The Four - Day Oil Concession The sensation provoked by the Oil
concession in Abyssinia has been short-lived,. but it had the effect of niost .gravelY 'encerbating the international situation at its most critical Moment By a singular misfortune the first announcement was to the effect that the concession of oil and mineral rights over about a third of Abyssinia had. been granted to an Anglo-American concern. It was technically accurate, in that the agent employed by an American group was of British nationality, but all the capital was, as it turns out, to have been American, and it. is by the voluntary abandonment of the concession by the Standard Vacuum Oil Company of Anierica (obviously in deference to the State Department's views) that the diplomatic storm has been quelled—though some of its unhappy effects endure in both Paris and Rome. The Emperor of Abyssinia would seem to have been quite within his rights in granting the concession, for he was no party to the sphere-of-influence treaty of 1906, between Great Britain, France and Italy. On the action of Mr. F. W. Rickett, Master of the Craven Hunt, who had no compunction about carrying through, for the benefit of a group of American capitalists, a financial deal which could not fail to add immensely to the difficulties of the British Government in a situation of the greatest delicacy and danger, every Briton is capable of forming his own opinion.
