g
public. The short session of Congress is unfavorable to private bills,
even when they are unopposed. These arts sufficed to prevent the
introduction of the bill desired, and the patent has since expired.

The immense increase in the demand for the gum has frequently
suggested the inquiry whether there is any danger of the supply
becoming unequal to it. There are now in Europe and America more than
a hundred and fifty manufactories of India-rubber articles, employing
from five to five hundred operatives each, and consuming more than ten
millions of pounds of gum per annum. The business, too, is considered
to be still in its infancy. Certainly, it is increasing. Nevertheless,
there is no possibility of the demand exceeding the supply. The belt
of land round the globe, five hundred miles north and five hundred
miles south of the equator, abounds in the trees producing the gum,
and they can be tapped, it is said, for twenty successive seasons.
Forty-three thousand of these trees were counted in a tract of country
thirty miles long and eight wide. Each tree yields an average of three
table-spoonfuls of sap daily, but the trees are so close together that
one man can gather the sap of eighty in a day. Starting at daylight,
with his tomahawk and a ball of clay, he goes from tree to tree,
making five or six incisions in each, and placing under each incision
a cup made of the clay which he carries. In three or four hours he has
completed his circuit and comes home to breakfast. In the afternoon he
slings a large gourd upon his shoulder, and repeats his round to
collect the sap. The cups are covered up at the roots of the tree, to
be used again on the following day. In other regions the sap is
allowed to exude from the tree, and is gathered from about the roots.
But, however it is collected, the supply is superabundant; and the
countries which produce it are those in which the laborer needs only a
little tapioca, a little coffee, a hut, and an apron. In South
America, from which our supply chiefly comes, the natives subsist at
an expense of three cents a day. The present high price of the gum in
the United States is principally due to the fact that greenbacks are
not current in the tropics; but in part, to the rapidity with which
the demand has increased. Several important applications of the
vulcanized gum have been deferred to the time when the raw material
shall have fallen to what Adam Smith would style its "natural price."