The oil is flowing into this tank, through a pipe held in the man's hand, at the rate of a barrel in three minutes indefinite period in an attempt to put the State out of the oil business. The Kansas consumer would smile, and ask the State to lock up the refinery so long as the Standard should sell its oil cheaper than it could be produced by the State. Whenever the Standard advanced its prices, the State could open its refinery and resume business. An advantage of this plan would be that the State need not take its oil from under ground in greater quantities than the demand required. The danger had been to the oil on top of the ground, which the Standard was confiscating by its juggling of prices and manipulation of railroad freight rates. Kansas suspects that the Standard is too shrewd to undertake such a fight. The benefits to the consumer would be observed by the people of other States, and their Legislatures would be asked to follow the example of Kansas and "set a watch-dog on the hill." Locking up the State refinery would give little consolation, however, to independent producers and the owners of oil lands. They can prosper only when they can get a market for their product, at good prices. They declare that the maximum freight rate and the anti-dis crimination law are of more intrinsic advantage than a State refinery. They need more than home protection. An independent refinery could be built on every section of land in Kansas without relieving the congestion in the oil field. Kansas can pour oil far in excess of home consumption, and a market must be found for this surplus. At this time Kansas is discussing the construction of a pipe line to the Gulf of Mexico, and the establishment of a European market, as the only means of breaking through the barrier which the Standard Oil Company has built around the State. The cost of such a pipe line is estimated at about $7,000,000. Officers of the Kansas Producers' Association assert that the necessary capital has been offered, upon condition that a merger controlling a daily output of not less than ten thousand barrels can be effected. Each producer would receive for his property a certain amount in cash, and the balance in pipe-line stock. The sanguine Kansan predicts that this pipe line will be building this year. A dozen or more companies have declared their intention of building independent refineries. Before decisive steps are taken in building a pipe line to tide-water, Kansas producers may try to establish a market nearer home. Their plan contemplates the building of a refinery at Kansas City and its connection with an independent producers' pipe line from the Kansas field. After refining, the residuum would be sold for fuel purposes. The producers assert that there is a market for more than thirty thousand barrels of fuel oil daily in the Middle West, and that the producer could sell his fuel oil at a profit in competition with coal at $1.40 a ton. The market for the refinery distillate would be ample and the price profitable. An executive committee representing the producers has recommended the consolidation of all independent properties, upon an appraised valuation, and that the merger should have a daily production of not less than ten thousand barrels. The Kansas oil field, as developed, extends from Iola south to Indian Territory, and has an average width of about forty miles. Oil is found at a depth of from seven hundred to fourteen hundred feet. The industry has given wonderful growth to Kansas towns, many of which, after remaining sleepy villages for more than a quarter of a century, awoke suddenly into feverish activity. Their streets became crowded with traffic, and their hotels swarmed with strangers. Prosperity made everybody a liberal "spender," and money was plentiful. A majority of the towns found an unlimited supply of natural gas, which gave cheap fuel to factories and domestic consumers. Gas is so cheap that lights burn night and day. The long, low-sweeping prairie sky-line of the Kansas oil towns is jagged and broken with the perpendicular lines of unsightly derricks. There is an odor of kerosene in the air, and streets, fences, sidewalks, and buildings are splotched with brown stains. At Peru wells were drilled in the rear of stores and dwellings, and when "shot" with nitro-glycerine, geysers of oil came roaring to the surface and were caught by high winds and blown broadcast. Housewives wept at the sight of floor and carpets "tracked" and soiled with oily dirt. A well drilled in the cemetery at Peru rained its oil upon the white marble slabs and monuments. Citizens grew indignant, and the well-drillers tried to placate them by scrubbing and sand-papering the gravestones. Few sources of wealth are more enticing to speculators than the ownership of producing oil wells. The steady stream of riches that flows night and day from hidden caverns seems to be the creation of magic. Kansas farmers, after toiling for years to wrest a competency from the earth's surface, were suddenly confronted by strangers who promised them fortunes for the privilege of mining the treasure that lay beneath their fields. One farmer saw his income grow from $3,000 one month to $6,000 the next, and $8,000 the third. One of his wells, for a time, yielded four hundred barrels of oil a day. Another farmer, whose only possession was twenty-two head of poor cattle, borrowed $150 to make a payment on eighty acres of cheap land, without suspecting that his purchase was in the oil belt. He has been offered $50,000 for his farm. The State refinery will be built at Peru, Chautauqua County, a central location in the oil belt. The sum of $200,000 will be invested in a plant having a capacity of two thousand barrels a day, and a like sum, known as a "revolving fund, will be used in the operation of the plant. The revenues will be deposited in the State treasury to the credit of this "revolving " fund. The warden of the State penitentiary will build and operate the refinery with convict labor. As a safeguard to purchasers, a friendly suit has been instituted to test the validity of the refinery bonds before they are placed in the market. The refinery, if plans do not fail, should be in operation in six months. Independent producers estimate that the State can pay $1 a barrel for crude oil and sell kerosene at six cents a gallon, and make a good profit. The retail dealer would add from one to two cents a gallon as his commission. With the State's guarantee of protection against the Standard, and a market for their surplus, producers believe that they can increase the total daily output of crude oil in Kansas to forty thousand barrels, which would be considerably more than twice the amount heretofore produced. E FRITZ KREISLER BY RICHARD ALDRICH UGÈNE YSAYE and Fritz Kreisler have so impressed their art upon the musica: public in the course of the New York season now drawing to a close as almost to have given it a special cachet of their own. If, notwithstanding the appearance of several distinguished pianists, this has been peculiarly a violinists' season, it has been chiefly due to the uncommon interest that these two great artists have aroused. They have made no sensation." The judicious have had no cause to grieve over any hysterical manifestations such as too often ensue when the public has been deeply stirred in a musical way. "Virtuosos," in the less noble sense, these two men are not; and they have made their impression, each in his own way, through musicianship untainted with trickery or meretricious effects, or the exploitation of a personality. have exercised the potent spell of great art with the dignity of true artists. Both by his art. There is a quality in Mr. Ysaye's performance that distinguishes it from most other men's performance on the violin-a quality that persists in and through even his less artistic moods. It is a quality of deep poetical insight through which he is enabled to pluck the heart out of the mystery of great music and impart it in more or less completeness, putting the listener into immediate communion with the music for its own sake alone. It is a fervent and impassioned preoccupation with the inner voice, with the secret thought, of the composer. At such times all considerations of technique vanish, all the processes by which the work of the artist is done are forgotten. The listener hears his heart-searching tone, rich in indefinable shades of emotional expressiveness and color, his soaring imagination, his instinctive following of the larger melodic line. He feels the broad and sensitive bowing and its plastic modeling of the phrase; and all these things are joined in an irresistible eloquence. There is a story that Vieuxtemps, paralyzed, suffering in enforced exile in Algiers, longed during his last days to hear again the cantabile of his pupil Eugène Ysaye. That cantabile is the greatest glory of the artist; his tone is such as is scarcely to be heard from any other master of the instrument now living, so poignantly beautiful is it, so warm, so expressive. With it he can take us close to celestial heights, as can few others. Mr. Ysaye reaches in his inspired moments to the highest flights of the interpreting musician. His moments are not all inspired, and in other moods he partakes unmistakably of the earthly nature. But none have spoken with a higher or a nobler eloquence than he at his best, as in Bach's E major concerto, in which he embodies the breadth and muscularity of the first allegro, and voices the ineffable and solemn tenderness of the slow movement as few have ever done; and as in Beethoven's concerto, in the first allegro, and in the larghetto, Mr. Ysaye is not always at the height at least. Or we may prefer to dwell of his powers. He is an extremely unupon the elegance and aristocratic refine- even performer, and his sincerest admirment, the grace and symmetry, of his ers are not seldom disconcerted by the playing of Saint-Saëns's B minor con- faultiness of his playing in his less happy certo, a work not of the deepest artistic moments. They may hear, then, inacsignificance, but ennobled and dignified curate and slovenly technique, false in |