Agreement

As diplomats reckon time, the job was done with breath-taking speed. Just seven days after Petroleum Administrator Harold Ickes arrived in London, he sat down with Britain's Fuel Administrator Emanuel Shinwell and signed a new Anglo-American oil agreement.

The Old Curmudgeon, who had come a producing and consuming countries. Long before then, U.S. oilmen expect to get some solid results. Some hope that the pact will mean an end to the Red Line area agreement* which has slowed drilling in parts of the Middle East.

They also hope that U.S. companies may now get exploratory concessions in India, Trinidad and many other parts of the British Empire from which they have been barred. Most of all, oilmen hope that if the swollen wartime oil production causes the expected world surplus in petroleum, they will be able to cure it in other ways than by price-cutting each other's throats.

* After World War I, U.S. companies could drill in Iraq only by joining the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Co. and conforming to the Red Line pact. Under this pact, a member of Iraq Petroleum could drill in the Red Line area, which embraced most of Arabia and part of the old Turkish empire, only in partnership with the rest of I.P.C. As the British did not want to drill, they thus kept the U.S. companies from drilling too.

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