"NOT BUSINESS"
This "business success" is the greatest commercial and financial
achievement of history. Its broad foundation was laid in the years
from 1872 to 1879, the severest time of panic for others the world
has known. A universal jaundice of ill-fortune has given its sallow
complexion to every one else. From the Alleghanies to the Caucasus
thousands of men have been somehow thrown out of work because so much
new work has come to the world. "At the flash of a telegraphic message
from Cleveland, Ohio," said the people of the oil regions in their
appeal to the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1878, "hundreds of men have
been thrown out of employment at a few hours' notice, and kept for
weeks in a state of semi-starvation." These men filled up many of the
insurrectionary ranks of the great railway strike of 1877, as the
employés of the Pennsylvania Railway declared in a public communication
at that time. The eight oil-producing counties of Pennsylvania were
said by the general council of the petroleum producers, in a public
address in 1879, to be "fast sinking beneath such financial distress
that resistance to threatened bankruptcy or servitude could not long
be made." They grew too poor to pay the counsel they employed to
help them in the courts, the legislatures, and before the executive
of Pennsylvania and Congress. "The universal complaint we find is
the poverty of the people, not their unwillingness to give." "I am
ashamed," said one of them in court, "to see our counsel every day on
account of the beggarly amounts I have paid them. A large number of
producers have subscribed that have not paid."[653]
Men who were "frozen out" of their occupation in transporting or
refining oil took to digging wells. "That is the only thing they have
been allowed to do. They went on in a wild way, hunting new oil, and
when they found it they would develop it rapidly." This made oil fall
in price, and the more they produced the more they had to produce. The
wages of labor kept going down. They were lower in 1888 than they were
twenty-four years before. "A well-digger that I paid $6 a day and his
expenses twenty-four years ago is now working for $40 a month. That
is true of every department of the oil business so far as the wages
of workmen are concerned." "We were $10,000,000 poorer at the end of
1887 than at the beginning," said the association of oil producers of
Pennsylvania. Their executive committee the next year said the people
were on "the verge of bankruptcy."[654]
The railroads were no happier than the laborers, the producers, the
manufacturers, or the merchants. As early as 1879 Vanderbilt II.
declared that the oil business of the railroads--worth $30,000,000 a
year--had been destroyed.
"I think the business is gone."[655]
In 1892 a number of refiners and producers of Pennsylvania, in a formal
appeal to Governor Pattison, asked him to investigate the causes
which were working "to the injurious depression if not the ultimate
destruction of a great industry." In the same year mutterings of a
turbulent discontent and threats of violence and the destruction of
property, repeating those of 1872, were heard again in Pennsylvania
and in Ohio, which had become an oil-producing State. "Many of the oil
producers," a member of their protective association in Ohio said, in
the spring of 1892, "are in a bad way. They are at that point that
they don't know just where their next sack of flour is coming from, and
I am not surprised at anything they may do."
This area of low pressure, following the habit of American storms, made
itself felt abroad in bankruptcies and falling wages from Scotland
to Baku and beyond. Meanwhile the little nest-egg of nothing of the
group which came into the field in 1862 grew to $1,000,000 in 1870; to
$2,500,000 in 1872; to $3,500,000 in 1875; to $70,000,000 in 1882; and
in 1887 to a capital of $90,000,000, which the New York Legislature
reported in 1888, "according to the testimony of the trust's
president," to be worth "not less than $148,000,000."[656] Before
the trust was dissolved in name, in 1892, and the "trustees" betook
themselves to the greater seclusion of separate corporations, acting in
concert, its stock sold as high as 185, a valuation of $166,500,000 for
the whole.
Its dividends had been $10,800,000 a year for several years. These
ducal incomes and the vaster sums accumulated as undivided profits
made themselves visible in the progressive _embonpoint_ of the
capitalization. In the six years (1876-81) preceding their taking the
veil as trustees their net earnings added up the total of $55,000,000.
In the next six years (to 1888) the dividends alone--not the net
earnings--were more than $50,000,000.[657] These did not absorb their
profits. In one year they spent $8,000,000 out of their profits for
construction, besides making the regular payments to stockholders.[658]
"All this vast wealth," the New York Legislature said, "is the growth
of about twenty years; this property has more than doubled in value
in six years, and with this increase the trust has made aggregate
dividends during that period of over $50,000,000. It is one of the
most active," the report continued, "and possibly the most formidable
moneyed power on this continent."[659]
"This is an immense property," says the Interstate Commerce
Commission," ... and it gives an immense power which is capable of
being so employed as to put all competitors at a great and perhaps
ruinous disadvantage."[660]
For the first time the New York investigation of 1888 revealed that it
was only the beginning of the truth that these hundreds of millions
were controlled by "trustees." It now became known that some one or
more of the trustees owned personally more than half of every concern
in the trust, and of the best ones owned all.
"These eight trustees control all these ninety millions of property
scattered over the United States?" the president of the trust was asked.
"They have as trustees, and they have as individual owners both."[661]
In corroboration of this testimony the trust furnished the New York
Senate Committee of 1888 a "list of corporations, the stocks of which
are wholly or partially held by the trustees of the Standard Oil
Trust." In this list, under the head of "New York State," appears
this: "Capital stock, $5,000,000. Standard Oil Company of New York,
manufacturers of petroleum products. Standard Oil Trust ownership,
entire."[662] But when the company was threatened with the forfeiture
of its charter by the proceedings before the Attorney-General in May,
1894, its president made oath as follows: "The Standard Oil Company of
New York never permitted its stock to be transferred to trustees."[663]
Even this ownership by eight men is not the whole of the truth. The
eight trustees have a ruling power within themselves. An examination of
the personnel of the board at the beginning, middle, and end of its
career as a board shows four men always there. This agrees with the
remark reported in the press to have been made by the solicitor of the
trust upon its ostensible dissolution in 1892: "A majority of the stock
being held by four men."
A friendly journal, the New York _Sun_, of April 25, 1889, in an
editorial paragraph concerning the wealth of one of the trustees, said:
"His regular income is twenty millions of dollars a year. That makes
him the richest man in the United States--perhaps the very richest in
the world." This is nearly three times the dividends paid in 1892 to
all its stockholders by the Bank of England. The Bank of England has
built up this earning power by two hundred years' work at the head of
the finances of the greatest empire of history. This American wins
thrice its dividend capability in less than a generation by contriving
and managing an institution which he says does not do any business.
Another entirely friendly paper, with sources of information of the
very best, put his income two years later at $30,000,000 a year.[664]
No denial of the _Sun's_ statement was attempted, and the _Sun_ never
withdrew or modified its figures. Shortly after the secretary of the
trust gave, in a public interview, a statement of the income of its
principal members. That of one of them he put at $9,000,000 a year; his
own at $3,000,000.
This wealth is as much too vast for the average arithmetical
comprehension as the size of the dog-star, 400 times larger than the
sun. These incomes are sums which their fortunate owners could not
count as they received them. If they did nothing but stand all day at
the printing-presses of the Treasury Department while the millions
came uncrinkled out in crisp one-dollar greenbacks, or worked only at
catching the new dollars as they rolled out from the dies of the Mint,
they could not count them. If they worked eight hours a day, and six
days a week, and fifty-two weeks in the year, they could not count
their money. The dollars would come faster than their fingers could
catch them; the dollars would slip out of their clutch and fall to the
floor, and, piling up and up, would reach their knees, their middle,
their arms, their mouth, and Midas would be snuffed out in his own gold.
Commodore Vanderbilt, Parton tells us, was forty-four years old before
he was worth $400,000. In the next thirty years he increased this to
over $100,000,000--perhaps twice that; no one knows. Vanderbilt had
to multiply this nest-egg of his forty-fourth year 250 times, but one
of these "trustees" will be a billionaire when he has turned himself
over only ten times. Poor's _Railroad Manual_ shows these men and their
associates to be presidents or directors in thousands of miles of
railroads, valued at hundreds of millions. Their names were prominent
in the railroad "deal" of 1892 and 1893, which had for its end to put
the whole of New England under one hand, controlling both its land
and water connections with the rest of the country. They stand at the
receipt of custom at the railroad gates to the oil regions; to the
coal-fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois;
the copper, gold, and silver mines of the West; the iron mines of the
West and South; the turpentine forests and the lumber regions and
cotton fields; the food-producing areas of the Mississippi basin; the
grazing lands of the plains. They are owners in the principal steamship
line between America and Europe, and in the "whalebacks," which appear
destined to drive other models out of the freight traffic of the lakes,
and have begun to appear on the Eastern and Western oceans, to capture
the carrying business of the world. Every dollar for the construction
of a State building at the World's Fair was advanced by one of them, as
the principal journal of the State announced, and it referred to him as
"the man who breathes life into its East coast towns, and the lifting
of his pen by his hand is like turning upsidedown the horn of plenty."
They are "in" the best things--telegraphs, the gas supply of our large
cities, street-railways, steel mills, ship-yards, Canadian and American
iron mines, town sites. Ore dug out of their own iron mines at the
head of Lake Superior is carried over their own railroad to their own
furnaces and mills. It rolls along until that which began to move as
ore lies at the docks of their ship-yards as a finished vessel, cut
out of the mountains, as it were, at one cheap stroke, or is loaded in
the cars in some perfected shape of steel, as steam radiators or what
not. They feed entire mountain ranges into their mills with one hand,
and with the other despatch the product in their own cars and ships to
all markets. Betrayal, bankruptcy, broken hearts, and death have kept
quick step with the march of the conquerors in iron as in oil. They
are in the combination in anthracite coal, with which the acquisition
by an American syndicate of the Nova Scotia coal deposits is closely
connected. Theirs is the largest share in the natural-gas business
in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Indiana, Illinois. They are in the
combination which controls lead, from pig to white lead, and turpentine
and linseed-oil and paints.
"Its members," it was said in the application to the Attorney-General
of New York, in 1894, for a forfeiture of one of their charters, "are
now presidents and directors in 33,000 miles of road, one-fifth of the
total mileage in the United States. Its surplus is invested in banking,
in natural and manufacturing gas companies, in iron ore beds and coal
beds and crude-oil production, in lead and zinc, in turpentine and
cotton-seed oil, in steel, in jute manufacture, in ocean steamships, in
palatial hotels, in street-railroads."
Most of their interests are in public functions, railroads, pipe lines,
telegraphs, postal contracts, steamers, municipal franchises, and the
like; but it is impossible to know their full extent with our present
crude means for enforcing the truth that property is power and that
civilization endures no irresponsible anonymous power. The corporation
is an agency by which the capitalist can do business in ambuscade.
"They are all in our company," said the manager of a very important
public agency, "but their names do not appear." It is not out of
deference to the obsolete idea that such matters are private business
that all the details of their possessions are not given, but only
because they are not known.
"There is no such thing as extemporaneous acquisition," Daniel Webster
said; but he spoke of eloquence, not of the perfected modern commerce.
Selligue, the French genius to whose discoveries nothing of equal
importance has been added, is not dignified with an entry in the
encyclopædias or biographical dictionaries. For "Colonel" Drake, who
struck oil, a pension had to be provided by his friends in the regions
which he had filled with fountains of wealth. Mr. Van Syckel, who first
proved the pipe line to be practicable, died in Buffalo, paralytic,
helpless, and poor.
The "age of oil" could not have come without the oil well and the drill
and derrick, and these in America are the lineal descendants of the
first salt well, drilled and whittled out of the rocks by the Ruffner
brothers, in 1806, in the "Great Buffalo Lick" of the Kanawha. Their
first "drill" was a great sycamore-tree, four feet through, hollowed
out, set on end on the ground in the lick, and gradually lowered as
the earth and stone within were dug away by a man inside. When they
came to the rock, which they could not blast because it was under
water, they hung a roughly-made iron drill by a rope to a spring pole
and went inch by inch through the rock, "kicking down" the well. Metal
tubes were not to be had, but the Yankee whittler solved the problem
of tubing the well. Two slender strips of wood were whittled into two
long, thin, half tubes, and tied together. This is the genesis of the
bored "well" and the "drill and derrick."[665] It took eighteen months
to accomplish this, but the wonder is that it was done at all "without
preliminary study, previous experience or training, without precedent,
in a newly-settled country without steam-power, machine-shop, skilled
mechanics, suitable tools or materials."
These almost-forgotten men, shrewd, patient, undauntable, were the
pioneers of the skilful well-borers who have gone forth from the
Kanawha wells all over the country to bore wells for irrigation on
the Western plains, for cities, factories, and private use, for salt,
for gas, for geological and mineralogical explorations, and for
oil. "Billy Morris," of the Kanawha borings, invented a tool simple
enough, but not so simple as to be described here, called the "slips"
or "jars," which has done more for deep boring than anything except
the steam-engine, and for which, considering the part played in the
life of man by oil, gas, water, brine, and other wells, we are told
he "deserves to be ranked with the inventors of the sewing-machine,
reaper, and cotton-gin."[666] But "Uncle Billy" made a free gift to the
well-diggers of the world of his invaluable "slips," and slipped into
poverty and an unknown grave. To Joshua Merrill, more than to any one
else, belongs the honor of bringing the manufacture of oil in America
to its perfection.[667] He made better oil than any one else, and he
loved his work. "I was thirty-two years in the oil business. It was
the business of my life."[668] But he had to dismantle his refinery,
and join the melancholy procession of two thousand years of scouts,
inventors, pioneers, capitalists, and toilers who march behind the
successful men.
Yet, strange to say, these successful men did not discover the oil,
nor how to "strike" it. They were not the lucky owners of oil lands.
As late as 1888 they produced only 200 barrels a day--about 1 in every
3000--"an infinitesimal amount," their president said.[669] They did
not invent any of the processes of refining. They did not devise the
pipe line, and they did all they could to prevent the building[670]
of the first pipe line to the seaboard, and to cripple the successful
experiment of piping refined oil.[671] They own all the important
refineries, and yet they have built very few. They did not project
the tank-car system, which came before them,[672] and have used their
irresistible power to prevent its general use on the railroads, and
successfully.[673] They were not the first to enter the field in any
department. They did not have as great capital or skill as their
competitors.[674] They began their career in the wrong place--at
Cleveland--out of the way of the wells and the principal markets,
necessitating several hundred miles more of transportation for all of
their product that was marketed in the East or Europe.[675] They had
no process of refining oil which others had not, and no legitimate
advantages over others.[676] They did not even invent the rebate. They
made oil poor[677] and scarce[678] and dear.[679]
The power to chalk down daily on the black-board of the New York
Produce Exchange the price at which people in two hemispheres shall buy
their light has followed these strokes of "cheapness":
1. Freight rates to the general public have been increased, often to
double and more what is paid by a favored few.[680]
2. The construction has been resisted of new lines of transportation by
rail,[681]
3. And pipe.[682] This has been done by litigation,[683] by influence,
by violence,[684] even to the threatened use of cannon,[685] and by
legislation, as in Ohio and Pennsylvania, to prevent the right of
eminent domain from being given by "free pipe-line bills" to the people
generally.
4. The cost of pipeage has been raised.[686]
5. Rivers and canals have been closed.[687]
6. Oil has been made to run to waste on the ground.[688]
7. The outflow of oil from the earth has been shut down.[689]
8. The outflow of human energy that sought to turn it to human use has
been shut down by restricting the manufacture by the combination and by
others, by contract,[690] dismantling,[691] and explosion.[692]
9. High fees have been maintained for inspection,[693] and the
inspectors have been brought into equivocal relations with the
monopoly.[694]
10. The general use of tank-cars and tank-steamers has been
prevented.[695]
11. The people have been excluded from the free and equal use of the
docks, storehouses, and other terminal facilities of the railroads in
the great harbors of export.[696]
12. Inventors and their better processes have been smothered.[697]
13. Men have been paid more for spying than they could earn by
working.[698]
14. "Killing delay" has been created in the administration of
justice.[699]
All are poorer--oil-producers, land-owners, all labor, all the
railroads, all the refiners, merchants, all the consumers of oil--the
whole people. Less oil has flowed, less light shone, and there has
been less happiness and virtue. In every one of the few intervals,
says Hudson, during which oil could flow freely to Pittsburg, all the
businesses connected with it were active and expanding.[700]
When the trust's secretary was asked for the proper name of the
combination, his reply was: "The Lord only knows; I don't." "An
indescribable thing," he said again.[701]
"Do you understand the practical work of refining as a refiner?" he was
asked.
"I do not.... I have not been inside a refinery in ten years."[702]
"Two mills a ton a mile for five hundred miles would be a dollar a ton?"
"I am not able to demonstrate that proposition."
"You have some arithmetical knowledge?"
"I cannot answer that question."[703]
He could not state what proportion of the oil trade is now controlled
by the trust. He had never looked into that question. He did not know
who knows these things.[704]
"You own the pipe line to New York?"
"Yes, sir."
"What does it cost you to do business on that pipe line?"
"I do not know anything about it.... I have never been in the oil
regions but once in my life.... I am not a practical oil man.... For
perhaps eight years I have given absolutely no attention to the details
of our business."[705]
Asked upon another occasion, before the Pennsylvania Legislature, about
the accounts of the company when he was its secretary, he said:
"I am not familiar with the accounts."[706]
"I am a clamorer for dividends. That is the only function I have," said
another trustee.[707]
"When was your last rate given you, the rate at which you are now being
carried (on the New York Central)?"
"I could not tell."[708]
The secretary had testified that this associate attended to getting the
rates of freight; but the latter avowed that he could not remember "any
rate" that he had paid "at any time." But a little later he who could
not remember any rate he had ever paid was able to tell the committee,
off-hand, the exact rate of freight on oil by steamer from Batoum in
Russia to Liverpool, and knew the rate from the wells at Baku by rail
to the sea at Batoum![709]
"Had you ever been interested in the refinery of oil in any manner when
you first became connected with the oil business?" another trustee was
asked.
"Never."
"Or the production of oil?"
"Never."
He was a railroad man, and had been taken into the combination for his
value as such; but when he was asked if he could tell any of the rates
of freight his company had paid, he said:
"I cannot."[710]
"What is your business and where do you reside?" another of the
trustees was asked by the State of New York.
"I decline to answer any question until I can consult counsel."[711]
"What is the capital stock?" was asked of another.
"I do not know."
"How much has the capital been increased since?"
"I don't know."
"Where are the meetings of the Standard Oil Company held?"
"I don't know."
"How many directors are there?"
"I don't know."
"Do they own any pipe lines?"
"I don't know."
"I don't know anything about the rates of transportation."[712]
"What quantity of oil was exported by the different concerns with which
you were connected from the port of New York in 1881?" the president
was asked.
"I do not know."
"How many millions of barrels of oil were refined by such concerns in
the vicinity of New York in 1881?"
"I don't know how much was refined."
"Did not the concern with which you were so connected purchase over
8,000,000 barrels of crude petroleum in 1881?"
"I am unable to state."
He was asked to give the name of one refinery in this country, running
at the time (1883), not owned or substantially controlled by his
concern. "I decline to answer."[713]
He was asked if he would say the total profits of his trust's companies
for the last year (1887) were not as much as $20,000,000.
"I haven't the least knowledge on that subject."[714]
Phrenologists are right. Memory is not to be ranked with the mental
attributes of the highest importance. The head of the New York Central
could not tell when a stock dividend of something like $46,000,000 had
been declared on one of his railroads--and a $46,000,000 dividend is
something worth remembering. "I don't know.... I don't remember."[715]
It is lucky for the rest of us that these great men forget something.
One of the chiefs of the oil combination was a witness in Cleveland in
1887 in a suit by the State of Ohio against certain railroads.
"What business in connection with the oil business is done in the
building in which the oil trust has its office in New York?"
"I do not think I could state just what business is done in that
building, I am sure."
Asked on the witness-stand in the Buffalo explosion case when it was he
formed the "trust" with $70,000,000 of capital, the president replied:
"I am unable to state," and he could not say where its articles of
agreement were, nor who has control of it. When questioned before the
Interstate Commission he could not tell within $25,000,000 how much
business they were doing a year.[716]
These men keep no books. The whole arrangement is just a happy family,
like Barnum's monkeys, birds, cats, dogs, and mice in the same
cage. "It is a business of faith," one of the ruling four puts it.
Another was asked about the by-laws under which he and his associates
transacted their business. "I don't know that I have seen a copy," he
replied, and as to where it was he was able only to "suppose."[717]
When the committee of the Legislature called for the books recording
the transactions of the trust and its attorneys and committees, there
were practically none to produce. All there was in the way of a record
of transactions of a magnitude beyond those of any other commercial
institution in this country or the world were a few pages of formal
entries from which nothing could be learned. The executive committee
received and passed upon the disbursements of money by the treasurer,
and the reports of sub-committees and of members, who had sweeping
powers of attorney, by which these countless millions were kept rolling
themselves up into more, but it never kept any records.
"I have no knowledge of any formal record having been made," one of
them said. The reports were "either verbal or on pieces of paper....
I think it was memorandums," he continued, and the memorandums were
"undoubtedly destroyed." They were transcribed into the records of the
trustees, he said, but the search of the committee showed that the
transcription was a "skeleton," consisting mainly of the mere phrase,
"Minutes of the executive committee approved." "The real minutes do not
appear upon the book," Senator Ives, of the committee, said.
"There is no book to produce?"
"There is no book."
"And there is no memorandum?"
"There is no memorandum."[718]
"Does the trust keep books?" the "president" was asked by Congress.
"No, we have no system of book-keeping."
On further pressure he said that the treasurer had "a record to know
what money comes in."
"You have never seen those books?"
"I do not think I have ever seen those books."
"Has any member of the nine" (trustees) "ever seen those books?"
"I do not know that they have."[719]
Simplicity is said to be always a characteristic of greatness. What
could be simpler, and so greater, than this? The elements of success
are only--
1. Not to know anything about the business.
2. To keep no books.
3. To have "a record to know what money comes in," and
4. Never to look at it.
Finally, the operations of these men have, in their own language, not
been "business." Its secretary told Congress that the "trust" was "not
a business corporation,"[720] and an associate declared in court that
it "cannot do business." The report of the New York Legislature shows
that on October 3, 1883, the president had by a formal instrument been
made the attorney of the trust to sign and execute all the contracts
made by it. The same instrument in express terms confirmed the
execution of contracts heretofore signed by him, showing that he had
been making contracts.[721]
"Those gentlemen" (the members of the trust who hold its power of
attorney) "do actually execute contracts involving pretty large
amounts, sometimes without a formal resolution of the Board of
Trustees, do they not?" one of them was asked.
"Undoubtedly they do."[722]
Following their employers, the lawyers in the Pennsylvania Tax case for
the oil combination argued that its operations were not business within
the meaning of the tax law. If the "no money" of 1862 has become the
control, in one industry alone, of $160,000,000 in 1892 by methods that
are not "business," what are they?
NOTE.--The principal members of the oil combination were heard
at great length in its defence before the committee of Congress
investigating trusts in 1888.[723] Their testimony has been frequently
used in our pages. But they felt that their case needed further
elucidation, and asked the committee to hear them again. The committee
declined to hear them again "explain or contradict," as they offered
to do, but by printing their communication gave them the benefit of
their denials and explanations.[724] Their offer was mainly to go
again over the ground that the "South Improvement Company never did
any business," that the combination "obtained no preferences" on the
railroads, that they had cheapened transportation, improved machinery,
made better oil at less cost, and so on. The chief officers and owners
had been heard on all these points to the extent of hundreds of pages
of testimony. But though it did not recall them to the witness-stand,
the committee, in addition to printing their communication, printed
most of the documentary evidence they desired to submit. This covered
nearly two hundred pages more.[725]
The examination, which any one can make, of this record discloses an
interesting fact concerning the proof, and the trust's offer to prove,
which can best be shown in parallel columns:
TRUST'S OFFER TO PROVE. | THE PROOF.
|
It offered the evidence of the third|But the testimony of this witness
vice-president of the Pennsylvania |states that his connection with
Railroad to "show the South |the oil business of the Pennsylvania
Improvement Company never did any |Railroad--the principal railroad in
business, and its charter was |that scheme--did not begin until
repealed in 1872." |1873.[726]
|
It offered the same evidence to |But this witness stated that his
prove that the same rebates granted |road would give other shippers as
it by the contract of October 17, |low rates as to the oil combination,
1877, "were also granted to every |"if they would guarantee the same
shipper who contracted to do _all_ |quantity--not otherwise--under that
his business over the Pennsylvania |contract";[727] and the contract
Railroad." |itself states that no other shipper
|should have the same rebate
|--"commission," it is called--unless
|his business gave the road "the same
|amount of profit you realized from
|our trade."[728] No shipper could get
|the same rates by giving "all his
|business." He must give "the same
|quantity"--a totally different
|proposition.
|
It offered the evidence taken in the|The evidence shows that this was
Buffalo Explosion case, to show that|what was sworn to: "I have now a
"C.B. Matthews testified falsely" |detective agency here" (Buffalo). "I
in testifying that it was sworn to |employed L---- B----. At the time
that the members of the oil |he was in my employ he was employed
combination on trial employed |at the works of the Buffalo
detectives in Matthews' refineries, |Lubricating Company" (Matthews'
and that the detective was some time|company). "He made reports to me....
in Matthews' employ, and made his |I forwarded copies--one to New
report to the lawyer of the trust, |York, one to Rochester.... The one
and he got his pay from this lawyer.|forwarded to New York was addressed
|to" (the lawyer of the oil
|trust). "I met" (this lawyer, naming
|him) "at New York City, at No. 44
|Broadway, which is the office of the"
|(oil trust). "I received my pay from"
|(him). "My instructions from" (him)
|"were in writing."[729]
|
It offered "to prove that C.B. |This was what "was proved by a
Matthews testified falsely in saying|witness," and referred to by
that it was proved by a witness" |Matthews.
that the Rochester representative of|"He" (the Rochester representative
the oil combination said that the |of the oil combination)
principal company in it "would sue |"said he thought they" (Matthews'
Matthews once a month, or once a |company) "would not survive.... By
week, if necessary, to squeeze him |the time they got through with all
out." |the suits that they" (the oil
|combination) "would bring, the
|Buffalo Lubricating Company would
|be pretty much used up.... He didn't
|know as they would gain anything
|really, but they would embarrass them
|by bringing these suits, and if it
|was necessary they would bring them
|once a month--yes, they would bring
|them once a week."[730]
Similarly, throughout, the trust's offer to prove falls when
confronted with its own proof. Many more instances could be given, but
more than one instance is not needed.