This is perhaps as plausible a phrasing as can be of the grab-whatever-you-want-wherever-it-is theory of national interest and international morality. It involves, however, a number of erroneous assumptions.
Applied to the matter in hand, it involves, first, the assumption that Mexican oil is essential to the life of the American nation. This assumption is absurd so long as domestic oil is exported in large quantities and is wasted in production in very much larger quantities.
In an article in Sperling's Journal, in September, 1919, E. Mackay Edgar, a well known international banker of Great Britain, remarked:
In a letter to the Westminster Gazette, in the Spring of 1918, Viscount Cowdray, the British oil king, said:
We have heard the same kind of thing from American experts. Well, if the United States Government "ought to hold for its industries and its people" any oil lands anywhere, it would seem evident that it ought first to "hold" the lands that are already under the American flag, where war is not a part of the process; that it ought to look first to the effective conservation of the domestic supply, which is being wasted by the very gentlemen who are urging a great grab from our neighbor.
The Doheny theory involves, second, the assumption that if the production or control of Mexican oil should pass out of the hands of American citizens, American industry and American automobile owners would in some way be deprived of its use.
It happens that the percentage of gasoline in Mexican oil
25
