." The oil combination, he continued, "has agents in the Netherlands' East India colonies and at Sumatra, and it would certainly have heard of this corporation and its competition if there was anything worth hearing." There are great oil-fields in Peru. Since the close of the war with Chili there has been an active development of them, and the commercial reports of San Francisco say that fuel oil is now being supplied from this source to our Pacific States. This has not been done by the Peruvians. It was an American who organized the oil industry of Peru. The principal company was formed by the same expert who went years ago from Pennsylvania to Russia to Americanize the oil interests of the Caucasus. After he had succeeded in that task he went to Peru. He died in the spring of 1894. At about the time of his death the newspapers, by a coincidence that arrests attention, chronicled the departure from New York of a well-known man who was going to Peru, as he stated in an interview, to look after the interests of the members of the oil trust. But there is no official information that they have any ownership or control there. When one of the officers of the combination was before Congress, in 1888, he was asked if there had been any negotiations by his associates with the Russian oil men. "We have never had any serious negotiations,"[641] he replied.