We Fight for Oil. by

A HISTORY of the oil war must wait. The war is not over. Contemporary records can be set down by observers in different countries. From many such incomplete reports future historians may round out the story. Origins of the struggle have been studied by several men, most of them Europeans. They described the rivalry among the Powers over petroleum riches of Russia and the Near East in the period immediately following the Great War. No one, apparently, has attempted to bring the record down to the present. Since 1925 the battle lines have shifted. The struggle for Russian resources has grown more bitter. Another Mosul dispute is in the making. The Mexican situation has completely changed. There are new and more important fronts. In Venezuela and Colombia, Great Britain is manoeuvring for position dangerously near the Panama Canal. The British Government is directly involved. It owns and directs the most aggressive company in this international competition. While British companies help drain diminishing reserves of the United States, Great Britain excludes American companies from most of the petroleum lands of the Empire.