Sinclair to Deterding

"What can be done until you put your house in order?"

Thus last month did Sir Henri Deterding, swart, dynamic head of Royal Dutch-Shell, shrug off the possibility of a world oil parley in view of the low estate of U. S. oil.

Last week the managing director of the world's largest crude producer was bluntly answered by a U. S. oilman just back from Sir Henri's home territory. Rapped out Harry Ford Sinclair of Consolidated Oil: "What about Europe putting its own house in order? In one country I visited they were selling gas at ... less than it costs to produce. And if you want to know the country, it was Holland."

On his week's visit to Manhattan, Sir Henri had calmly announced that railroad electrification was already obsolete, that the Diesel engine was the locomotive of the future. On that score, too, Mr. Sinclair had a ready answer: "What's the difference whether you drink Scotch or bourbon"--a reference to the fact that U. S. railroads already burn some 2,000,000,000 gal. of fuel oil per year.

While Mr. Sinclair was stepping ashore in Manhattan, the rest of U. S. oildom was assembled in the rain at Titusville, Pa., celebrating the 75th anniversary of the drilling of the first oil well by the late Col. Edwin I. Drake. The celebration was no love feast. While Secretary of the Interior Ickes and Governor Pinchot of Pennsylvania smiled on the speakers' platform, Axtell J. Byles of the American Petroleum Institute keynoted: "Upon the rock of rugged individualism this nation was founded!"

Asking for an end of Federal control except for overproduction, Mr. Byles trumpeted: "Some of us do not believe in fairies or panaceas or economic magic or in guaranteed profits or in price-fixing or think that a series of rules embodying in one form or another 'Thou shalts' and 'Thou shalt nots' will prove any more successful than they did when applied to the liquor traffic."

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