"NO!"
There has never been any real break in the plans revealed, "partly
born," "and buried" in 1872. From then till now, in 1893, every fact
that has come to the surface has shown them in full career. If they
were buried, it was as seed is--for a larger crop of the same thing.
The people had made peace, in 1872, on the pledge of "perfect equality"
on the highways. Hardly had they got back to their work when they
began to feel the pinch of privilege again. The Pennsylvania road
alone is credited with any attempt to keep faith, and that only "for
some months." "Gradually," as a committee of the people wrote to the
managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, "the persons constituting the
South Improvement Company were placed by the roads in as favorable
a position as to rates and facilities as had been stipulated in the
original contract with that company."[123]
As soon as pipe lines were proved practicable they were built as
rapidly as pipes and men to put them in the ground could be had, but
there was some lubricant by which they kept constantly slipping into
bankruptcy.
They were "frozen out," as one of their builders said, "summer as well
as winter."
By 1874, twenty pipe lines had been laid in the oil country. Eighty per
cent. of them died off in that and the following year.[124] The mere
pipes did not die, they are there yet; but the ownership of the many
who had built them died.
There were conservatives in the field to whom competition was as
distasteful as to the socialists. To "overcome such competition," and
to insure them "a full and regular" and "remunerative business" in
pipe lines, in the language of the South Improvement Company contract,
all that was needed was to put into operation the machinery of that
contract which no longer existed--in name. The decease of the name was
not an insuperable obstacle.
In exact reproduction of the plan of 1872, the railroads, in October,
1874, advanced rates to the general ruin, but to the pool of lines
owned by their old friends of the South Improvement Company they paid
back a large rebate. That those who had such a railroad Lord Bountiful
to fill their pockets should grow rich fast was a matter of course.[125]
Getting this refund they got all the business. Oil, like other things,
follows the line of least resistance, and will not flow through pipes
where it has to pay when it can run free and get something to boot.
Nobody could afford to buy oil except those who were in this deal. They
could go into the market, and out of these bonuses could bid higher
than any one else. They "could overbid in the producing regions, and
undersell in the markets of the world."[126]
This was not all. In the circular which announced the bounty to the
pet pipes there was another surprise. It showed that the roads had
agreed to carry crude oil to their friends' refineries at Pittsburg and
Cleveland without charge from the wells, and to charge them no more for
carrying back refined oil to the seaboard for export than was charged
to refineries next door to the wells and hundreds of miles nearer the
market. "Outside" refiners who had put themselves near the wells and
the seaboard were to be denied the benefit of their business sagacity.
The Cleveland refiners, whose location was superior only for the
Western trade, were to be forced into a position of unnatural equality
in the foreign trade. In short, the railroads undertook to pay, instead
of being paid, for what they carried for these friends, and force them
into an equality with manufacturers who had builded better than they.
Evidently they who had contrived all this had their despondent moments,
when they feared that its full beneficence would not be understood by a
public unfamiliar with the "science of transportation."
To the new rules was attached an explanation which asserted the right
of the railroads to prevent persons and localities from enjoying the
advantage of any facility they may possess, no matter how "real."
"You will observe that under this system the rate is even and fair to
all parties, preventing one locality taking advantage of its neighbor
by reason of some alleged or real facility it may possess."[127]
Meanwhile good society was shuddering at its reformers, and declaring
that they meant to stop competition and "divide up property."
"Do you do that in any business except oil?" the most distinguished
railroad man of that day was asked. "Do you carry a raw product to
a place 150 miles distant and back again to another point like that
without charge, so as to put them on an equality?"
To which he replied--it was he who could not remember that he had ever
seen the South Improvement Company contract he signed in 1872--"I don't
know."[128]
"Could any more flagrant violation of every principle of railroad
economy and natural justice be imagined than this?" the report of the
New York Legislature asks.[129]
An expert introduced by the railroads defended this arrangement. He
insisted that all pipe lines had a chance to enter the pool and get the
same refund.[130] But a witness from the pipe-line country, who was
brought to New York to testify to the relations of the railroads and
the oil combination, let out the truth.
"Why didn't they go into the pool?" he was asked, in reference to one
of the most important pipe lines.
"Because they were not allowed to. They wanted to freeze them out. They
were shut out from the market practically."[131]
For these enterprises, as they failed one after the other, there was
but one buyer--the group of gentlemen who called themselves the South
Improvement Company in 1872, but now in the field of pipe-line activity
had taken the name of United Pipe Line, since known as the National
Transit Company, and then and now a part of the oil trust.
"The United Pipe Line bought up the pipes as they became bankrupt one
after another," testified the same friendly witness.[132]
Then came a great railroad war in 1877. A fierce onslaught was made on
the Pennsylvania Railroad by all the other trunk lines.
In this affair, as in all dynastic wars, the public knew really nothing
about what was being done or why. The newspapers were filled with the
smoke of the battles of the railroad kings; but the newspapers did not
tell, for they did not then know, that the railroads were but tools of
conquest in the hands of greater men.
The cause of the trouble was that the managers of the Pennsylvania
Railroad had begun to reach out for the control of the oil trade.
They had joined in the agreement in 1872 to give it to the oil
combination, but now they wanted it for themselves. Through a mistletoe
corporation--the Empire Transportation Company--they set to work
building up a great business in oil cars, pipe lines, refineries.
"We like competition; we like our competitors; we are neighbors and
friends, and have been all these years," the president of the oil
trust testified to the New York Legislature,[133] but he served notice
upon this competitor to abandon the field.[134] He and his associates
determined to do more than compel the great railroad to cease its
competition. They determined to possess themselves of its entire oil
outfit, though it was the greatest corporation then in America. This,
the boldest stroke yet attempted, could be done only with the help of
the other trunk lines, and that was got.
The ruling officials of the New York Central, the Erie, the Baltimore
and Ohio, the Lehigh Valley, the Reading, the Atlantic and Great
Western, the Lake Shore railroads, and their connections, were made to
believe, or pretended to believe, that it was their duty to make an
attack upon the Pennsylvania Railroad to force it to surrender.[135]
"A demand," says the New York Legislative Committee of 1879, "which
they"--the railroads--"joined hands with the Standard Oil Company and
proceeded to enforce by a war of rates, which terminated successfully
in October of that year" (1877).[136]
The war was very bitter. Oil was carried at eight cents a barrel less
than nothing by the Pennsylvania.[137] How low the rates were made by
the railroads on the other side is not known. The Pennsylvania was the
first to sue for peace. Twice its vice-president "went to Canossa,"
which was Cleveland. It got peace and absolution only by selling its
refineries and pipe lines and mortgaging its oil cars to the oil
combination. It "was left without the control of a foot of pipe line to
gather, a tank to receive, or a still to refine a barrel of petroleum,
and without the ability to secure the transportation of one, except
at the will of men who live and whose interests lie in Ohio and New
York."[138]
It was only seven years since the buyers had organized with a
capital of $1,000,000. Now they were able to give their check for
over $3,000,000 for this one purchase. "I was surprised," said Mr.
Vanderbilt to the New York Legislative Committee of 1878, speaking
of this transaction, "at the amount of ready cash they were able to
provide." They secured, in addition to the valuable pipe lines, oil
cars, and refineries in New York and Pennsylvania, the more valuable
pledge given by the Pennsylvania Railroad that it would never again
enter the field of competition in refining, and also a contract
giving the oil combination one-tenth of all the oil freights received
by the Pennsylvania Railroad, whether from the combination or its
competitors--an arrangement it succeeded in making as well with the New
York Central, Lake Shore, and other railroads.[139]
One of the earliest members of the oil combination was present at the
meeting to consummate this purchase. Something over $3,000,000 of his
and his associates' cash changed hands. The meeting was important
enough to command the presence of a brigade of lawyers for the great
corporations, and of the president, vice-president, and several
directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and, representing the Poor
Man's Light, the vice-president, the secretary, and five of the leading
members of the combination, besides himself.[140]
But when asked in court about it he could not remember any such
meeting. Finally, he recalled "being at a meeting," but he could not
remember when it was, or who was there, or what it was for, or whether
any money was paid.[141]
Three years later this transaction having been quoted against the
combination in a way likely to affect the decision of a case in
court,[142] the treasurer denied it likewise. "It is not true as stated
... directly or indirectly...."[143]
Eight years later, when the exigencies of this suit of 1880, in
Cleveland, had passed away, and a new exigency demanded a "revised
version," the secretary of the combination told Congress that it was
true.[144]
"The pleasures of memory" are evidently for poets, not for such
millionaires. That appears to be the only indulgence they cannot
afford.
The managers of the Pennsylvania road went back with the zeal of
backsliders reconverted to their yoke in the service of the men who had
given them this terrific whipping. They sent word to the independent
refiners, whom they had secured as shippers by the pledge of 1872 of
equal treatment, that equal rates and facilities could be given no
longer. The producers and refiners did not sit down dumb under the
death sentence. They begged for audience of their masters, masters of
them because masters of the highway.
The third vice-president, the official in charge of the freight
business, was sent to meet them.
"As you know," they began by reminding him, "we have been for the past
year the largest shippers of petroleum the Pennsylvania Railroad has
had."
He acknowledged it.
"Shall we, after the 1st of May, have as low a rate of freight as
anybody else?" they then asked.
"No," he said; "after the 1st of May we shall give the Standard Oil
Company lower rates than to you."
"How much discrimination will we have to submit to?" the poor
"outsiders" asked.
"I decline to tell you," was the reply.
"How much business must we bring your road to get as good rates as the
combination?" they then asked, and again--
"I decline to tell you," was the only answer they got.
"If we will ship as much, will you give us as low freight rates?"
"No."
"We have been shipping over the Pennsylvania Railroad a year," they
persisted, "why can we not continue?"
"It would make them mad; they are the only people who can make peace
between the railroads."
"I think," said he, "you ought to fix it up with them. I am going over
there this afternoon to talk with those people about this matter, and,"
he continued, "you will all be happy, and everything will work along
very smoothly."
"We gave him very distinctly to understand that we did not propose to
enter into any 'fix up' where we would lose our identity, or sell out,
or be under anybody else's thumb; we are willing to pay as high a rate
of freight as anybody, and we want it as low as anybody has it," they
told him.
But the reply to all of it was, "You cannot have the same rate of
freight."
As the magnate of the railroad seemed to be determined not to permit
them to move to market along his rails, one of the independents
referred to a plan for a new pipe line then under consideration by
them, the Equitable, as perhaps promising them the relief he refused.
"Lay all the pipe lines you like," the vice-president retorted, with
feeling, "and we will buy them up for old iron."
The independents appealed from the third vice-president to the
president; they had to beg repeatedly for a hearing before they got
it. They came together in the June following, the independents coming
on from New York for the purpose. Since their interview with the third
vice-president rates had been advanced upon them, and not only that,
but when they had oil ready to ship at those high freight rates, the
railroad on one pretext or another refused them cars. One of them had
contracts to deliver oil from his refinery in New York to go abroad.
When he ordered the cars that were needed to take the crude oil to New
York to be refined they were refused him. The ships lay idle at the
docks, charging him heavy damages for every day of delay; at the wells
his oil was running on the ground.
"You had better go and arrange with the Standard Oil Company; I don't
want to get into any trouble with them," the president said. "If you
are business men, you will make an arrangement with them. I will do all
in my power to bring it about."
"We will never take our freight rates from them," they replied; "we are
not willing to enter into any such arrangement."
"Why don't you go to the other roads?" the president asked his
suppliants.
"We have done so. It's of no use. On the New York Central the cars are
owned by the combination, and the Erie is in a like position. We have
been shippers on the Pennsylvania Railroad a long, long while, and
you ought to take care of us and give us all the cars we need. We are
suffering very greatly for the want of them. Can we have the same rate
that other shippers get?"
"No."
"If we ship the same amount of oil?"
"No."
"If you have not cars enough, will you, if we build cars, haul them?"
"No. You will not have any peace or prosperity," continued the
president, "until you make terms with the combination."
Like the third vice-president he offered to intercede with them to get
transportation over his own road for his own customers. Like men they
refused the offer.
"We were, of course, very indignant," one of them said, in relating
this experience in court.[145]
A little later a rich and expert refiner, who had sold out in 1876,
made up his mind to try again. The Pennsylvania road had a new
president by this time, but the old "no" was still in force.
"When I was compelled to succumb I thought it was only temporarily,
that the time would come when I could go into the business I was
devoted to. I was in love with the business. I took a run across the
water; I was tired and discouraged and used up in 1878, and was gone
three or four months. I came back ready for work, and had the plan,
specifications and estimates made for a refinery that would handle
ten thousand barrels of oil in a day. I selected a site near three
railroads and a river; I would have spent about five hundred thousand
dollars, and probably a couple of hundred thousand more. I believed the
time had arrived when the Pennsylvania Railroad would see their true
interest as common carriers, and the interest of their stockholders,
and the business interest of the City of Philadelphia. I called on the
President of the Pennsylvania Railroad; I laid the plans before him,
and told him I wanted to build a refinery of ten thousand barrels'
capacity a day. I was almost on my knees begging him to allow me to do
that.
"'What is it you want?' he said.
"'Simply to be put upon an equality with everybody else--especially the
Standard Oil Company. I want you to agree with me that you will give me
transportation of crude oil as low as you give it to anybody else for
ten years, and then I will give you a written assurance that I will do
this refining of ten thousand barrels of oil a day for ten years. Is
not that an honest position for us to be in? I as a manufacturer, you
the president of a railroad.'
"'I cannot go into any such agreement.'
"I saw the third vice-president. He said, in his frank way, 'That is
not practicable, and you know the reason why.'"[146]
After their interviews with the President and Vice-President of the
Pennsylvania Railroad, these outsiders went to the officials of the
other roads, only to hear the same "No!" from all.[147]
At one time, to get oil to carry out their contracts and fill the
vessels which were waiting at the docks and charging them damages for
the delay, these refiners telegraphed to the oil regions offering the
producers there ten cents above the market price if they could get oil
to them over any of the roads to New York. They answered they could not
get the cars, and none of them accepted the offer.[148]
All the roads--as in 1872--were in league to "overcome" them.
Thus, at a time when the entire movement of oil was at the rate of
only 25,000 or 30,000 barrels a day, and the roads had cars enough to
move 60,000 barrels a day, these independent refiners found themselves
shut completely off from the highway.[149] The Pennsylvania Railroad,
the New York Central, the Erie, and their branches and connections in
and out of the oil regions, east and west, were as entirely closed to
them as if a foreign enemy had seized the country and laid an embargo
on their business--which was, indeed, just what had happened. The only
difference between that kind of invasion and what had really come
was, that "the dear people," as the president of the trust called
them,[150] would have known they were in the hands of an enemy if he
had come beating his drums loud enough, and firing off his two-thousand
pounders often enough, and pricking them deep enough with his bayonets;
but their wits are not yet up to knowing him when he comes among them
disguised as an American citizen, although they see property destroyed
and life lost and liberty thrown wherever he moves.
There was enough virtue in Pennsylvania to begin a suit in the name
of the State against the men who were using its franchises for such
purposes, though there was not enough to push it to a decision. The
Third Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, when examined as a
witness in this suit, confirmed these statements about the interviews
with himself and the president of the road in every particular about
which he was questioned.
"We stated to the outside refiners that we would make lower rates to
the Standard Oil Company than they got; we declined to allow them to
put cars of their own on the road."[151]
His evidence fills seventy-six pages, closely printed, in the report of
testimony. It was clear, full, and candid; remarkably so, considering
that it supplied officially from the company's own records the facts,
item by item, which proved that the management of the Pennsylvania
Railroad had violated the Constitution of Pennsylvania and the common
law, and had taken many millions of dollars from the people and
from the corporation which employed them, and secretly, and for no
consideration, had given them to strangers.
This testimony is so important that it was reprinted substantially
in full both by the "Hepburn" committee of the New York Legislature
in 1879[152] and the Trust Investigating Committee of Congress in
1888.[153] As instances, it showed that in one case where the rate to
the public was $1.15, this favored shipper was charged only 38 cents.
In another case the trade generally had to pay $1.40 a barrel on crude
petroleum, but the oil combination paid 88-1/2 cents.
"And then the refined rate was 80 cents?"
"80 cents net to the Standard."
"And to all others?"
"$1.44-1/2."
"But there were no other outside shippers," he pleaded--how could there
be?
There was only one important member in Pennsylvania of the oil
combination who could be caught with a subpoena. At his first
appearance in court, on the witness stand, he took lofty ground.
"I decline to answer."[154]
Put on the stand again, he was asked:
"Were you allowed a rebate amounting to 64-1/2 cents per barrel?"
"No, sir; not to my knowledge."[155]
Put on the third time and compelled to produce his books, he had to
read aloud in court the entries showing the payment he had thus denied
under oath.
"There was a total allowance of 64-1/2 cents per barrel."[156]
And then he shut up again--but too late; and to all other questions
about his rebates said, gloomily, "I decline to answer."
When the president of the oil trust was asked afterwards by the New
York Legislature if some company or companies embraced within it had
not enjoyed from railroads more favorable freight rates than outside
refineries, he replied:
"I do not recall anything of that kind."
"You have heard of such things?"
"I have heard much in the papers about it."[157]
But at the time these rates were being made, one of his principal
associates admitted that the president was the person who attended to
the freight rates.[158] This was also put beyond a doubt in the Ohio
investigation by the evidence of his first partner in the little oil
refinery at Cleveland which had grown so great, he who had furnished
the only mechanical and refining knowledge it had started with, and who
had, until within a year, been a fellow-stockholder and director.
"Do these contracts contain anything of the nature that would
discriminate against the small refiners of the State?"
"I think they did.... Up to the time I left the company the open rate
was $1.40 to the seaboard. They"--the oil combination--"ship for 80
cents.... The president told me it was the rate at that time."[159]
With every known avenue to the sea thus closed to them it certainly
looked as if all was up with the "outsiders." But the men, who had
too much American spunk to buy peace with dishonor by consenting to
a "fix-up" under compulsion, had the wit to find out a loop-hole
of temporary escape. They built tank boats for the canal, and thus
succeeded in getting 200,000 barrels of oil to New York that summer
before the canal closed.[160]
Since then all chance of escape by the canal has been cut off. The
railroads made a war of freight rates against it, and the only canal
that connected the oil regions with the Erie canal route to the sea was
dried up, and turned into a way for a railroad by a special act of the
New York Legislature. The railroad so built has ever since been managed
as one of the most diligent promoters of the policy of excluding the
common people from the oil business.
According to the funeral notices given out by the railroad officials
and the members of the South Improvement Company this concern was dead,
but in the quaint phrase of the producers it was really alive and hard
at work, but "with a new suit of clothes and no name." These interviews
between the independent refiners and the railroad officials of the
three trunk lines form one of the most extraordinary scenes which have
taken place between a government and its subjects since the era of
modern democratic liberty.
The railway officials are, in the world of the highway, the government.
They hold their supreme power to tax commerce, and to open and close
the highways, solely and altogether by grant of the State, and under
the law of the common carrier. It is only by the exercise of the
sovereign power of eminent domain to take the property of a private
individual by force, without his consent, for public use--never for
any other than public use--and only by the grant of the right to cross
city streets and country roads that the railroads come into existence
at all. This says nothing of the actual cash given to the railroad
projectors by the government, which, in New York State alone, amounts
to upwards of $40,000,000.[161]
The independent refiners represent the people, claiming of the highway
department of their government those equal rights which all citizens
have as a birthright, and the government informs these citizens that
their rights on the highways have been given as a private estate to
certain friends of the ruling administration, much as William the
Conqueror would give this rich abbey or that fertile manor to one of
his pets.
"We have no franchise that is not open to all," say the "trustees." "It
is a free open market." "There is nothing peculiar to our companies."
"It is as free as air."
In truth they have had no less a franchise than, as in 1872, the
excluding possession of all the great trunk-lines out of the oil
country, and all their connections east and west, and this franchise
has since widened until, in 1893, it reaches from ocean to ocean, and
from gulf to gulf.
Their franchise was meant to be as exclusive as if they had had from
the government letters-patent in the old royal fashion of close
monopolies in East Indian trade, or salt, or tobacco at home, giving
them by name the sole right to use the roads, and forbidding all
others, under pain of business death, from setting their foot on the
highway. But with this difference: the exclusive franchise in the
latter case would exist by law; but in this case it was created in
defiance of law, exists in contempt of the law, and in its living the
law dies daily.
The refiners and producers who were pleading in this way with the
railroads for a chance to live after May 1, never doubted but that,
as they were told, and as their arrangements with the Pennsylvania
road guaranteed, they were having and were to have at worst until that
date, equal and impartial rates and facilities. Under this safe-conduct
they parleyed for the future. But the Pennsylvania Railroad was at
that moment negotiating with the oil combination to collect from the
independents, under the guise of freight, 20 to 22-1/2 cents a barrel
on all they sent to market, and pay it over to the combination. The
payments were made to one of the rings within the oil ring, called the
American Transfer Company. "It is the same instrumentality under a
different name," said the counsel of the New York Chamber of Commerce
before the New York Legislature. The official of the Pennsylvania road
who issued the order to take this money out of the treasury pleaded
in excuse that proof had been given him that other roads were doing
the same thing.[162] Receipted bills were brought to him, showing that
the New York Central and the Erie had been "for many months" paying
these men who called themselves American Transfer Company for having
"protected" their oil business, sums ranging from 20 cents to 35 cents
a barrel on all the oil those roads transported.[163] So deeply was
the watch-dog of the Pennsylvania road's treasury affected by the
proof that his company was doing less than the other roads, that he
instructed the comptroller to give these men three months' back pay,
which was done. Twenty cents a barrel was sent them out of all the oil
freights collected by the Pennsylvania for the three months preceding,
and thereafter the tribute was paid them monthly. Then it was increased
to 22-1/2 cents a barrel. The same amount per barrel was refunded to
them out of their own freight. They received this on all oil shipped
by them, and also on all shipped by their competitors.[164] They who
received this tribute pretended to the railroad officials that they
"protected" the roads from losing business. The railroad men pretended
to believe it.
The way in which this revenue was given and got shows what a simple
and easy thing modern business really is--not in any way the
brain-racker political economists have persuaded themselves and us.
The representative of the oil combination writes a bright, cheery
letter; the representative of the Pennsylvania answers it, and there
you are; 22-1/2 cents a barrel on millions of barrels flows out of
the cash-box of the railroad into the cash-box of the combination.
In one year, 1878, this tribute, at the rate of 22-1/2 cents on the
13,750,000 barrels of oil shipped by the three trunk-lines, must have
amounted to $3,093,750. The American Transfer Company had a little
capital of $100,000, and its receipts from this rebate in this one year
would amount to dividends of 3093 per cent. annually; the capital of
the oil combination which owned this Transfer Company was at this time
$3,500,000.
There are reasons to believe that some of the very railroad men who
turned the money of the railroads over to the American Transfer Company
were among its members. But if all the profit went to the combination,
and none of it was for the railway officials through whom they got
it, their revenue from that source alone would have paid in 1878 a
dividend nearly equal to this capital of $3,500,000. In this device of
the American Transfer Company we again see reappear in 1878, in high
working vitality, the supposed corpse of the South Improvement Company
of 1872. The American Transfer Company was ostensibly a pipe line, and
the railroad officials met the exposure of their "nothing peculiar"
dealings with it by asserting that the payment to it of 22-1/2 cents a
barrel and more was for its service in collecting oil and delivering
it to them; but the Third Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad
admits that his road paid the money on oil which the American Transfer
Company never handled.
"This 22-1/2 cents (a barrel) paid the American Transfer Company is not
restricted to oil that passed through their lines?"
"No, sir; it is paid on all oil received and transported by us."[165]
The American Transfer Company was not even a pipe line. By the
Pennsylvania laws all incorporated pipe lines must report their
operations and condition monthly to the State. But the publisher of the
petroleum trade reports, and organizer of a bureau of information about
petroleum, with offices in Oil City, London, and New York, issuing
daily reports, testified that the American Transfer Company was not
known in the oil regions at all as a pipe line. It published none of
the statements required by law. "They do not," he said, "make any runs
from the oil-wells." It had once been a pipe line, but "years ago it
was merged in with other lines," and consolidated into the United Pipe
Line, owned and operated by the combination.[166]
When this arrangement was exposed to public view by the New York
legislative investigation, the "expert" who appeared to explain it away
in behalf of the railroads and their beneficiaries, paraded a false map
of the pipe-line system, drawn and colored to make it seem that the
American Transfer Company was a very important pipe-line.[167] This was
the same "expert" who, as we saw, defended the pipe-line holocaust of
1874 by asserting that "all were to be taken in alike."
There are three kinds of liars, an eminent judge of New York is fond of
saying--liars, damned liars, and experts.
When the assistant secretary of the oil combination was asked about
this "transfer" company, he replied, "I don't know anything about
the organization."[168] He had described himself to the committee as
"a clamorer for dividends"; but he declared he knew nothing about an
organization which was "transferring" him dividends at the rate of
$3,093,750 a year on $100,000 of capital. Almost at the very moment
of this denial, receipts were being produced in court in Pennsylvania
which had been given by the cashier of himself and his associates to
the railroads for this money.[169]
Even if the independents succeeded in saving their oil from wasting on
the ground, and got it into pipe lines, and had it refined, and were
lucky enough to be given cars to carry it to the seaboard, they found
that in leaving the oil regions they had not left behind the "no." Up
to the very edge of the sea were the nets spread for them.
Part of the bargain of 1872 had been that the brothers of the South
Improvement Company should provide the terminal facilities at the
seaboard.[170] Railroad companies are usually supposed to have their
own yards, storehouses, wharves, and the like, and, as a matter of
fact, the railroads had these. The agreement of 1872 that the South
Improvement Company should furnish the terminal facilities meant--it
was discovered by the New York Legislature in 1879--that such terminals
as the road already had should be turned over to that concern, and that
thereafter nobody should be allowed to build or use terminals except as
it permitted.
The New York Legislature found, in 1879, that the oil combination
thus owned and controlled the oil terminal facilities of the four
trunk-lines at New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
"They can use the power here given, and have used it to crush out
opposition."[171]
"Of course, there is in the Erie contract a statement that every
shipper of oil over the road shall be treated with 'fairness' by the
Standard Oil Company, and our attention was drawn to that," the counsel
of the Chamber of Commerce said.... "In the first place, they have the
exclusive shipment of oil, and therefore nobody could ship oil, and
there was no oil handled for anybody else; but if the Erie Company
should send some for somebody else, why, the sloop could not get to the
dock, and the machinery at the dock would not and could not work by
any possibility so as to get that oil out of that dock and into a ship
(except at the end of a lawsuit)."[172]
Evidently the "cancellation" of 1872 had not cancelled anything of
substance. Indeed, the "no" of 1878 was wider than the embargo of 1872,
for the fourth great trunk-line, the Baltimore and Ohio, was not one of
the signatories then; but by 1878 it had, like all the others, closed
its port to the people--farming it out as the old régime farmed out the
right to tax provinces.
He used to meet the president of the oil combination "frequently in the
Erie office," a friend and subordinate has recalled.[173] Railroad
offices are pleasant places to visit when such plums are to be gathered
there as this of the sole right to the freedom of all ports and control
of the commerce of three continents.
Down to this writing, when the little group of independents who remain
masters of their own refineries along Oil Creek seek to send their oil
in bulk abroad, or to transship it at any one of the principal ports
for other points on the coast, the same power still says the same "no"
as twenty years ago.[174]