Pipe Line -

The Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Company, an American concern, has completed the world's largest oil pipe line system. The oil of Saudi Arabia is now available on the shores of the Mediterranean, more than a thousand miles from its source.

The Arabs gave the name TAPLINE to this greatest of all long range engineering projects. Tapline in its completion has done more than serve the cause of national security and international peace. It has given proof that a democracy produces private initiative and enterprise which can handle any industrial undertaking no matter how great its proportions.

And Tapline has proved that the American type of free business, without nationalization and without government subsidy, can do a job better, faster and cheaper than any other system in the world.

One of the major problems facing the world today is the future supply of oil. Even the United States, which has owed its industrial growth and high standard of living in great measure to an abundance of low priced oil products, cannot be complacent in the face of the present situation.

Since 1920 oil requirements in the United States have increased four-fold. Industry forecasts indicate that in 1955 the United States will require a daily average of more than twice as much oil as was consumed in 1938.

Until 1947 an aggressive American oil industry provided enough oil products to sustain a high and rapidly rising level of industrial output and prosperity, with a surplus for export to other countries. But 1947 was a turning point.

In that year consumption slightly exceeded production and it became plain that henceforth the United States would have to import an increasing portion of its ever-growing requirements. Fortunately there are large oil reserves in Latin America, around the Caribbean Sea, certainly enough to supply United States deficits for years to come.

But here's the difficulty. The Western Hemisphere had long been a principal source of supply of oil to western Europe and other parts of