XVII. IN THE INTEREST OF ALL…

XVII. IN THE INTEREST OF ALL

The difference in freights against Rice was so great, as the Interstate Commerce Commission found, after taking hundreds of pages of testimony, that he had to pay $600 to $1200, "or more," on the same quantity his opponent got through for $500. These discriminations were made, as the commissioners say, "on no principle.... Neither greater risks, greater expense, competition by water transportation, nor any other fact or circumstance brought forward in defence, nor all combined, can account for these differences."[414]

The railroads had, of course, to give some reason, and they put forward the plea that it was much more expensive and dangerous to carry Rice's shipments, which were in barrels, than those of the combination, which were in tank-cars.[415] This excuse for charging him rates at which he could not ship at all did not stand examination by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

But he did not wait for that. When he found the railroads were so fond of tank-cars, he set about getting them. He wrote the general freight agent and the president of the road that he would build tank-cars, and asked what his rate would be then; but he got no answer. He wrote other roads, but got no answer. He asked the general manager of the Queen City and Crescent Route the same question. After a correspondence of five months with him and other officials, in which he was shuttlecocked from one to another and back again, he had not only not succeeded in getting any tank-car rates, but at the end of that protracted exchange of letters the general manager wrote: "I was not aware that you had asked for rates on oil in tank-cars."[416] Rice wrote the Louisville and Nashville: "I will build immediately twenty tank-cars if you will guarantee me ... as low a net rate as accorded any other shipper." Commenting on his failure to get answers, the commissioners say: "Complainant did not succeed in obtaining rates. The denial of his right was plain, and stands unexcused.... What reason there may have been for it"--the refusal of rates--"we do not know, but find that they were not just or legal reasons."[417]

How history is made! One of the reasons given by the solicitor of the oil trust[418] for its success is its use of the tank-car, with the obvious inference that its would-be competitors had no such enterprise. And Peckham, in his valuable and usually correct "Census Report on Petroleum," in 1885, says that the railroads require shippers to use tank-cars![419]

Determined to keep in the field and to have tank-cars, if tank-cars were so popular with the railroad officials, Rice went to the leading manufacturers to have some built. He found they were glad to get his contract. After making arrangements at considerable trouble and expense to build him the cars, they telegraphed him that they had to give it up. Bankers, who had promised to advance them money on the security of the cars, backed out "on account of some supposed controversy which they claim you have had with the Standard Oil Company and various railroads in the West. They feared you could not use these cars to advantage if the railroads should be hostile to your interests."[420]

Through the all-pervading system of espionage, to which cities[421] as well as individuals were subject, his plans had been discovered and thwarted. The espionage over shipments provided for by the South Improvement scheme has now extended to business between manufacturer and manufacturer. Why should it stop at unsealing private correspondence in the post-office in the European style, and making its contents known to those who need the information for the protection of their rights to the control of the markets?

Rice, who was nothing if not indomitable, finally got ten cars from the Harrisburg works. But this supply was entirely inadequate, and he had to continue doing the bulk of his business in barrels. What a devil's tattoo the railroad men beat on these barrels of his! They made him pay full tariff rates on every pound weight of the oil and of the barrel, but they hauled free the iron tanks, which were the barrels of his rivals, and also gave them free the use of the flat-cars on which the tanks were carried.[422] Hauling the tanks free, on trucks furnished free, was not enough. The railroads hauled free of all charge a large part, often more than half, of the oil put into the tanks. In the exact phrase of the Interstate Commerce Commission, they made out their bills for freight to the oil combination "regardless of quantity." This is called "blind-billing."

Of the 3000 tank-cars of the combination only two carried as little as 20,000 pounds; according to the official figures there were hundreds carrying more than 30,000 pounds, and the weight ran up to 44,250 pounds, but they were shipped at 20,000 pounds.[423] A statement put in evidence showed that shipments in tank-cars actually weighing 1,637,190 pounds had been given to the roads by the combination as weighing only 1,192,655 pounds. Cars whose loads weighed 44,250, 43,700, 43,500, 36,550 pounds were shipped as having on board only 20,000 pounds. At this rate more than one-quarter of the transportation was stolen.

The stockholders of the road were paying an expensive staff of inspectors to detect attempts of shippers to put more in their cars than they paid for, but these shippers paid for three car-loads and shipped from four to six regularly, and were never called to account. This "blind-billing," the Commission said, was "specially oppressive." It was done by the roads in violation of their own rule. It had been mutually agreed among them, and given out to the public, "that tank-cars shall be taken at actual weight."[424]

When Rice was trying to get the roads to allow him to use tank-cars, he asked how the charge on them was calculated. Of those that answered none answered right. None of them gave him the slightest intimation that there was any such practice as "blind-billing." On the contrary, they assured him he would have to pay for every pound he shipped. The Missouri Pacific replied with a "statement not warranted by the facts," as the Commission softly put it. They said they charged for the "actual weight," while, as the Commission shows, they made shipments "regardless of quantity." Rice asked the Newport News and Mississippi Valley Railroad for tank-car rates. "A tank-car is supposed to weigh (carry) 20,000 pounds; if it weighs more, then we will charge for it." At the same time the agent wrote Rice this, he was hauling cars containing 35,000 pounds "with no additional charge." "If this statement was made in good faith," the Commission says, "it is difficult to account for it, and it is not accounted for." "Had he (Rice) provided himself with cars for tank shipment, and been charged as he was told he would be, the discrimination against him would have put success in the traffic out of the question."

When they wanted to turn some new screw in freight rates against Rice, the railroad officials would whip themselves around the stump by printing a new tariff sheet on a type-writer, and tacking it, perhaps, as one of the Interstate Commerce Commission said, on some back door in their offices. This they called "publishing" their rates, as required by the Interstate Commerce law. To Rice, asking for tank-car rates, they would send this printed sheet, showing that if he shipped by tank-car he must pay for every pound, and they held him off with this printed, official, and apparently authentic tariff, though shipping 44,000 for 20,000 pounds for the trust. This was done after the Interstate Commerce Act went into force.[425]

One of these roads assured Rice that its rates had been fixed "by the special authority of the National Railway Commissioners." The fact was, as the Commission declares: "The Commission never investigated coal-oil rates, or gave special authority for their renewal; it never sanctioned any difference in the rates as between tank-car and barrel shipments, and had never, up to the date of this letter, had its attention called to them in any way."[426]

The representative of the combination was called as a witness before the Interstate Commerce Commission. "We pay for exactly what is put in the tanks,"[427] he testified. "In fact, this was never done," says the Commission.[428] Even the railroad officials, who could go any length in "blind-billing" for him, could not "go it blind" on the witness-stand to the extent of supporting such a statement. "Our price per tank-car was not based on any capacity or weight; they have been made simply per tank-car."[429]

"What, generally, is the object of false billing?"

"I suppose to beat the railroad company."[430]

In defence of the discrimination against the barrel shippers, a great deal has been made of danger from fire, damage to cars from leakage, and trouble of handling in the case of barrel shipments, but the best expert opinion which the Interstate Commerce Commission could get went against all these plausible pretences.[431] The manager of the tank line on the Pennsylvania roads showed that the risks were least when the transportation was in barrels. Another reason given for the lower rates on tanks was that they returned loaded with turpentine and cotton-seed oil from the South; but, as the Interstate Commerce Commission shows, this traffic was taken at rates so astonishingly low that it was of little profit;[432] and the commissioner of the Southern Railway and Steamship Association informed the Commission that the return freight business in cotton alone, brought back by the box-cars, to say nothing of other freight, was worth more than these back-loads of turpentine in the tank-cars.[433] It was, consequently, the box-car in which barrel shipments were made, and not the tanks, on which the railroad men should have given a better rate, according to their own reasoning. Turpentine and cotton-seed oil are worth three or four times more than kerosene, and it costs no more, no less, to haul one than the other; but the railroads would carry the cotton-seed oil and turpentine for one-third or one-fourth the rate they charged for kerosene. The Commission could not understand why the rates given by the roads on these back-loads of turpentine and cotton-seed oil were so low. "This charge, for some reason not satisfactorily explained to the Commission, is made astonishingly low when compared with the charge made upon petroleum, although the cotton-seed oil is much the more valuable article."[434]

The newspapers of the South have contained many items of news indicating that the men who have made the oil markets theirs have similarly appropriated the best of the turpentine trade, but nothing is known through adjudicated testimony. The trustees of oil have always denied that there was any connection between them and the Cotton-seed Oil Trust, although the latter shipped its product in the oil trust's cars. The reasons, therefore, for the "extraordinarily low" rates made on the turpentine and cotton-seed oil shipped North in its tank-cars must remain, until further developments, where the Commission leaves it--"not satisfactorily explained." The railroads said they made the rates low for tanks because of the enticing prospects of these back-loads, in which there was no profit to speak of; but they extended these special rates to points from which there was no such back-loading.[435] Rice saw how the cost of sending his oil South could be reduced by bringing back-loads of turpentine at these "astonishingly low" rates. He found there was still turpentine in the South he could buy; but the railroads would not so much as answer his application for rates.

"They absolutely refused."

"Was this refusal since the Interstate Commerce decision in your case?"

"Yes, sir; since that decision."[436]

It might have been thought this would have been enough--hauling the tank itself free; furnishing the flat-cars free for many tanks; carrying free a quarter to a half, "or more." But there was more than this. The railroads paid the combination for putting its tank-cars on their lines. For every mile these cars were hauled, loaded or empty, the roads paid it a mileage varying from 3/4 to 1-1/2 cents. This mileage was of itself a handsome revenue, enough to pay a profit of 6 per cent. on its investment in the cars. But when Rice asked what the railroads would charge him for hauling back his empty tank-cars, he was not told that he would be paid for their use, as others were. He was told that he would be charged "generally a cent and a half a mile," or, "we make the usual mileage charge on return of empty tanks." "This last statement," the Interstate Commerce Commissioners say, "was not warranted by the facts."[437] The vessel which contains the oil of the combination "receives a hire coming and going," Mr. Rice's lawyer said before the Committee of Congress on Commerce; "that which contains Rice's oil pays a tax." When Rice tried to sell his oil on the Pacific coast he found that if he shipped in tank-cars he would have to pay $95 to bring the empty car back, which others got back free.

The representative of the oil combination was questioned about all this by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

"Are you allowed mileage on tank-cars?"

"No, sir."

"Neither way?"

"Neither way."[438]

But the railroad officials again could not "blind-bill" him as far as this. Asked what mileage they paid him, they replied:

"Three-quarters of a cent a mile."[439]

When the freight agents who did these queer things at the expense of their employers--i.e., their proper employers, the stockholders--were put on the stand before the Interstate Commerce Commission to explain, they cut a sorry figure. "It was an oversight," "a mistake," said one. Another could only ring confused changes on "I think it is an error.... I cannot tell why that is so.... It is simply an error.... I cannot tell."[440] There were never any errors, suppositions, oversights for Rice.[441] Referring to this, the Commission says, caustically:

"The remarkable thing about the matter is that so many of these defendants should make the same mistake--a mistake, too, that it was antecedently so improbable any of them would make. The Louisville and Nashville, the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific, the Newport News and Mississippi Valley, and the Illinois Central companies are all found giving out the same erroneous information, and no one of them can tell how or why it happened to be done, much less how so many could contemporaneously, in dealing with the same subject, fall into so strange an error. It is to be noted, too, that it is not a subordinate agent or servant who makes the mistake in any instance, but it is the man at the head of the traffic department, and whose knowledge on the subject any inquirer would have a right to assume must be accurate. In no case is the error excused."[442]

The cases in which Rice prosecuted the railroads before the Interstate Commerce Commission are among the most important that have been tried by the Commission. The charges made by Rice were conclusively proved, except as to some minor roads and circumstances. The Commission declared the rates that were charged him to be illegal and unjust, and a discrimination that must be stopped. It ordered the roads to discontinue using their power as common carriers to carry Rice's property into the possession of a rival. "The conclusion is irresistible that the rate sheets were not considerately made with a view to relative justice."[443]

The facts of these discriminations--"unjust," "illegal," and "abhorrent"--are on the records as judicially and finally determined. But one of the combination said before the Pennsylvania Legislature, at Harrisburg, as reported in the Harrisburg Patriot, February 19, 1891:

"I say to you all, in good faith, that since the passage of the Interstate Commerce law, and the introduction of that system, we have never taken a rebate. I mean we have taken no advantage over what any other shipper can get. I make the statement broadly, and I challenge the statement to the very utmost, and will pay the expenses of any litigation undertaken to try it."

When it was found that this practice of charging the preferred shipper for only 20,000 pounds when it shipped 25,000, 30,000, 40,000, or 44,000, was going to be investigated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, there were intellects ready to meet the emergency. A pot of paint and a paint-brush furnished the shield of righteousness. Each car being known by its number, and only by its number, all the old numbers of the 3000 tank-cars of the oil trust were painted out, and new numbers painted on. Whether its mighty men left their luxurious palaces in New York, and stole about in person after dark, each with paint-pot and brush, or whether they asked employés to do such work, the evidence does not state. The device was simple, but it did. Rice was suing for his rights to use the highways before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and before the Supreme Court of Ohio, through the Attorney-General of the State, who had found the matter of sufficient importance to use his official power to institute suits in quo-warranto against two railroads. It was necessary that evidence should be forthcoming in these suits to prove what his rate was in comparison with the others. The only way this could be done was by comparing the actual size of the cars with the size given in the freight bills, or manifests. The cars are known in the bills only by their numbers, and without its number no car could be identified. The report of Congress reprints the following from the testimony of the representative of the trust before the Interstate Commerce Commission:

"Has there recently been any general change in the numbering of the cars?"

"Yes, sir; there has been quite a general renumbering, repainting, and overhauling."

"When did that change take place?"

"I think it was commenced some time in July; it may have been later."

The result of that renumbering made it practically impossible to identify any car as connected with any shipment made before that time. The cars were there, looking as fresh and innocent as good men who have donned robes of spotless white earned by the payment of generous pew-rent. The cars showed even to the unassisted eye, as the Interstate Commerce Commission said, how much larger they were than was pretended. There were still the accounts of the railroads, showing that these cars had been "blind-billed" as containing only 20,000 pounds, but the cars mentioned in the manifesto could no longer be identified with the cars on the tracks. The sin of "blind-billing" was washed out in paint. Rice went to the Interstate Commerce Commission with his complaint in this case in July. Immediately the repainting and renumbering took place. "It was commenced some time in July; it may have been later."[444]

In such cases time is money, and more. "Seest thou a man diligent in business, he shall stand before kings. He shall not stand before mean men."

The members of this combination have many thousand tank-cars engaged in carrying their oil, and some of them have another kind of tank-car travelling about the country. Under the head of the "Gospel Car" the Daily Statesman, of Portland, Oregon, printed the following article, Sunday, December 13, 1891: "THE GOSPEL CAR.--The mission car 'Evangel' arrived yesterday, and was side-tracked on the penitentiary switch. A song service attracted many people during the morning. There will be services at 10.30 this morning, and in the afternoon, at 3 o'clock, a Sunday-school will be organized. This will be the first Sunday-school ever organized from the gospel car, which has been on the road since last spring. The 'Evangel' is sixty feet in length, ten feet wide, and seats nearly one hundred people. It is the generous gift of"--several New York millionaires, the most important of them belonging to the oil trust--" ... to the American Baptist Publication Society. The reverend gentleman who was in charge of the 'Evangel,'" the Statesman continued, "will visit the smaller towns along the railway, and conduct evangelistic meetings in the car." One of these cars was in Chicago early in 1893, and was admiringly described by the Chicago press. Though corporations have no souls they are ready to help save the souls of others, for the railroads give these cars free hauling, and the messages and the packages of its occupants are franked by the telegraph and express companies. The contents of this tank-car are distributed by its donors to the people without money and without price. It is conceivable that by making it so "cheap" and by multiplying the "Evangel" into an evangelical tank line of thousands of cars, the donors might drive the churches, which have no tank-cars, out of the business, as they have done the tankless refiners, and ultimately add to their monopoly of the Light of the World that of the Light of the other World.

Tho effect of all this on the family co-operation at Marietta does not need to be described. Its head told Congress that if he had had no difficulty in getting the same freight as others he could have run his refinery to its full capacity, and could have increased his works largely.

"Are not your expenses less than theirs?"

"Yes, sir.... I am running very moderately now.... One-third to one-half generally."[445]

"I am virtually ruined," he says still later in a statement of his condition in a circular to the public, urging them to petition Congress to make the imperfect Interstate Commerce law operative. He is virtually ruined, though he has won his cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and that Federal tribunal has ordered the roads to give him his rights on the highways; but it has been a barren victory. His circular is entitled "My Experience Very Briefly Told." Its opening sentences give us in a phrase the secret of the significance of Rice's story, and dignify his appeal to the public. They show how thoroughly adversity had driven home into this plain man's mind a great civic truth which his fellow-citizens have not yet learned, probably because they have not yet had adversity enough. His solitary and fruitless, although successful, struggle taught him that the citizens of industry can no more maintain their rights acting singly than the citizens of government. He had learned that "competition," "supply and demand," "eternal laws of trade," were catchwords as impotent in the markets to give individuals their rights, if unassociated, as the incantations of royalty and loyalty, and law and order, to save people from their king until they made themselves a People. Persons fail; only a People can get and keep freedom. This Rice had begun to learn from his failure to enforce single-handed rights which all the courts declared were his, but which no court could secure. In his card to the people, he said: "I am fighting for my rights and for my existence (which happens to be in the interest of all) single-handed and alone, at my own expense and time lost.... I am here ... to do what I can to get the Interstate Commerce Act amended at this present session of the Fiftieth Congress, to cure existing evils, and all I ask is that you will take hold and assist me by your signature and approval to the enclosed petition. You are subject to the same influences, and now is your time, my fellow-countrymen, to come forward and assist a little to stop this nefarious work."

"In the interest of all." This is exactly the relation which the struggle of this common citizen bears to the general welfare. The investigation by the Ohio Legislature in 1879;[446] the removal by the United States Court of the railroad receiver who agreed to pay the oil trust $25 out of every $35 freight collected from Rice;[447] the refund ordered by the Supreme Court of Ohio from a pipe-line company which had charged Rice 15 cents extra on every barrel he shipped to pay it to his competitors;[448] the successful prosecution, by the Attorney-General of Ohio before the Supreme Court, of the railroads discriminating against Rice;[449] the cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission from its beginning till now, involving hundreds of railroads, and decided, so far as it did decide, on almost every point in Rice's favor;[450] the disruption, as far as forms go, of the oil trust in Ohio by the Supreme Court of the State ousting corporations from the right to become members of such combinations and to pool their earnings therein;[451] the investigation of the oil trust by Congress in 1888 and 1889, devoted in large part to the various aspects of Rice's experience--these are some only of the public functions which had to be invoked in the ineffectual attempt to protect this one man on the high-road and in his livelihood, and they show how little his was merely a "private affair."

When the amendment of the Interstate Commerce law was before Congress in 1889, eminent counsel were employed by Rice to explain the defects of the law to the committees, and petitions to Congress through his instrumentality were circulated all over the country, and numerously signed. Though a poor man, who could ill afford it, he gave time and money and attention, frequently spending weeks at Washington, discussing the subject with members, and presenting petitions. The act was amended in partial accordance with these petitions and recommendations.

To obtain the elementary right of a stockholder, never withheld in the course of ordinary business--to vote and receive dividends on stock in the oil trust which the trustees had sold and he had bought in the open market--Rice had to sue through all the New York courts from 1888 to 1892. The Court of Appeals decided that there had been no lawful reason for the denial of his rights, and ordered that they be accorded him. This was another barren victory. The trust had meanwhile ostensibly been dissolved; but the dissolution has every appearance of being like that of its progenitor, the South Improvement Company, a dissolution "in name" only; not in reality. In place of the old trust certificates listed on the New York Stock Exchange, new certificates have been issued which were selling in the spring of 1894 at about the same quotation as the former ones.

In this case the trust asked the New York courts to deny Rice his rights because he had in other matters, and as to other parties, appealed to other courts. His other suits had been against the railroads, not against the oil combination. He acted on the defensive, and went into court only to save himself from commercial strangulation. In all of them that went to trial he was successful, with but one or two exceptions. He was so successful that even the judges who heard his case and decided in his favor were moved to outbursts of unaffected indignation on the bench. The only result aimed at or procured was that the courts decreed that these common carriers must in the future give this citizen his legal rights on the railways; not that he must have the same rates as his opponent, but only that the difference in their favor shall not be "excessive," "illegal," "unjust."

Because of this attempt to secure the fair use of the highways side by side with it, the trust pleaded in the Supreme Court of New York that his appeal to courts as a shipper was a reason why the courts should withhold his rights as a stockholder.

In making this plea the trustees described themselves as having been for years persecuted by the independent of Marietta, and moistened the dry pages of their legal pleadings with appeals for the sympathy of the courts and the public. He has "diligently and persistently sought to become acquainted with" our "methods of business and private affairs;" "he has used efforts to injure" our "business"; "he is attempting to harass, injure, and annoy" us; "he has ever since ... 1876, when he first engaged in business, ... maintained a hostile attitude, and been engaged in hostile transactions and proceedings against" us, ... "for the purpose of injuring" us and our "business"; he "has been uninterruptedly prosecuting ... a series of litigations ... in the courts, as well as before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and before an investigating committee of Congress ... for the purpose of harassing and annoying" us.[452] And when in 1891 Rice was appealing to the Attorney-General of New York to bring suit in the name of the State against the oil combination in New York, like that which had been successfully brought in Ohio, he was publicly stigmatized in court as a "black-mailer" because he had once named a price at which he was willing to sell his refinery and quit. So the citizens of Nashville were called black-mailers for competing, and the citizens of Buffalo for bringing a criminal conspiracy to justice.

It is this dancing attendance upon State legislatures, courts, attorney-generals, Congress, the Interstate Commerce Commission, as shown in this recital, which the modern American business man must add to Thrift, Industry, and Sobriety as a condition of survival.

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XVIII. ORDINARY SUPPLY AND DEMAND

"Do I understand you that they have not sought in any way to make the operations of refineries outside the trust so unprofitable that parties would either come into the trust or have to abandon the business--has anything of that sort been done?"

"They have not; no, sir, they have not," was the triple negative of the president.

"They" (the trustees) "have lived on good terms with what I may call their competitors?"

"They have; and have to-day very pleasant relations with those gentlemen."

"So far as you know," he was asked, "the product of the crude oil and the manufacture and sale of the refined oil has been absolutely left to the ordinary rules of supply and demand, has it not?"

"It has."[453]

In the winter of 1873 a young farmer living among the blue hills of Wyoming, in western New York, where he had been born and bred, was asked by a stranger from Rochester to help him in a search for oil lands. The old-fashioned quiet of the little community was agitated by the hope that the milk and honey of their valleys might be replaced by a more precious flow. The stranger and his son were prosperous oil refiners, but a little cloud, about the size of a "trustee's" hand, had crept into their sunshine. As they set about drilling a well on some "likely-looking" land they had leased, the stranger told the farmer why he was so anxious to strike oil for his own exclusive use. The reader is better prepared to understand his explanation than the then inexperienced agriculturist to whom he gave his confidence. It had begun to be difficult for him to get a full and regular supply of the crude petroleum for his works. There were restrictions, he said, about the shipments.[454] What that meant the young farmer was to learn for himself.

There was no oil in Wyoming, and the refiner went back to Rochester, and, as so many others have done, sold the control of his works, the Vacuum, to the "successful men" of the combination, and stepped silently into the minority place. His Wyoming friend, Charles B. Matthews, had continued in his service, and when the Vacuum was sold he and two other of its employés made up their minds to go into the business of refining in Buffalo on their own account. They were under no obligations or contract to remain, and did not suppose themselves to have been sold along with the concern. They were capable men, and showed great business sense in their arrangements. Buffalo, by its connections by rail and the lake with the market, and its nearness to the oil supply, was a much better situation than Rochester or Cleveland. An independent refining company--the Atlas--was then constructing an independent pipe line from the oil regions to Buffalo. "This made Buffalo the best point for establishing refining industries in the country, with its canal and lake transportation for the products of the factory, and with a pipe line, in the hands of independents, from the crude oil wells to the city," said the Buffalo Express. Matthews had by this time had several years' experience in the business. Of the two with him, Albert was a laborer, who had worked his way up in the Vacuum refinery until he could run the stills, and had learned how to make oil. He and his thrifty wife had saved a few thousand dollars. He was ambitious. He had learned at school and in the army and at Fourth-of-July celebrations that America is a free country for all, and that there are no classes here, and that any workman may go to the top. Farmer Matthews had fed his boyhood with stories of country boys who had gone to the city and matured into business magnates. He and Albert pooled their visions and their savings, borrowed some money, and went to work. As for competition, though they knew it was close, they were not afraid but that they could hold their own in a fair fight, and of anything but a fair fight they never dreamed.

"How are you going to get your crude oil?" Albert and Matthews were asked when they went to tell their employer what they were going to do.

"From the Atlas pipe line."

"You will wake up some day and find that there is no Atlas Oil Company.

"We have ways," he continued, "of making money you know nothing about," using, singularly enough, the phraseology employed by a greater man in the interview with another would-be competitor.[455]

"As gentlemen," he went on to say, "I respect you, but as to the Buffalo Lubricating Oil Company I shall do all in my power to injure or destroy it."[456]

Afterwards Albert alone was sent for. "Don't you think it would be better for you to leave these men, and have $20,000 deposited to your wife's credit than go with these parties?"

"I went out with them in good faith, and I propose to stay."

"It will be only a matter of a few days with the Buffalo institution at the furthest. We will crush them out, and you will lose what little you have got."

Albert was shown an elaborate statement of the cost of making oil and its selling price, proving that there was no money in oil.[457] The record of dividends was produced in court afterwards. It showed that just before this--January 18, 1881--a dividend of 50 per cent. had been paid in one month.[458] Dividends of $300,000 had been paid in 1881 on the capital of $100,000. "No wonder they did not want competition," said the New York World.

These negotiations had been with the son. Albert not yielding to this pressure, and pushing ahead with the construction of the rival stills, the father, who was in California, came back. At his request Albert again interrupted the work on the new refinery, which he alone of the partners could direct, and came from Buffalo to Rochester for an interview.

"You have made a grand mistake," said his old employer, "by going out with those fellows.... The company will not last long.... The result will be, if you stay with them, you will lose all you have got in it.... We are going to commence suits against them. We will not only sue them, but serve an injunction on them and stop their work. The result of it is that when these suits commence, if you are in it, you will be responsible, and you have got a little money, and you will lose it all.... If you come back and work with us everything will be all right, and we will make everything satisfactory to you."

"If I leave them it will leave them in bad shape," Albert urged.

"That is just exactly what I want to do,"[459] his former employer replied.

Albert began to weaken. "I had," he afterwards told in court, ... "about $6000 altogether, or a little more. They had reason to know that I had some property there."[460] This was all he had to show for the work of a lifetime, and it began to look as if it were fading away under these reiterated threats and warnings, which went on from March to June. Albert gave way. He went to his lawyer, Mr. Truesdale, of Rochester. "We have come," said his former employer, who accompanied him, "to see what disposition can be made of Al's property."

"They are going to bust the company up," said Albert to his lawyer, when asked why he was going back to the Vacuum Company. "I am an indorser on one of its notes, and if I do not come back with the Vacuum, what property and money I have will be taken away from me."

The lawyer was pressed to tell how Albert could get out of his arrangement with his company. They could not get along without him, and were not likely to discharge him.

"If they won't release him or buy him out, the only other way," said the lawyer, "is to leave them, and take the consequences. If he has entered into a contract and violated it, I presume there will be a liability for damages as well as for the debts."

"I think there is other ways for Albert to get out of it," said the representative of the Vacuum method in commerce and morals.

"I see no way except to back out or sell out; no other honorable way," persisted the lawyer.

"Suppose he should arrange the machinery so it would bust up or smash up, what would the consequences be?"

"If negligently, carelessly, not purposely done, he would be only civilly liable for damages caused by his negligence; but if it was wilfully done, there would be a further criminal liability for malicious injury to the property of the company."

"You wouldn't want me, would you," said the poor man to his late employer and friend, "to do anything to lay myself liable?"

"You have been police justice," said the Vacuum man to the lawyer, "and have had some experience in criminal law. I would like to have you look up the law carefully on that point, and we will see you again."[461] Or, in effect: "See about how much crime we can commit," District Attorney Quinby paraphrased it afterwards to the jury.

In a day or so the two managers of the Vacuum--father and son--came back again with Albert.

"Have you looked up that matter, Mr. Truesdale?" asked they.

"Yes, I have looked it up."

"What do you think about it?"

"My impression has not changed. Such a course would involve him in a criminal liability if he did it on purpose. Everybody who advised or counselled him in such a course would be equally liable with him. The consequences, if you follow that course, would be that you would get into State's prison. If he is an honest man he won't think of taking any such action as that. I advise him to keep out of any such thing."

"Such things will have to be found out before they can be punished," was the Vacuum reply. "They will have to find him before they can do anything to him. We will take care of him." "Having in mind," said District Attorney Quinby to the jury, "what happened afterwards--that they should spirit him away."

"The suggestion is altogether wrong," persisted the lawyer. "The action would certainly be very hazardous as well as wrong."

On leaving, the elder of the two, evidently persisting in his plan, said to the lawyer, "If you want to communicate with Albert, you can do so through C.M."[462]--his son.

These men were too careless to note that the lawyer they were talking to was not their lawyer, but Albert's. When they were brought to trial for the crime that followed, and Albert, repentant, told the truth, the lawyer was free to testify against them. "I am entirely willing," said Albert in court, "that Mr. George Truesdale shall state what took place. I withdraw any legal objections I might have."

The accident which has let us see how the employés of a trust coolly debated with lawyers the policy of blowing up a competitor's works, is one of the few glimpses the American public will ever get into the relations of great legal lights and law-reformers with the mighty capitalists who wreck railroads and execute wholesale corruption of courts, legislatures, and trustees, and evade and transgress the laws with the sure march of those who know that indictments and bail-bonds and verdicts of "guilty" and the penitentiary are only for men not rich enough to plan crime "by advice of counsel." When such men went marauding through the treasury of a great railroad and the courts of an Empire State, we saw the greatest of law-reformers, with a host of legal luminaries, picketing and scouting for them. Every sound in nature is phonographed somewhere, as its waves strike, and Judgment Day will be rich with the revelations from these invisible rolls of the confidential conversations between "trustees" and counsel, who are not honorable lawyers as George Truesdale was, prostituting their functions as "officers of courts" into those of officers of crime.

All these trips from Buffalo to Rochester for these interviews made bad breaks in the construction of the works of the new company at Buffalo. The partners, who were wholly dependent upon Albert's knowledge and experience for the building of the refinery, and running it when built, were mystified and alarmed. Time and again he ran away without a word to them, and all work would stop until he came back. When he was on hand his task did not prosper as if his heart were still in it. When one of the three stills of the refinery had been set up ready for use, and before any oil was run, Albert went up to Rochester again. At this rendezvous the sinister suggestion of "doing something" was repeated. "You go back to Buffalo and construct the pipes and stills so that they cannot make good oil, and then if you would give them a little scare ... they not knowing anything about the business ... you know how to do it." Swearing he would not consent, but already succumbing to this temptation, as he had given way to the threat of ruin, he replied as before: "I don't propose to do anything to make myself criminally liable."[463] At their suggestion he took a man they sent all through the new works, showing him how the stills had been constructed, how the oil was to be made, and all the details of the refinery.[464]

The day came at last--long expected, delayed by these unaccountable absences--when the members of the new company were to have the happiness of seeing their enterprise set going. The one still that was ready was filled with crude oil. The morning of the start Albert weighted down the safety-valve with heavy iron, and packed it with plaster of Paris. "Fire this still," he said to his fireman, "as heavy as you possibly can." The fireman did as he was ordered. During the forenoon Albert came to him. "Damn it!" he said, "you ain't firing this still half. Fire this still! I want you to fire this still! You ain't got no fire under it!" He took the shovel himself and threw some coal in, although there was, as the fireman expressed it, "an inordinary fire." The fire-box grew cherry red.[465]

Albert knew well enough what the next chapter in the history of his associates was likely to be. He had carried a dark-lantern into the still-room one day when he was superintendent of the Vacuum. "I was badly burned by the explosion," he testified before the coroner's jury investigating the explosion in Rochester, in 1887. There were four explosions in the Vacuum works while he was there. In the second, four men were burned. As one of them ran to get water, with his clothes burning, he set fire to the gas coming out of the sewer. Flames flashed all about him. "There's hell all around!" he exclaimed. The third explosion came from an overheated condensing-pipe, and destroyed one of the buildings. The fourth burned up three tanks. Remembering all this, he now took himself off to the grounds of the Atlas Company, out of harm's reach. The brickwork about the still cracked apart with the heat.

But the "smash-up or something" had not been thoroughly arranged. Despite the heavy weight and the packing of plaster, the safety-valve lifted itself under the unusual pressure, and was a safety-valve yet. It was blown open, and a large mass of vapor rose and spread. This was the real accident: that the safety-valve broke loose instead of keeping the gases in to explode, as had been planned. The spreading vapor was not steam, as that had not been admitted to the still, but the gas of distilling petroleum, as inflammable as gunpowder. There was danger still, as great almost as that of explosion. A spark of fire, and it would have wrapped all within its reach in flames. The boiler fires were but twenty feet distant; not far from them the distilled oil was being gathered in the "tail-house"; near the tail-house stood the tanks of crude oil, hundreds of barrels of the fuel that conflagration loves--the kind of fuel the cooks use who, beginning with kerosene for kindling, make the whole house into a stove, and cook themselves and the family with the breakfast.

The kindly wind of a June day carried the cloud of gas away from the fire until it passed out of sight. The unsuspecting, inexperienced men, whose lives and property had been at the mercy of explosion, knew nothing of their peril until years afterwards. The worst they knew then was that the "batch" of 200 barrels of petroleum was spoiled, and that Albert, the only practical man among them, was gone, leaving them crippled for a year. They waited for him, but he did not come. They looked for him, but could not find him. Matthews went to the depot night after night, sometimes at midnight, or later, to watch the trains, but Albert never came.

"What would be the consequences?" Albert was asked afterwards in court, when he was telling about "the pretty heavy fires" he had made under the still--"what would be the consequences in case too hot fires were applied, and the gas should blow off the pipes and become ignited?"

"The consequences would be that, if ignited, there would be a fire."[466]

An Associated Press despatch from Louisville, Kentucky, June 30, 1890, describing an explosion in an oil refinery there, and the "five acres of fire" that followed, reproduces for us the picture which it had been planned to paint at Buffalo as part of the panorama of "the ordinary rules of supply and demand." A tank-car had been opened to run some oil out. As the workmen lifted the cap from the manhead of the tank a cloud of gas poured forth. It had been generated simply by the heat of the summer sun, without the aid of an "inordinary" hot fire. The men jumped and ran. Before they had taken a dozen steps the vapor, spreading over the ground and moving with the wind, had reached one of the sheds near by in which there was a fire. There was a flash. The men were bathed in a lake of fire. They ran with the flames streaming from them. At the infirmary their bodies were found to be charred in spots, literally roasted alive, and the flesh dropped off as their clothing was removed. Three men died and several were injured.

Several years after the Buffalo explosion, when those convicted for their part in it were fighting for stay of proceedings, new trial, anything to escape sentence, and were trying by every means in their power to impress upon the public the altogether innocent character of the little incident at the works of their rival, something happened at their own works--the Vacuum in Rochester--which gave the people an appalling sense of the terrors of the new school of supply and demand. Naphtha is one of the by-products of petroleum distillation, and is used by the gas companies in the manufacture of the greased air they furnish under the name of gas. The Vacuum Company were selling their naphtha to the Rochester Gas Company. It was delivered to the gas company through a pipe line. On the afternoon of December 21, 1887, there was an explosion on Platt Street, Rochester, tearing away the pavement, shattering the basement of a building, and filling the air with missiles. In a few seconds another explosion occurred a short distance away, making a hole in the street several feet in diameter, from which came large volumes of smoke and flame. A third and fourth "bust-up" rapidly followed, and then a fifth, in the Clinton Flouring Mill, tearing away a considerable portion of the building, blowing off the roof and upper stories of the Jefferson Mill adjoining, and shattering the Washington Mill. The Jefferson and Clinton and Washington mills were burned to the ground. People were killed by flying débris, burned to death, smashed by falling walls, crippled by jumping from the upper stories of factories and mills on fire. "There is probably no chemical product," says Professor Joy, of Columbia College, "which has occasioned the loss of so many lives and the destruction of so much property as naphtha.... From its highly explosive and inflammable nature it has proved little better in the hands of ignorant people than so much gunpowder."

"The counsel for the defence," said District Attorney Quinby, in summing up the case before the jury, "laughed at the idea of Matthews and his associates coming to Buffalo with a little money to compete. I congratulate him that instead of defending for conspiracy he is not here to-day pleading for the defendants' lives. If a person had been killed, and it had been under the advice and instruction of his clients, he would have been differently situated from what he is to-day. How well you men may be thankful that the gases from this still did not flow down and, becoming ignited, explode and kill the fireman! You ought to get down on your knees and thank your God that Providence prevented any such terrible thing as that for you."

After the "bust-up" had been planned, and before it was done, one of the Vacuum managers went to New York, where the "trustees" for whom he was managing the company were. After the "bust-up" Albert heard by telegram from New York, as had been arranged, and went to meet his old employer. "What do you say to going down to Boston?" he was asked on his arrival. Later a man came in and was introduced by the name of one of the three trustees who purchased and directed the Vacuum. On leaving, this "trustee" said: "I will see you again if you do not go to Boston." He thus showed that he knew of the plan that Albert should be taken away, and that they should go to Boston. The manager of the Vacuum now gave the world a genuine illustration of the harmony of labor and capital. He couldn't let Albert out of his sight. They went to Boston on the Fall River boat. The representative of a hundred millions took the laborer into his own state-room, and at Boston carried him into the splendors of Young's Hotel, where he registered, naming himself "and friend," and they shared one bedroom. They went to church together, and to Nantasket Beach, his friend introducing Albert to those whom they met under an assumed name. "You don't want to be known here," he said, "and I will introduce you by the name of Milner."

"That is the name I was known by while I was there."

"Albert has nothing to fear," said District Attorney Quinby on his trial. "He had never been in Boston before in his life. He had no acquaintance there. There was no reason why he should be registered 'and friend' at the hotel. There was no reason, so far as he was concerned, that he should be introduced under a fictitious name, except that his employer had been schooled in the wonderful university known as" the oil combination. In Boston, on a Monday, on the Common, within sight of the equestrian statue of the Father of his Country, his former employer made a contract with Albert to pay him $1500 a year for doing nothing except staying away from Buffalo.

"You won't have much to do, and you can stay here in Boston, and keep away from those fellows, and we will protect you."

"Who's going to make up if those fellows come on and sue me for damages? Who will make up this loss that I have been going to by sacrificing my property?"

"Leave that to me; I will fix that all right. You do just as I tell you, and you will come out all right.... Go wherever you like, stop where you like, and we will pay all your expenses while you are here."[467]

Albert loafed about Boston several weeks, sometimes helping to roll a barrel of oil in the Vacuum's store. When he wanted money he asked for it and got it. He had once been a hard drinker. Destruction was as carelessly invited upon the soul of a poor brother as upon the lives and property of competitors. He hung around Boston and Rochester nearly a year. Then his old employer, who was in California, sent for him to come there to help in a fruit cannery, his salary continuing as before. From the moment he deserted his partners, as Judge Edward Hatch, the counsel for Matthews, stated in the civil suit for damages in this conspiracy, Albert "never earned enough to cover the end of your knife-blade with salt at your dinner. But they pay him, in salary and bonus, over $4000. Why? To get him away, and to stifle lawful, legitimate, and honest competition; to stifle that which brings into every poor man's home an article of necessity at a cheaper rate." He stayed in California a few months, and, finally, sickened of the disgraceful part he was playing, turned at bay, and gave notice that he was going to leave. "This is kind of sudden," the agent of his employers replied, but said he would write to the principal director in New York and advise that he release him. "You will give me time, won't you? You know it takes a couple of weeks or longer to do business from here to New York." Albert waited, and in time the word came from New York. "I have heard from these parties, and they are willing to release you."[468]

Albert, who had put himself into the extraordinary position in which he was on the repeated pledges of the tempters that they would make it "all right" with him, and protect him from loss and harm, found that he had put his "trust in princes." When he came to settle he expected that those for whom he had sacrificed his honor, his property, and his career would make him some compensation. In answer to the question how much they ought to make up to him, he named $5000 or $10,000, which was certainly little enough, in view of the fact that the business he had sacrificed to them was one in which, as the Vacuum's career showed, $100 shares came to be worth $2666 each. But the representative of the trust declared he could not think of such a thing, and in full of all obligations gave him nothing but the balance due of the wages agreed on. Then he asked Albert to hold himself still further at their service. As they parted, he said: "Now we have settled up; now we are good friends.... If anything ever comes up in this matter I would like to have you stand by us.... We will see that you are paid all right, and give you $25 a day while we need your services." Albert replied that he did not feel under any obligations to the oil combination. "I do not know as my interest lays that way. I do not think I shall do anything to benefit them; they have injured me all that they can; they have switched me all around, all over the country; they have got me out of employ, not given me anything to do, which I sought to have them do. I do not think they have used me right, and I have sacrificed considerable money by this transaction, and you have always promised that it would be made good, and you have not done so."[469]

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XIX. THROUGH THE WOMAN'S EYES

Matthews knew nothing and suspected nothing about the worst part of the plot against him until Albert's lawyer, Mr. Truesdale, nearly four years later, was called upon to testify in the suit Matthews brought for damages against the Vacuum people. This suit was to recover from them for having enticed Albert away, and having persecuted Matthews with false and malicious suits; but Truesdale's evidence at once revealed that there had been a deeper damnation still in the conspiracy against him. Mr. Matthews, one day on the street in Buffalo, ran across Albert, who had just come back from California.

"No man ever used another meaner than I have you," said the now repentant man to him, volunteering all the information he had, and agreeing to testify if called on. This revelation made the farmer-refiner a reformer. This was the public's business. If such things could be plotted and done with impunity by one man against another, there was an end forthwith of every liberty the republic boasted. Especially menacing was such a conspiracy when concerted by the rich fanatic of business against the poorer citizen to prevent the latter from disputing the claim that a great market was a private preserve, and that the right to trade in it is a privilege which "belongs to us."[470] Matthews could have used his discovery as an irresistible weapon to force his enemy to his knees, but he laid his evidence before the district attorney. This official presented it to the grand-jury, which found that the facts warranted indictments. When the first indictment was quashed on technical grounds a second grand-jury, sifting the facts, agreed with the first that the accused should be held to answer in the criminal courts. This was six years after the crime. The five persons indicted were the two former owners of the Vacuum, now the resident managers of it for the combination, and the three members of the oil trust, as the combination then called itself, who had bought the Vacuum for it, and had been elected by the trustees directors to manage it for them, and had so managed it even to the most picayune details. The case caught the ears of the world, not because crime was charged against men who had dazzled even the gold-filmed eyes of their epoch by the meteor-like flash of their flight from poverty into a larger share of "property"--the property of others--than any other group of millionaires had assimilated in an equal period; not for that, but because the charges of crime against these quickest-richest men were to be brought to trial. Members of the combination had been often accused; they had been indicted. This was the first time, as District Attorney Quinby said in his speech to the jury, that they had found a citizen honest enough and brave enough to stand up against them--the only one. "There is no man," he said, "so respected to-day in Buffalo as he for the method he has used to bring these men to justice." He succeeded in doing alone what the united producers of the oil regions failed to do, although their resources were infinitely greater. The people of the entire oil country failed utterly to do so much as get the members of the oil combination, when indicted for conspiracy in 1879, to come into court to be tried. All its principal men were indicted--the president, the vice-president, the secretary, the cashier, and others. They could not even be got to give bail. One of them had said when the indictments were found, that the case would never be tried, and it never has been. The Governor would not move to have those of the accused who were non-residents extradited, as he would have done, does daily, in the case of poor men, and the courts so tangled up the questions of procedure that the people withdrew, and left the indictments, as they remain to this day, on file in the Clarion County court, swinging like the body of some martyr on a road-side gibbet in the pagan days, polluting the air and mocking justice.[471]

That the trust was thoroughly alarmed, and saw the necessity of rallying all its resources to save itself, was apparent from the formidable display with which it appeared in the court-room. Present with the five defendants, as if also on trial--a solid phalanx--were its president, the vice-president, the manager of its pipe-line system, the principal representatives of the trust in Buffalo, and many others. Their regular attorney of New York was present with two of the leading lawyers of Buffalo. Besides these there was a distinguished man from Rochester, reputed the ablest lawyer in western New York, whose voice is often heard in the Supreme Court at Washington. He had two important members of the Rochester bar as assistants, one of them in the summing up unmercifully scored by the District Attorney for fixing witnesses; and, not least, a well-known United States District Attorney, who made the convention speeches by which a distinguished citizen of Buffalo was nominated, successively and successfully, for Sheriff, Mayor, Governor, and President. The defendants come here, said the people's attorney, with the best legal talent the country affords, the best the profession can furnish; for the trust--"they are practically the defendants in this action--with its great wealth, has the choice of legal talent." Other eminent lawyers were also consulted, but were not present. Never was a weak defence made the most of with more skill than these gentlemen exhibited upon the trial.... But great as was the ability of the defence, Mr. George T. Quinby, the District Attorney, and his assistant, William L. Marcy, proved a match for them. Every political and moneyed influence that could be brought to bear was used to mislead the District Attorney, but all to no purpose. The jury could see that the complainant, Charles B. Matthews, did not get the indictment to sell out, otherwise he would have sold it out and not have insisted upon a trial. The fact that the case was on trial, at a cost of many thousands of dollars to the defendants, was conclusive upon that point. An emissary, trying to get Matthews to call off the District Attorney and to hush up this criminal prosecution, said the oil trust could "give him anything, even to being governor of a Western territory."[472] "You will have a chance," Matthews told the District Attorney, "to line the street from your house to the City Hall with gold bricks." But this public prosecutor had no price. He grasped the full scope of this extraordinary case, which involved not only a crime against persons and against the people, but against that true commerce of reciprocal and equal service on which alone the new civilization of humanity can rest.

The room in the Buffalo court-house, where the case was being heard, was bright with the sunshine of a May day, putting out the shadows of indictments and verdicts lurking in corners and pigeon-holes. Although it was a criminal case, the on-looker saw, strange as it seemed, that whatever strain there was in the situation appeared to be felt least by the accused, and most by the public and the jury. The nearer the eyes of the on-looker travelled towards the prisoners, the lighter and brighter was the scene. Close to the accused sat a bench full of notables, evidently friends lending moral support. That the bench was occupied by men of importance was evident. They were supported by platoons of eminent counsel and detectives. Only the judge betrayed no consciousness of the presence of the herd of millionaires. The whisperings and pointings and namings by one spectator to another showed that the people's curiosity was greatly excited by the sight of the richest men in the country, if not in the world, with attendant millionaire esquires in or about the dock of a criminal court. On this particular day the notables and their suite had come in specially good-humor. Nods of kindly recognition went about and smiles rippled everywhere as, settled into their seats, they listened to the recital by the witnesses. It had been as good as a play to hear the working-man, Albert, tell on the stand how he had been bribed and threatened with ruin until he yielded to the suggestion that he should "bust up" the works of his friends, partners, and employers, and run away. There had been nothing funny to Albert in those threats: "We will ruin you," "We will crush you," "You will lose what little you have got left."[473]

"Then the compensation you got was $300 and the pleasure of selling out your friends?" Albert was asked by one of the great lawyers.[474] Albert did not smile, but "they seemed to enjoy hugely," reported the press, "the idea that men could be bought so cheap." The eminent counsel of the prisoners took the cue from their clients, and treated the proceedings as a farce. When the State's Attorney was questioning his witnesses, they objected to his questions with laughs and sneers until he became indignant, and asked, with considerable emphasis, to have the joke explained to him--a need the jury also felt, as their verdict showed. When the Boston agent of the trust told that his instructions from headquarters were that if there was to be any selling at a loss to let the new competitor have the loss,[475] they all laughed again.

So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box. She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front, in a row, looking straight at me."

The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point--the home-maker's and the home-keeper's--which the smiling row before her were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced, brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked what she was--an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen years, and we had accumulated some property--mortgages and money and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then travelled over the continent for a year--from Buffalo to Boston, to Rochester, to San Francisco.

"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you were going?"

"No, sir."

"Or your wife?"

"No, sir."

While the wife was in Buffalo wondering what had become of her husband, he was in New York with his venerable ex-employer, getting lessons like the following in the secrets of building up a great commercial enterprise:

"The best thing you can do, Albert," said the latter, "is to go and write a telegram, and tell your wife to go back to Rochester."

"You'd better write it; I am a poor writer," said Albert.

"No," he said; "I do not want to appear in this case at all. Write it so," he continued, "that she can move on the Fourth of July, and they can't attach her things."[477]

The first word she got from her husband was this telegram to move between two days, and back to Rochester the dutiful woman packed herself and her things.

"It was two or three weeks before I heard from him direct or knew just where he was," she said.

"I asked Charles"--one of the two managers--"how Al was, and he said Al was all right."

"Would he tell you where he was?" the State's Attorney asked.

"No, sir; when I wrote to my husband I left the direction blank, and gave the letter to Charley. I got an answer through Charley."[478]

For three weeks they would not let her know where her husband was. "Think of that," said the District Attorney. "She had to go and take her poor little letter to her husband, thinking, perhaps, if he was away from her tender care he might get to drinking, because he does drink some; but when with his wife they lived year in and year out without his tasting a drop; ... afraid that he might get to drinking, and that she could not watch over him.... It was a cruel thing to do."

"C. told me to go to the real-estate agents," Albert's wife continued, "and try to sell our property and get it into money. He made out a list of real-estate agents from the city directory. I guess that is all he did about assisting me in the sale of the property."

"I asked C. if my husband could not come home from Boston. I was sick. He said 'Yes.' Al came home and stayed a week or two. Then he went back to Boston. C. told me they did not want the Buffalo company to know where Al was."[479]

Albert was a man infirm under temptation. The employer knew, by fourteen years' acquaintance, the weakness this man had acquired in his service in the army. He gave him idleness, money, temptation, and an assumed name to go to the devil with, if that agent of the trust was to be found in Boston.

"You want to take good care of Al," said the good old man to his clerk in Boston, "and not let him get homesick. If he wants any money, let him have it." Albert travelled the broad way made smooth for him.

"Of course I never went around with him," said the clerk, in a deposition; "a porter that I had was the party that went around with him in the evening. I would hear what was going on, and I could judge about the size of Al's head when he came around in the morning."

With all Albert's faults he kept one dignity to the end which makes him tower above his seducers--the dignity of the laborer. A life's discipline in daily toil had made his whole fibre too honest to enjoy idleness, even at the rate of $1500 a year. He was free to come and go amid the gaudy joys of a great city, as irresponsible under the assumed name given him as if he wore the ring of Gyges. He had money for the asking, and boon companions. But the habit of a lifetime of honest, hard manual work was too deeply ingrained into the very substance of his nature for him to become a cheap American Faust, revelling in a pinchbeck paradise. This simple son of poverty had all his life handled only real things, and had at every point had the mind's native wantonness and riot checked by the hard surface which had calloused his hands, and the outer air which had cooled him as he worked. His were dreams of honest rest earned by honest work, and of family joys. The self-indulgence that was revealed by the "size of his head in the morning" was an animal exuberance that, as the result showed, did but stain the "rose-mesh of his flesh," and went no deeper. Albert could not stand the idleness of his Boston life. He went back to Rochester.

"I want something to do."

"What brings you here?" said his employer. "Go back."

After hanging around the office in Boston a few weeks longer, the workman's nature reasserted itself again. He went back again to Rochester. "I want something to do." "We have not got anything for you to do just now," he was told. "You are all right."[480]

Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well. Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went, as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran, but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife, treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there was not anything that he knew that he could do."

"I don't want Al to go. I won't go. Give him something else to do."

"I have nothing else."[481]

She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half. "I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484]

It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able, by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly. He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of the door.

"Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney, "that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and the testimony was shut out.

Albert's wife kept close to his side, and held him steady. No, Albert did not care to go to Russia. Advertisements of an alum-mine in Corry then began to appear in newspapers where Albert's attention could be called to them. By a lucky chance the captain happened to know the capitalists whose boundless powers of enterprise could find full outlet only by developing the hitherto unsuspected resources of Corry for supplying the nations of the earth with alum. By a joyful coincidence, these capitalists wanted for superintendent of their bottomless alum-mines just such a man as the captain knew his dear Albert to be. Would Albert like to go to Italy to learn the true science of alum manufacture, and to show the effete monarchies how an American could disembowel the earth of its alum? Salary, $5000 and expenses. No, Albert had no unslaked ambition to go to Italy as superintendent of mines of alum, or green cheese, or any other lunar commodity.

At least, Albert would take a drink? That poor Albert would do; and when he failed to come home at night his wife went up and down the streets seeking him. "A persistent effort had been made" by the trust, Mr. Matthews testified, "to get Albert out of the country. I was afraid they would get him away, as he might not be used in this case. Men had been sent there to get him drunk, and had debauched him."[485] Money was potent enough to persuade lawyers to make it a part of their professional duty to help in this. One of the trust's lawyers sat with Albert and its detective in the stall of a cheap saloon, and plied him with liquor to get from him some letters of Matthews' they wanted. "There they sat," said the keeper of the saloon; " ... they got what they called for, probably.... I couldn't tell how many drinks they got into Albert on that occasion; I think they drank there."[486]

While this courtship was in progress with Albert in Pennsylvania, wires were being pulled to get him indicted in New York. The grand-jury of Rochester was asked to indict him for receiving stolen property in a watch trade he had made seven years before. This would have ruined him as a witness in the forthcoming criminal case against the members of the oil trust, but the grand-jury decided that there was no evidence on which to indict. When Adam Cleber, a stolid-looking German laborer, who worked in the same place with Albert in Corry, took the stand for the State at the close, an eager excitement filled the court-room. The State's Attorney was known to have his darkest sensation still in reserve. What it was he would not, of course, disclose in advance, but those hardly less familiar than he with the evidence hinted that the fertile genius of the captain, having exhausted itself in the ideas of the trips to Russia and Italy, had fallen back upon the genius of his superiors, and had arranged to have Albert go a-hunting, and get a "bust-up" as much as possible like the one he had been induced to attempt upon his employers and partners.

"Did the captain tell you what he wanted you to do to Albert?" Cleber was asked.

"Yes--" That was as far as Cleber got.

"I object!" screamed one of the lawyers.

"I propose to show that the captain made a request of this witness in regard to what he should do to Albert, and what he should come and swear to about Albert, there being no truth in the matter he wanted Cleber to swear to," the State's Attorney urged to the Court. The judge took the matter home for consideration over-night, and announced in the morning that he would not admit the evidence. It was acknowledged by one of the lawyers for the members of the trust on trial that he had employed the captain to get evidence for them; but the judge, instead of admitting Cleber's testimony, and leaving the question of its value to be settled by the jury, excluded it.

In his closing speech District Attorney Quinby said: "Why, in Heaven's name, my friends, didn't you place the captain on this witness-stand? He would have been a feast for you and a feast for me. His ways have been curious and sinuous, his methods have been peculiar and corrupting, and they did not dare to put him on the stand because if they did he would have left it to go to prison. That is the reason. They know it."

The brave and steadfast woman told her part of this story on the witness-stand. Her home had been broken up again and again. As she herself said afterwards: "I had to live with my carpets packed, and moved around like a gypsy." Her husband had been tempted to commit a crime which compelled him to lead the life of a fugitive. He had been spirited away and secreted; she had not been allowed to know where he was, and could communicate with him only through a third person; they had moved around, in her expressive phrase, until they had moved into two rooms; the savings of fifteen years' hard work were all gone, and the independent business, in which her husband had just got his footing, swept away. He and she faced the world with no other assets than their child and the palms of their hard-working hands.

"Well, it's taken all we had," she says; "we've lost it all, but I'd rather it would be so than to have the money they have, and go about hiding and sneaking. I'd like money, but not so well as that. When I said to 'Charley,' 'I shall have to sell all my furniture'--'Oh, that's nothing.' And when I told him it had cost us $100 to pay the expenses of selling real estate--'That isn't much.' It wasn't much to them, but it was to us, who had made every dollar by hard work. Well, we'll have to do without the money, and just live along by honest work. We can live that way. We have had all this trouble and lost our money, and haven't made money enough to buy a calico dress."

All the good that had come of this loss of savings and home and honor had gone to those at the bar of justice and their associates sitting in the tickled row before her. On the cross-examination, which was to crush the witness and her damaging testimony, the distinguished counsel, not content with all the suffering and loss already inflicted on this wife, tried to humiliate her still further, but the woman's wit of truth was too much for the lawyer's wit of wile.

"Don't you recollect," the lawyer asked, "that you went to the house of the manager of the Vacuum, and that you saw him in the parlor, and that you asked him to take your husband back?"

"I never asked him to take my husband back."

"Then you did not ask him at the time and place I spoke of?"

"I never asked him anywhere to take him back."

"Don't you recollect upon that occasion being considerably affected, and asking him to take your husband back, and his speaking of the way in which he had left the company, which he characterized as shameful, and that you cried--shed tears?"

"I never asked him to take him back. I recollect going there. I recollect I felt bad, because I was talked to so much about it. I had reason to feel bad. I am trying to tell the truth as near as I can."

"Then what was the occasion of your bad feeling?"

"It was because I thought we were going to lose everything, and would not have nothing left. That is what I felt bad for--was shedding tears for, if I did. I don't know as I did."[487]

Then came the laugh. From millionaire to lesser millionaire went the enlarging laugh. The mighty cortege of the retained ex-judges, famous constitutional and criminal lawyers, detectives, camp-followers laughed. It was the laugh of hundreds of millions, and it clinked and tinkled and rang. As if every mouth were a bagful of gold, and as if every bag had burst, the golden notes of mirth filled the air, and struck the ceiling, and rolled over the floor, rebounded and fell and rose in mellow chimes of sound, and the golden rain dripped everywhere. Millions on millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of the coin of the republic, and in every coin a cackle.

"Yes, they all laughed at me," the little woman told her friends; "it looked like such a great joke to them. Perhaps I did not tell it very well, but I told the truth."

In closing the case the State's Attorney said to the jury: "A sorrow was placed on that woman's heart that can never be removed. One of the pathetic things in this case was that when this woman was on the stand, telling her little story, how they were afraid they might lose the few thousand dollars they had saved, the $6000 or $7000 they had been struggling for for fifteen years, these New York gentlemen with their millions laughed in her face at the idea of her being sorry to lose the pittance of $6000 or $7000. It was the only time in the case, really, I felt that these gentlemen were outraging common decency."[488]

Some time after the trial was over, and sentence passed and satisfied, these men sent for Albert to come to Rochester. He went with witnesses. There in the office of a leading lawyer he was tempted with desperate propositions to do something or say something that would break the force with which these disclosures must act on public opinion. "They need not think," he replied, "that they can get me to make a false oath to let them out of a hole. I would not do it for all the combined wealth of the trust. When my wife was on the stand they laughed her in the face when she told about losing all we had. Do you suppose any man with a particle of American blood could have any love for them? I think as much of my wife and daughter as any of them of theirs, and I will do nothing to disgrace them." This hard-working and hard-living laborer and his wife had, by thirteen or fourteen years of toil and stinting, saved $6000. The laughers had in the same time saved about $300,000,000, and somebody else had done all the work. The poor man and his wife had been afraid that the $300,000,000 would devour the $6000. It said it would, and it had. Shall not they laugh who win?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XX. TAKEN FROM THE JURY BY THE JUDGE

The District Attorney put the president of the light of the world on the stand. His evidence showed that the purchase of the three-quarter's interest in the Vacuum Company, sold because "there were restrictions in the shipments," was made by the three New York men on trial. "They are share-holders in the trust," he said. When they bought the stock they transferred it to the oil trust. He had known of the contemplated purchase. Having thus proved that the three indicted directors from New York on trial were members of the oil trust, and were managing the Vacuum for it, the District Attorney proceeded, in pursuance of a logical plan of inquiry, to bring before the jury what the trust was, and its relations to the companies it covered.

"What is it ... if you know?" the District Attorney asked. The president, through his counsel, objected to the question.

"What is the object of this?" the judge asked the District Attorney.

The trust, the District Attorney explained, owns a majority of the stock of this Vacuum Company and others, and controls the manufacture in this country of substantially all the lubricating and illuminating oils. These defendants belonging to the trust, and "one of these being chairman of a committee of the trust, it was the desire and motive of the three to do away with competition, to destroy and ruin the competitive works in Buffalo."

The Court asked the president of the trust if it was a manufacturing company.

"It is not, your honor."

The Court ruled out the question "What is it?" although in doing so he used language apparently contradicting his ruling, saying, in effect, that it was "quite immaterial what the objects or purposes of the oil trust are, unless these defendants are in some way interested so as to create a motive to do what it is claimed they did do." Again, when the District Attorney sought to ascertain in what other corporations engaged in the manufacture of oil in 1879, 1880, and 1881 the trustees on trial owned stock, it was objected to and the objection sustained, although the Court but a few moments before had said, "I will allow you to show everything these defendants have done upon the question of motive, ... to show what their business is, the companies they have stock in, whether it is an oil company or some other company--that is, any company engaged in the manufacture of oil that would come in competition with the Buffalo company...."

The judge, declaring that he would admit such evidence, refused to admit it. What the District Attorney would have been able to uncover as to the responsibility of the "trustees" for what was done by the subordinate companies, the reader, freer than the jury in this case, can find out for himself.

The nine trustees, of whom three were on trial, owned as their individual property more than half of this as of every establishment in the trust. They decided who were to be elected directors and officers of each company. They exercised full control over these officers when elected. They declared the dividends. The profits of all these shares are put into one purse, and distributed in quarterly dividends among the trustees in proportion to their interest in the trust--the purse-holder.[489] In the case of the Vacuum Company, accordingly, we find that the minutes of stockholders' meetings record the presence of members of the oil trust, in person and by proxy, representing a majority of the stock, electing the officers and directors, and declaring the dividends. How thorough and minute is the supervision over the vassal companies an employé, who had been in the service of the combination for several years in a confidential way, and "had access to every book and paper and their cipher arrangement," has told.[490] They "control every movement of every branch of their business." The subordinate companies "make a report every day of all their business.... They have blanks there on which they make a report of all their shipments, where shipped, and who shipped to, and all their purchases; and they report every month the exact percentage they have made out of their crude oil, of all the different products they get out of it. They report everything in detail."

This was in 1879. Ten years later, in 1888, the testimony of the president shows that the system is the same. "They know the cost at every refinery. They get such reports once in thirty days; each report shows just what it has cost for everything.... Made out on regular blanks."[491]

But when put on the stand in this case, in Buffalo, he had professed himself altogether ignorant of any such reports.[492] Asked if the Vacuum Company had made them, he replied:

"I can't recall any such reports."

Asked if it was obligatory upon the Vacuum Oil Company to make reports, he said:

"I can't state."

But the manager's testimony in the same case shows that the system of reports which his superior "could not recall" was in regular operation.

"There are reports of sales of the Vacuum Oil Company made to certain parties in New York."[493]

The three trustees who bought the control of the Vacuum stock did not keep it for themselves. They transferred it to the trust, and received for it shares in the trust. They were not stockholders in the Vacuum, but stockholders in the trust. It was the trust which was the real stockholder in the Vacuum. The profits on this Vacuum stock, therefore, went into the common fund in which the trust accumulated the profits of all its controlling ownerships in companies all over the country--all over the world. Every trustee shared in the profits of every company so controlled, whether in the United States or Europe or Asia. The president of the trust, now on the witness-stand, was a large participator in the profits of the Vacuum, because he was a large owner in the trust which possessed three-quarters of it. Similarly as to the three trustees indicted and on trial, and every other trustee.[494] The case was interwoven, notwithstanding the exclusion of this by the judge, with evidence that the three members of the trust on trial were the managers of the company for the trust, and were consulted habitually about the current details by the salaried agents.

"After this purchase was made did you continue to represent the purchasers in the management of the affairs of the Vacuum Oil Company?" one of the three was asked.

"I did."

After the purchase of the Vacuum by the trust, Mr. Matthews, before he left to go into business on his own account, had to go to its office in New York half a dozen times, to see the New York directors when he wanted instructions. His testimony on this point covers thirty pages of the official testimony, and shows repeated interviews between him and the members of the trust about every kind of detail of the business of the Vacuum. When Matthews asked the manager of the Vacuum to give him more pay, the latter had told him to speak to one of the trustees--one of the three now on trial. "It will be as he says about it." Again, as to another matter, he said to Matthews: "I cannot tell you. There is no use for me to pretend that we run our business, for we do not."[495]

This evidence must be sought in the original records of the case at Buffalo, as it is left out in the transcript furnished by the trust to the committee of Congress, which represents the case against the two local managers only. The Rochester manager, after the explosion, and at the time of sending for Albert to come to New York, telegraphed to his son: "Our views with regard to Albert confirmed." By whom? as Matthews' lawyer asked. The manager saw one of the three accused trustees in New York after he returned from the trip to Boston to hide Albert. "I told him that I had hired him," he testified.

The trustee denied this, as the president denied the monthly reports. But he has himself furnished the evidence that his employé told the truth. In their answer in court to the allegations of the suit against them for damages, he and the other two trustees concerned in the Vacuum direction testified that they advised the Rochester managers "to endeavor to retain the said" Albert, ... "and after" he "had left the employment of the Vacuum Oil Company ... they further advised that he should be re-employed if it could be done by reasonable increase of his wages. They were afterwards informed that he had been re-employed." This shows they knew about the negotiations before, during, and after. They knew the man was to have more wages, though the increase was only $300 a year, and their income was millions yearly. When he had been gotten away they were informed of that too. The District Attorney knew all about this answer in the civil case, but under the statutes of New York it could not be used in a criminal prosecution against those who had made it. He put the trustee on the stand, and did his best to get him to tell the same story, but in vain.

The body-guard of lawyers surrounding the great men who made the court-room a veritable curiosity-shop for the people of Buffalo, did a deal of acting throughout the trial to impress on the jury that the whole proceeding was a farce. They laughed and yawned and pooh-poohed, and sneered at the District Attorney's questions and points, and went through all kinds of dumb-shows of indignation and ennui that their clients should be so needlessly called on to waste priceless time. But this could not prevent their faces from lengthening as the story was told by witness after witness, as more than one observant reporter saw and noted. When the evidence was all in, and District Attorney Quinby had closed his case, the situation was desperate. There was no doubt about that. The great men of the trust on trial had been proved to be the actual directors of the Vacuum at every turn of its daily affairs. Before any evidence was introduced for the defence, one of the distinguished lawyers arose and moved the discharge of the three members of the trust, who were a majority of the Board of Directors of the Vacuum Company, and managed it for the trust. The prosecution were not taken unawares by the motion. The District Attorney's able assistant, William L. Marcy, had gathered all the precedents and equipped himself to resist the discharge. He and the District Attorney fought hard to have the principals in the company go to the jury with their agents, but in vain. Mr. Marcy pointed out that, as shown in the case of The People vs. Mather, "to charge partners as conspirators it is not necessary even to show that they were the original conspirators. It is sufficient if at a subsequent time they become party to it by accepting the benefits derived from the conspiracy. The case lays that down in exact terms."

The Judge: "Must there not be an adoption?"

Mr. Marcy: "That is an adoption--accepting the benefits."

The Judge: "They may accept the benefits without knowing."

Mr. Marcy: "Then the jury may infer that knowledge from all the circumstances. The jury are the tribunal to determine whether or not the parties had the knowledge." Mr. Marcy pointed out that there was everything to lead the jury to infer that these men were parties to the plan. "Where did the meetings of the Board of Directors take place? At Rochester, where the works are? No; at New York, where these men carried on their other business. The Rochester representatives dance in attendance wherever these New York parties desire them to go." He pointed out to the judge that the trustee whom Albert met in New York after the explosion knew of the plan to take him to Boston. He showed that the same trustee, when remonstrated with by Matthews for bringing patent suits without foundation, said that he intended to carry them on, and if he was beaten in one court, he would carry them to a higher court. Just in the same way the Rochester representative of the trust had said: "I will bring lawsuits against you. I will get an injunction against you." "When the Rochester manager," said Mr. Marcy, "hired Albert, he did not pretend to be able to make a bargain until he had been to New York and consulted about it. He was in New York before he telegraphed to him to come to New York. This significant fact points home the conspiracy upon the gentlemen who reside in New York."

But the judge, and not the jury, rendered the verdict as to the three members of the trust on trial. He failed to remember or observe the law that leaves it to the jury to render the verdict. He announced that he had decided to grant the motion for their discharge. There was silence in the court-room for a moment. Then: "Gentlemen of the jury, hearken to your verdict as advised by the Court," came in sonorous tones from the clerk; "you find the defendants"--naming the three members of the oil trust at the bar--"not guilty of the crime, as charged in the indictment, so say you all."

The jury looked scared at being addressed so peremptorily, but said nothing.

"The New York men looked happy," said one of the observers, "but their Rochester associates and codefendants did not smile." Upon the discharge of the trustees, one of the Buffalo dailies said that whether there was any conspiracy at all is an undecided question, but it should be remembered that the oil trust and the Vacuum Oil Company "have been honorably acquitted of the charge of having anything to do with the matter. As the case now stands, it is simply The People against"--the two Rochester managers.

Poor men! It was for this that they succumbed to the attacks of the oil trustees upon their business, sold them for $200,000 three-quarters of a concern which produced $300,000 in dividends in one year for the lucky conquerors, became vassals instead of masters in their own refinery. It was for $10,000 a year, divided into $6500 for one and $3500 for the other, that they undertook to fetch and carry for their suzerains, even to the gates of the penitentiary; and when discovery and conviction came, to bear in silence upon their own shoulders the guilt and shame from which others got only "more."

The trial of the two remaining defendants proceeded. Neither of them took the stand. In a deposition the elder said it was Albert who had spoken about misplacing the pipes; but when asked what he said in reply to a suggestion, which no one better than he knew the significance of, he replied: "I made no reply to it, but I thought it would be a very scandalous proceeding."[496] Albert had told how, in conversation in California, his employer had described his plans with regard to Matthews.

"We would have just got them fellows in a boat, right in the middle of the stream, and we would have tipped them two over, and drowned them, and you would have been all right."[497] "If I ever made such a remark," this defendant deposed, "it was in a playful humor. I am in the habit of making playful remarks."

Witness after witness had to confess, under cross-examination, that his testimony had been written and rewritten by himself or the lawyer for the defence, and carefully conned before coming on the stand. The District Attorney asked one of these tutored witnesses why he had read over the written preparation of his testimony in the rotunda of the court-house just before going on the stand.

"I read it over," he replied, lucidly, "for the simple reason of reading it over."

"Just to practise in reading?"

"Well, perhaps we might call it practice in reading."[498]

"This preparation of the testimony," said the District Attorney to the jury, "which I stigmatize as infamous, this going to a witness and writing him down, and having him fix it, and write it over again, and keeping it in his mind, and reading it over, and so going on the stand, is not the way to try a lawsuit, in my mind. I write nothing down. I coach no witnesses. I want a witness to tell me his story. I put him on the stand and he tells me his story; but no writing down, no reading over. It is not right, and it is very liable to be very wrong."

Several witnesses were introduced to prove that Matthews had offered to settle the criminal prosecution. He could not have done so had he wished to. The criminal case was in the hands of the State. Of the witnesses who made this charge against Matthews, one was a stockholder in the trust, another had been a stockholder in one of its pipe lines, and both had to admit on cross-examination that the occasion of his alleged agreeing to settle the case had been that they had gone to him for their friends, unsolicited by him and unexpected, to find out at what price he would sell his works to the combination." I was anxious to settle the criminal prosecution," said one of these ambassadors.

"Anxious for whom?" asked the ever-ready District Attorney.

"I should say--nobody," replied the witness, in confusion.

"Mr. Matthews told him," said Mr. Hiram Benedict, one of the best-known citizens of Lockport, who was present, "that if they bought the capital stock of the company they could do what they chose with the civil suits, but with the criminal suit he had nothing to do; the people had that in charge."[499]

The lawyers tried to make a jest of the whole proceeding, and affected to look upon the incidents of this rivalry with their powerful client as something too trivial to be noticed. "Is it a trivial matter," asked District Attorney Quinby, "that it shall be decided, once for all, in a court of justice, that in an alleged republic you and I shall not start a business which is a rival to some one else? That is the issue here, and yet the lawyers for the accused tell us it is trivial. It is the most important question that was ever left to a jury of twelve men in this or any country in this age of monopoly." The jury thought so too. The meaning of the policy of suppressing competition was skilfully described by Judge Edward Hatch, Mr. Matthews' counsel in the civil suit for damages, and here again the jury, representing the people, thought so too. "When a man or a corporation is in a position to control the market as to a given article, then everybody is within their power, and it rests with their conscience to determine what shall be the price. Every time you farmers at home, or your wives or daughters, take your oil-can, turn it up, fill your lamp, and then sit down to read by it, you can understand what is meant by this proposition to crush these men out.... It was a matter that not only these three men were interested in, but every person that lived in the community. Competition would run along to a point where you could get the oils that you use in your families, to grease your wagons, and to burn in your houses, or for any other purpose, at a price that should give the manufacturer a fair profit, and at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, if you leave that open to these parties to regulate as they saw fit, having a monopoly of the market, then you rest upon the conscience of a corporation and put your faith in a soulless individual."

It is one of the few bright lines in this picture that whenever the people got a chance to make themselves heard, their utterance was always right and true. The four juries which passed upon the facts understood them, and had the moral standard by which to judge them aright.

One of the trust's employés was put on the stand to break the effect of the evidence that the competition of the new works had put down the price of oil. "In the early part of 1881--the winter of 1881"--he said, "common oil was 5-1/2 cents a gallon"--this to prove that the reduction had preceded the appearance of the new refinery. He was confronted by the District Attorney with one of his own bills of oil sold in February, 1881. "That would seem to be a sale of 120 degrees oil at 12 cents a gallon," he confessed, and added, awkwardly, "I was asked as to the winter of 1881. That is not the winter of 1881 as I understand. I meant to speak from July, 1881, and so on."[500]

The great lawyers held up to the ridicule of the jury the idea that the gases of distilling petroleum were dangerous. Matthews stated on the stand that he had seen this gas burn up derricks, property, and several men. The lawyers could not let anything so absurd go unchallenged.

"Did it explode?" he was asked smartly.

"Yes, sir."

"And how did the 'explosion' burn up the men and property?" with a knowing look to the jury.

"The gases crept quietly to the boilers, unobserved," said the witness, "and all at once the whole atmosphere was ablaze."

The witnesses who tried to prove that no harm could have resulted from the tampering with the still broke down. One of them was the inspector of oils at the combination's refinery at Cleveland. He, too, had once been an independent refiner, but had passed under the yoke. He declared with every possible variation of phrase that there could not have been an explosion at the Buffalo works; but the District Attorney got out of him piecemeal admissions that the "escaping petroleum gases would be inflammable"; that "in a damp day you would expect them to settle close to the still"; that then, if they came in contact with fire, "you would have a large flash, and consume those vapors; if a person was in the vicinity he would burn."

"I ask you if it would be a safe thing to fill a still with 175 barrels of petroleum, put under it an extremely hot fire, so that the front portion of the still is a cherry red, and a weighted safety-valve is blown off--would you consider that a safe thing to do?"

"I would not."

Still another of these witnesses ended, like Balaam, by saying just the opposite of what had been wanted of him. He testified that the escape of gases from the stills, and even their ignition, was a matter of no consequence--"it may occur at any time"--until he was cross-examined. It turned out then that his own works had been burned three times by the gases from distillation taking fire. "These gases," he had to admit, "took fire and burned the receiving-house. A man got burned up with it."

"Are you willing," the District Attorney asked, sarcastically, "to go down to the Buffalo works and have them run some vapor, on a quiet day, on the ground, and let you stand in the middle of it and touch it off?"

"I am not anxious to do that."[501]

Every one looked to see Matthews crushed by the cross-examination, in accordance with the widely advertised promises of the counsel on the other side.

"As he stood up to take the oath," said the New York World, "and confronted the men with whom he had been at sword's-point for six years, men of unlimited wealth and almost unlimited influence, and controlling the most gigantic monopoly of any age or any country, Charles B. Matthews looked, as a good observer said, what he proved himself to be, a fighter, who will never know when he is whipped. Hard knocks and a struggle of years against an all-powerful enemy have whitened his hair, and set firm, hard lines about his face. His eyes are deep-set under a protruding forehead and black, bushy lashes, and are dark, firm, and searching. His jet-black beard is luxuriant but coarse, his whole head and face bespeak the dogged persistence in following a foe that is characteristic of the man. He is tall, well built, and with those whom he knows to be friends he is kindly and almost jovial in his manner." He told his story, and the jury believed it. One of the most damaging portions of his testimony was that given to connect the New York members of the trust with the conspiracy by showing that they had the actual, practical, continuous management of the Vacuum in matters small as well as large. Matthews, when in their employ, was kept running to New York continually to see one or the other of them about some detail of the business. Seeking to break down the force of this testimony, the big gun of the legal battery opened on him.

"But you did not see the name" of the oil combination "up over the office that you went into (in New York)?"

"I do not think I ever saw the name over the office that I went into. I think that name is not often in view over where they do business."

"What makes you think so?"

"My experience and observation."

"What experience and observation have you had?"

"Do you want I should tell it all?"

"No, you need not tell it all. We will let that go now." Matthews had been in their employ. He knew about the staff of lobbyists they keep to go from capital to capital as needed.

For lack of evidence the jury was offered abuse of Matthews, spoken by the brilliant attorney on a shout which enabled the populace outside the court-house to hear his speech, and, as the verdict proved, deafened the jury to his eloquence. The jury preferred the view given by the District Attorney. "When I look upon the troubled face of Matthews," said District Attorney Quinby in his closing of the case, "I know what is coming upon his head. When I know the struggle he has gone through, the integrity that is in his heart, I would say to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant, you have withstood the powerful arm of this insatiable corporation. You stand to-day honored from one end of this land to the other.' ... I am proud that in the county of Erie has been born a gentleman who has had the bravery and fortitude he has shown."

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XXI. CRIME CHEAPER THAN COMPETITION

The jury was composed of nine farmers, one tailor, one store-keeper, and one railroad foreman. "So intelligent a jury," said the Buffalo Express, "is proof perfect that the verdict it returns is the only one warranted by the law and evidence." The jury found all the defendants guilty whom the court allowed them to try. The verdict, "Guilty as charged in the indictment," was given May 18, 1887. Every possibility of appeal and reversal was resorted to. The judge granted a stay, and this left the defendants unsentenced. A motion for a new trial postponed the day of fate until December 24, 1887.

When the judge decided against the new trial an appeal was taken, and was carried through every court except the highest. Legal procedure in New York makes the courts a hunting preserve for those who can afford the luxuries of litigation. The law was changed by the Field code so that demurrers and counter-appeals, proceedings and ancillary proceedings, on technical points can be carried, one after another, from court to court, while the real point at issue has to wait untried below for the results of this interminable contest. By grace of this power to carry preliminary and technical questions from court to court, at the pleasure of quibbling and appealing lawyers and procrastinating judges, from courts of Oyer and Terminer to the Supreme Court at General Term, to the Court of Appeals, rich corporations and individuals are able to tire out altogether all ordinary opponents. It was only by help of very able and highly paid lawyers, officers of the courts and of justice, that the law of New York was "reformed," so that the technical parts of a case could be to such an extent disengaged from the main body, and sent forward and backward, up and down, through the whole series of appeals, consuming endless time and money, while poor men seeking justice kick their heels in the lowest courts.

As the time for pronouncing sentence came on, petitions for mercy were circulated in Buffalo and Rochester. The members of the jury which had found the accused guilty were labored with separately to sign a recantation. Only six succumbed and signed a statement that the prisoners were found guilty, not because they had conspired to blow up their rival's refinery, but because they had enticed away Albert. This recantation was in the face of the judge's charge, which had made the plot to blow up the Buffalo works the chief and the important inquiry in this case, and the verdict had been given under the influence of this view of the case. Six of the jury saw the impropriety of making this statement after they had disbanded and passed from under the legal and moral restraints they felt when sitting under their oath of office, and refused to sign it.

When the paper from the complaisant six jurors was handed in, the District Attorney said in court: "These jurors received money for making these affidavits. If required to do so I will prove the statement." He was not called upon to do so. "These affidavits," he said afterwards, "were procured for the purpose of influencing the Court to administer the lighter punishment, since they tended to show that the verdict was directed against the lighter offence. One of the jurors told me he had been offered money to sign one of these affidavits, and he knew of one juror who had received $10 for signing one."

When the last possibility in the way of proceedings for a stay or for a new trial had been exhausted, except argument of an appeal in the Court of Appeals, which was known to be useless, sentence was pronounced. The penalty provided in the statutes was imprisonment for one year in the penitentiary, or a fine of $250, or both. The lawyers pleaded that the elder of the convicted men was old, that the younger had just returned from a wedding tour in Europe, that some of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Rochester had petitioned for mercy, and that six of the jury had done likewise. Each was sentenced to pay a fine of $250. Notice of appeal was given by the convicted, and a year was consumed on both sides in preparations to fight the case to a bitter finish. But the appeal was abandoned. A new trial and new sentence might have ended worse. The fine was paid, and these employés of the trust, upon whose record as reputable and inoffensive citizens for all the years of their business career no shadow had fallen till they entered its employ, took thereby the place assigned them by the jury--that of convicts guilty of crime.

Crime, it seems, may in this country be cheaper than competition. They who received the larger part of the benefit of the enticement of Albert, of the harassing litigation, of the damage done by the explosion, and of the bankruptcy which was finally produced by these means, went free of all punishment; and the employés found their crime but little less than a pastime. After his conviction, and before his sentence, one of the two married. His wedding was attended by many of the great men of the trust--magnates in the New York world of affairs and its affiliated interests. It glittered with gold and silver and precious stones which they sent to signify to the world that they stood sponsor for him.

The case of some humble boycotters was then fresh in the public mind. Certain working-men, on strike, handed around printed circulars in the streets of New York, requesting people not to buy beer sold by their employer. In a few weeks from the time they dropped those circulars in the streets they were in the penitentiary at Sing Sing. It was shown on their trial that they were entirely ignorant of the fact that they were violating any of the laws of the State in what they did. It was shown on the trial of the oil men that they did know that the course they had in view was criminal, and were warned by a lawyer it might land them in prison. "It was very fortunate," said the New York World, "that they were not poor men convicted of stealing a ham."

One of the reasons given by the judge for his leniency was that prominent citizens of Buffalo and Rochester had begged for mercy. "With the very highest respect for the judge," said the Buffalo Express, "as the Express has often demonstrated, we must say that this is a mighty queer excuse. Three-fourths of those citizens are in one way or another identified in interest with the oil trust, as the judge could readily have ascertained, and their names on that petition were entitled to no more moral weight in the consideration of this case than the names of the two guilty men should have had if they had seen fit to sign it."

The sentence raised a whirlwind of indignation. "As ridiculous as anything that could be imagined," said the Philadelphia Ledger. "It is high time," said the New York World, "that the lines were drawn between competition and conspiracy, between business and brigandage." Referring to the golden harvest of $300,000 dividends in one year on a capital of $100,000, representing an original investment of only $13,500, the World said: "The monopoly of this sort of business is a very seductive thing. It is calculated to make men of more boldness than morals blow up factories, or do almost anything else to control the field." "It can afford to blow up a rival refinery every day in the year at that price," said the Erie Dispatch. "There have been conspiracies," said the Oil City Blizzard (Pa.), "to injure the business of opposition concerns right here in Oil City, and the conspirators have never been punished." "It is--a light sentence," was the comment of the Buffalo Commercial. "Poor criminals," the Buffalo Express declared, "may well wonder why rich ones are let off so easily. It is equivalent to deciding that wealth may securely indulge in that inexpensive sort of amusement as a mere pastime. Who's afraid?" it asked. "What conspirator 'in restraint' of trade is afraid of a $250 fine?" "Certain it is that no wealthy criminals convicted of such a crime ever before received from a court such a mockery of justice," was the verdict of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican.

The facts of this case have not been carelessly examined or decided. Two grand-juries in succession passed upon the evidence and found it good enough for indictments. Two petit juries heard the evidence, both for and against, in the civil and criminal suits, and found it good enough--one jury for $20,000 damages, another for a verdict of criminally guilty. Seventy picked citizens have unanimously concurred in the decision "Guilty." And this scarlet letter the monopoly will always have to carry.

"So surely as Matthews lives, and so long as he lives," District Attorney Quinby said in the criminal prosecution, "he will never again make another dollar upon a barrel of oil he may manufacture. The word has gone forth, right in this court-room, that this man shall be crushed, and he can never again run his works successfully. That is going to be one of the results of this case." The fulfilment of this prediction came swiftly. This sentence of ruin upon Matthews was executed before sentence was even pronounced upon the conspirators against him. He had been left crippled by the flight and corruption of his partner, the only practical oil man in the enterprise. When he tried to obtain some one to take his place, he could not get word of any one not connected with the oil combination. He did not dare to advertise, and knew no one in Buffalo he could venture to speak to. He had made contracts before opening the works, and was unable to fill them. The pipes had been laid wrong; it took him a year trying one way and another, and making a great many mistakes, to set them right. His third partner was frightened back into the employ of the oil combination by threatening litigation.

Then came the suits to destroy, punctually as threatened.[502] "If one court does not sustain the patents, we will carry them up until you get enough of it," one of the trustees said to Matthews. One of the Rochester managers, in speaking of these suits, said: "I don't know as we will gain anything really, but we will embarrass them by bringing these suits, and, if it is necessary, we will bring them once a month; yes, we will bring them once a week." One, two, three, four, five suits came with injunctions. "Null and void" was the verdict of court after court on the worthless patents and pretended trade-marks on which he was sued.

Matthews had to keep pushing his pursuers to trial. What they wanted was not decisions but delays, to ruin him by the waste of time and money.[503] "It cost me one-third of my time, and $25,000 or more to defend these suits." These suits were used to scare away his customers. "I was instructed," said the Boston representative of the combination, "to tell the customers that the Buffalo company were using their patents."[504] The sole legal victory the combination won was the recovery of six cents damages on a technical point.

Matthews, on his side, took to the courts. He sued his persecutors as individuals and corporations. He pursued them civilly and criminally. He was successful in defending himself against their suits. All his suits were successful as far as he was able to carry them. One suit for damages produced a $20,000 verdict; another was for $250,000, on the still stronger evidence procured in the criminal trial. It took Matthews two years--from 1883 to 1885--to get his first case for damages for conspiracy to trial. All that time was consumed by his opponents in quibbles about procedure, technical objections, and motions for delay, appealing them from court to court. The judge, in taking from the jury afterwards the three trustees who had been brought to trial for conspiracy, declared that he could see no reason to believe that these suits had been brought without probable cause. But the jury before which the suit for damages was tried saw plenty of such reasons, and gave Matthews' company a verdict of $20,000 damages. The views of the judge and jury might have varied in the same way on the question of the guilt of the three members of the trust.

Matthews woke up one morning to discover, as he had been told he would, that there was no Atlas Company to get his oil from. Corporations may have no souls, but they can love each other. The Erie Railroad killed the pipe line of the Atlas Company for the oil combination.[505] The courts had been kept busy granting injunctions against it on the motion of the Erie. These were invariably dissolved by the courts, but an application for a new one would always follow. At one time the lawyers had fifteen injunctions all ready in their hands to be sued out, one after the other, as fast as needed. The pipe line was finally destroyed by force. Where it crossed under the Erie road in the bed of a stream grappling-irons were fastened to it, and with an immense hawser a locomotive guarded by two freight cars full of men pulled it to pieces. The Atlas line and refinery became the "property" of their enemy. Matthews' supply of crude oil was not cut off immediately. He was tapered off. One of the superintendents of the Atlas testified in the suit for damages Matthews brought against the Atlas after it passed into the hands of the combination, that by the order of the manager of the refinery he mixed refuse oil with the crude which they sold to the Buffalo Lubricating Oil Company. Finally the supply was shut off altogether.

Matthews turned to the railroads connecting Buffalo with the oil country. They all put up their rates. At the increased rates they would not bring him enough to keep him going; they would not give him cars enough, and told him they would not let him put his own cars on the road. Even the lake steamers raised their rates against him. The farmer-refiner was taking his lesson in the course which had driven his first employer to dig oil-wells because "there were restrictions in the shipments." Cut off from a supply by either pipe or rail at Buffalo, Matthews made an alliance with the Keystone Refinery in the oil regions. War was now made upon the Keystone. It was finally ruined.

Packs of lawyers were set upon Matthews, and they finally brought him down. An attorney appeared before a judge and made a motion that the property of Matthews' company be taken out of Matthews' hands and be placed in the charge of a receiver, as officer of the court, to secure a debt due a Buffalo bank. This done, the lawyer appeared before the judge who afterwards decided that $250 fine was punishment enough for criminal conspiracy, with an offer from the monopoly to pay $17,300 for the discontinuance of the suits for damages which Matthews had instituted, and $63,700 for all the other assets. The other creditors and all the stockholders opposed the motion, but the judge granted it. There were two suits. One had produced a verdict of $20,000, and the other one for $250,000 was brought on the new and much stronger evidence secured in the criminal trial. As to the value of the property, Matthews had brought his enterprise to the point where it was worth $20,000 a year. It was capable of producing many times that amount of profit. Had not Albert been enticed away, the new works would have yielded a profit of over $100,000 the first year. They had a capacity of 70 to 80 barrels a day of lubricating oil, and the profit was $5 to $6 a barrel at the time Matthews and Albert went into the business.[506] The judge, overruling a majority of the creditors, ordered the receiver to accept the offer. He gave as his reason for selling these damage suits that a criminal prosecution had already taken place for the same offences, and a person could not be punished twice for the same offence. As they had not yet been punished, this meant, if it meant anything, that the suits were to be sold out for this inconsiderable sum, and the guilty men were to get their punishment in the sentence he was to pass upon them in the criminal court.

Three months later, before the same judge, these convicted agents stood up to receive their criminal sentence. The judge gave them the lightest sentence in his power, "nominal punishment." He did so, he was reported by the Buffalo press to have said, because "it has come to the attention of the court that civil suits have been brought to recover damages sustained by reason of the same overt acts. Large punitive damages are demanded in those actions. It is fundamental that a person cannot be punished twice for the same offence."

The judge released them from the suits for damages because they were to be punished criminally. Then he released them from any but nominal punishment, because there had been suits for damages. One would infer that the civil suits for damages were in full career in the courts, to end possibly in hundreds of thousands of dollars' damages against the convicted. No one would infer what was the truth--and who should have remembered it so well as the judge, for it was he who had done it?--that the civil suits had been ordered sold. The judge had ordered his officer--the receiver--who had the luckless Matthews' affairs in his grip, not to try the cases, but to sell them. The suits had been ordered sold in February preceding, and they were as dead as--justice. But as all the technical formalities and slow proceedings needed to consummate the sale had not been completed when sentence was passed in May, the damages they might produce were made a reason for inflicting none but nominal punishment. The order of sale made it impossible that they should ever be tried.

Of the money paid into court, nearly half--$30,000--went to the lawyers, and, crudest stroke of all, the attorney who had made the successful motion before the judge to take Matthews' property away, and to order the forced sale, got $5000. Matthews got nothing. Even his right to sue his destroyers had been sold to them on their own motion and at their own price.

The crime was plotted in March, 1881. The participants were indicted in 1886. It took until May 15, 1887, to secure conviction. While sentence was still unpronounced Matthews' property was put into the hands of a receiver of the court, January 16, 1888; the property was sold by order of the court, February 17, 1888; sentence was pronounced May 8, 1888; the formalities of the sale were consummated July 11, 1888; and the sentence, coming last of all--the fine of $250--was executed May 1, 1889.

Matthews had tried to make money in oil, and had failed; but his competition had forced those in control of the markets to increase the price to the producer, and he made light cheaper to the community. In Buffalo his enterprise had caused the price to drop to 6 cents from 12 and 18 cents, in Boston[507] to 8 cents from 20. Oil has never since been as high in Boston or Buffalo as before he challenged the monopoly. And he forced the struggle into the view of the public, and succeeded in putting on record in the archives of courts and legislatures and Congress a picture of the realities of modern commerce certain to exercise a profound influence in ripening the reform thought with which our air is charged into reform action.

Nothing is so dramatic as fact, when you can find the fact. The treatment his church gave the brother, who had been the victim, as judicially declared, of a criminal conspiracy, is described in the following letter from Matthews:

"BUFFALO, January 19, 1888.

"MY DEAR FRIEND,--As your father was a clergyman, and as you feel an interest in church affairs, I think you will wish to know of my recent experiences. My church here is not a rich one, but we pay as much for church music as we do as salary to our pastor. Probably the wealthiest man in our church is an agent of the oil trust. He receives a salary of $18,000 per year, and keeps their retail store here, and has been a witness for them in important suits. He does not belong to our church, but is a trustee and treasurer of the Church, and is very kind to our pastor, whom he took last summer on quite an extended vacation trip in New England. But you know the class of men that usually become trustees in our city churches these days.

"My pastor surprised me a few days ago by making a visit at my office, and telling me that as my term of office as member of the session expired soon, it might be best for me not to be a candidate for re-election, in view of what the newspapers had said about me, and the opposition there was. He said, however, that he personally felt friendly to me, and regarded me highly. He seemed to be embarrassed, but I quickly relieved the situation by saying that I had told my family some months before that I should not again hold a church office. I told the doctor he well knew I did not desire office in or out of the Church. True, the newspapers, under the influence of the oil trust, had ridiculed me as 'farmer Matthews from the country.' But why should my pastor mock me with such shallow pretences for reasons for church opposition to me? I had engaged in the oil business without the consent of the oil monopoly, and my pastor then and there told me my friends thought me foolhardy in doing so. I could hardly suppress my feelings on hearing this said by the man who baptized my children and ministers at the church altar. What could all this mean? I had only fought for my rights as an American citizen, as a manufacturer and shipper of oil. I had been sustained in every detail by the courts. I had convicted in our courts prominent men of conspiracy, little thinking that the subtle power of these men could come to dominate the Church itself. My feelings were intense, and words came thick and fast--all too tame to express my feelings. I told the doctor how I had struggled on from boyhood, and at middle age had accumulated a few thousand dollars, and in all these years had never sued a man or been sued, and that my struggle with the oil monopoly was for rights that no one worthy to be called a man dare to surrender. I told the doctor how I had been hounded, and my business beset by spies--that my friends had often told me I was in danger of assassination if I continued the fight in the courts. He, having done his errand, seemed uneasy, and anxious to go. I told him I had seen the rising and corrupting power of this trust in their control of our aldermen and courts, in state and national legislation. I could witness all this with comparative composure; but it made every drop of my blood hot to see them erect their altars for Mammon worship in the Church of the living God. I had seen the hard-won earnings of a lifetime swept away, and had hoped that at least one word of sympathy might come from the Church. If I had been robbed by old-fashioned highwaymen and the Church received none of the loot, church sympathy would have been hearty and abundant. But no; Sabbath after Sabbath our reverend doctor rises in the pulpit, and, at the regular time, says: 'Let us worship God in the gift of money.' Religion, divine worship, and money all seem to have a like meaning as they are alternately mentioned in our pulpit. My ancestors far back were church people, but this worshipping money, or worshipping God with money, is all new to me. It was not the acceptable worship required by Christ and taught by his disciples. After the conversation I had with my pastor that day I trudged home, but could not sleep that night. My heart was too full of sorrow as well as anger. I hope you will forgive me for writing you so long a letter. I have written much more than I intended to, but did not see where to stop. There are many things I wish you could see but not experience in the life of a business man nowadays. I want you to write often, as every word from a true friend is prized highly in these dark days for me."

The action of the judge in this and another celebrated case was made an issue in the elections in New York in 1889. In June, 1882, the railroads in New York City, rather than pay the freight-handlers the 20 cents an hour they asked for, instead of 17 cents, brought the business of the city to a stop. They refused to employ their old men at that price, and did not supply their places. Trucks by thousands, heavy with merchandise, stood before the railroad freight-houses for days, waiting in vain to be unloaded. The trade of the metropolis was paralyzed, and the railroad officials sat serenely in their offices, letting the jam pile up until the freight-handlers were starved into accepting the wages they were offered, and commercial distress had made the business community desperate enough to tolerate that injustice, or any other iniquity, provided the "Goddess of Getting-on" were allowed to get on again. It was so clear that the price asked by the men was fair, and that the refusal of the railroads to set them at work and keep the channels of trade open was due to a purpose to manufacture such widespread loss and trouble that the public should be goaded into forgetfulness of the rights of the men, that public opinion forced the Attorney-General of the State to act. Re-enforced by able counsel, he applied for a peremptory writ of mandamus to compel the roads to resume operations. This motion came before this Buffalo judge, then sitting by assignment in New York. He kept the people waiting ten days, and then quashed and dismissed the petition. The decision of the Supreme Court, composed of judges of both parties, reversing his action, was unanimous, but the mischief he had done was by that time--January 17, 1883--long past mending.

When he was nominated to be judge again, after his indecision and decision had swelled the dividends of the great railways of New York, the presiding officer of the convention which was to choose him to be their candidate was, by a coincidence, also the president of one of the great railway corporations which had been involved in the judicial proceeding of 1882. The judge's record was made one of the issues in the State election which followed the defeat of justice in Buffalo. He was nominated by the Republicans in 1889 for Judge of the Court of Appeals, the highest court in the State of New York, and the nomination was asserted by the New York Times, in a leading editorial, to have been procured by the oil trust. Its "influence was active," said the Times, "in securing the nomination of" this judge. " ... An attorney who has labored in its interests at Albany during the last two sessions of the Legislature was conspicuous among the men who did the work." The New York Times, the Buffalo Courier, the New York Star, the New York World, and other leading journals of the State retold the story of the trial, and declared that the judge's action in taking the case of the members of the trust from the jury, and the sentence he gave the convicted agents, made it clear that he was unfit to be a judge. The oil combination, the World said, editorially, "have had agents busy this year trying to secure his elevation to the highest court in the State.... We say confidently that the history of the case establishes his conspicuous unfitness for a place on the bench of the Court of Appeals. He should be defeated, and with him the oppressive monopoly which is actively seeking his election."

He was defeated with the rest of the ticket. District Attorney Quinby was re-elected several terms in succession. After their victory the people went to sleep, but not the sower of tares. At the election of 1890 the nomination of this judge to a seat on the bench was secured from both parties. For fourteen years, therefore--from 1890--a seat of the Supreme Court, one of the most important tribunals of justice in New York State, will be occupied by this judge, before whom must come many questions affecting oil transportation, electric lighting, natural gas and illuminating, street railways, banking, and other interests of the oil trust.

Monopoly cannot be content with controlling its own business. It is the creature of the same law which has always driven the tyrant to control everything--government, art, literature, even private conversation. Any freedom, though seemingly the most remote from any possible bearing upon the tyrant, may--will grow from a little leak of liberty into a mighty flood, sweeping his palaces and dungeons away. The czar knows that if he lets his people have so much freedom as free talk in their sitting-rooms their talk will gather into a tornado. In all ages wealth, like all power, has found that it must rule all or nothing. Its destiny is rule or ruin, and rule is but a slower ruin. Hence we find it in America creeping higher every year up into the seats of control. Its lobbyists force the nomination of judges who will construe the laws as Power desires, and of senators who will get passed such laws as it wants for its judges to construe.

The press, too, must be controlled by Power. During the criminal trial at Buffalo one of the oil combination's detectives was put on the stand. He was compelled to produce his written instructions from the counsel of the trust.[508] These had been given him at the office of the oil trust in New York. He forwarded his reports to its office in New York, and received his pay from the same place.[509] He sent his subordinates to get employment in Matthews' works, and through them obtained information from the inside. The monopoly paid one of these detectives $2.50 a day for spying, while he could earn only $1.50 a day for working.

"I see here further," said the District Attorney, "'Why the Express published the last complaint'"--in Matthews' suit for $250,000 damages. "Did he ask you to find out about that?"

"He did."

"That is, he wanted you to find out what arrangements were made with the Buffalo Express to have the complaint published?"

"Yes; the whole complaint. It covered the whole of the newspaper."

"And do you know 'how many copies were taken by Matthews?' Did he tell you to find that out, too?"

"Yes, sir."[510]

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XXII. ANOTHER TALE OF TWO CITIES

The South is the most American part of America. Close observers note as its especial characteristic the preservation of the original Anglo-Saxon types, which gave this country its first and deepest impress.

The South is not yet so steeped as the North in the commercialism to which it is all of life to buy and sell, and its population, less affected by trade and immigration, remains more nearly American, as the fathers were American, than the parts of the country flooded by the full force of the modern tide. Only in the South is there record all through this history of a man "too prejudiced to buy" from those who claimed the sole right to sell.

The merchants of Columbus, Mississippi, were buying their oil of the southern branch of the combination when they were offered a supply at cheaper prices by an independent refiner. They asked the combination to meet this competition of the market. This was refused. There were eleven firms there which sold oil in connection with other things. The combination "coolly informed us," wrote one of the firms to a journal of the trade, "that we were in their power, and could not buy oil from any one else, and that we should either pay such prices as they demanded or not sell oil. We immediately formed an association among ourselves and ordered from other parties. On receipt of our first car they immediately put the retail price below the cost per car lots, and for some time tried to whip us in that way, as we still declined to handle their oil. They then wrote offering to rebate to several of the larger firms if they would withdraw and leave the smaller ones to fight the battle alone. This proposition we declined, and they again tried the low-price dodge, their agent telling us that they would spend $10,000 to crush us out. This game they have now been trying for three years, and in that time we have not handled one gallon of their oil." As these devices, irresistible in more commercial civilizations, did not fool the brotherhood of Columbus, a special agent was sent to Columbus to carry on the war.

"You can tell the Columbus merchants if this does not succeed we will have it out on other lines," the agent was instructed, in the strain of the letter to the merchant of Nashville.[511] "The battle has not fairly opened yet; sharpen up your sword, we mean war to the knife." And again: "We want Columbus squelched," was the word sent the agent from the headquarters at Louisville.

He was ordered to start a grocery store in Columbus, to compete in their entire business with the "black-mailers." While the fight was on, and it was still hoped to conquer Columbus, the following was kept prominently before the people in the daily papers:

"We desire to state that we did not establish an agency in Columbus to force the wholesale grocers to handle our oil."

But seven years later the general in command of this department told Congress it was his practice to fight in that way. "Almost invariably I did that always."[512]

"To threaten the people elsewhere with Columbus," the agent at Columbus was told, "will make them scat, as it were, and take our oil at any price." But the people of Columbus did not "scat." The new store had a complete stock of groceries. Prices on everything, including oil, were put "down to the bone." But one essential feature of the enterprise all the ingenuity and power of the invader could not furnish--customers. Goods were advertised at cost; alluring signs were hung out with daily variations; but the people would not buy. A few citizens who bought at the beginning, without understanding the plan of campaign, came out in the newspapers with cards of apology, and pledges that they would not repeat the mistake. Local bankers refused to honor the drafts of the enemy, threw out its accounts, and gave notice that they would advance no money to persons who bought at its store. The public opinion of Columbus so bitterly resented the attack upon the livelihood of its merchants, because they had dared to buy where they thought best, and so clearly saw that the subjugation of the merchants would be but the preliminary of a conquest of themselves, that any one seen within the doors of the odious store fell into instant and deep disgrace. "Their store is regarded as a pest-house," wrote one of the leading business men, "and few respectable people ever darken their doors, their trade being confined mostly to negroes. Their oil trade has dwindled down to almost nothing, and we are selling now to merchants in other towns who heretofore bought exclusively from them."

At the first sign of aggression the merchants had given up competition, which they saw meant only mutual ruin, and had tied themselves together in an association. Now as the struggle widened the people did the same, and found a greater benefit and pleasure in co-operation than in keeping up the delusion of the "higgling of the market" where there was no market. The Index, of Columbus, printed an agreement signed by hundreds "of those who will sustain our home merchants in the struggle they are making.... It will receive many more signatures among our citizens.... The people have only to understand to properly decide in this matter between right and wrong."

"You ask if the feeling is bitter against them in our 'community,'" one of the merchants wrote. "I can only liken it to the spirit which prevailed when the people of Boston emptied King George's taxed tea into Boston Harbor."

Attempt was made to intimidate the press. Advertisements were discontinued because the papers supported the cause of the people. "If the agent," said the Index, of Columbus, "thought the cash that might be obtained for such advertisements could purchase the silence of this journal when it should speak, or its support in a wrong cause, he reckoned without his host." "The pledge" was signed by practically every man in the place. The country people about Columbus, when they came to town to sell produce and buy supplies, took back with them blanks of the agreement not to buy the obnoxious oil, and circulated them among their neighbors for signature. Agents were sent among these country people to win back their trade, but they could not be moved. The competition was made "war to the knife," and the knife "to the bone." It was a singular sight--this concentration of millions to "kill" these little men in this remote country town in far-off Mississippi. Nothing was too small to do. When one of the Columbus "rebels" bought oats for his trade, a competitive stock of the same kind of oats was hurried into Columbus, and these instructions sent with it: "Put your sign out. Rust-proof oats to arrive at 98 cents to $1 a bushel. This will kill him. The same signs should be posted about meats, sugar, coffee, etc."

The plan of action of the Merchants' Association was simple: they declined to handle the enemy's oil at any price. "Then to have a stock of our own always on hand, ready to sell whenever we could at a profit, and hold in reserve whenever they put prices below cost; and in this way we have made it a losing business to them for over three years, and will continue to do so as long as they remain in our town.... When our association buys a car of oil, each member pays for and takes charge of an equal share, but the oil remains the property of the association; and should any member sell out before the others, he has the right to buy from them at cost, and the next car is not ordered until all are nearly sold out."

It is "our pleasure to make oil cheap"; but a written proposition was made to the merchants that if they would repent and return, the price would be 20 cents a gallon, with a rebate to the loyal dealers. As this oil could be, and was being, laid down in Columbus at 12 cents a gallon, the proposition amounted to a request that the merchants join in imposing a tax on the people of 8 cents a gallon, which must be added to the retail price, and go to swell the profits of the "sympathetical co-operation." "Can any one," said the Index, "after knowing these facts, doubt that in a pecuniary point our merchants could have done better by surrendering the principle and joining the ring? But, at the same time, could any reasoning man (even viewing it in the light of policy alone) advise such a course?--one which, if adopted, would only open the door for other monopolies to enter and demand high prices on meat, flour, and the other necessaries of life, until our city becomes the highest market in the land. Let all good citizens, then, unite in a steady effort to resist the yoke which this monopoly is now trying to force upon us, and let us teach them and all others that our people are too loyal to each other and too intelligent to allow themselves to be made the instruments of their own destruction.

"Remember, that should our merchants be forced to yield, the day of low prices will be a short one, and then these strangers, having accomplished their purpose and forced their yoke upon you and us, will return to their homes, and while rioting in the taxes wrung from you, with your own assistance, will laugh at you for allowing yourselves to be so easily duped, and, emboldened by their success in forcing upon you high-priced oil, will soon return to demand high prices on sugar, coffee, and every other article of trade."

The nose for news of the American press scented out the novelty of a whole community acting as one man in successful resistance to those who had till then found nowhere any cohesive brotherliness to make a stand against them. The newspapers of the county took the matter up. It was absolutely the first time any method had been found that could prevail against the tactics of divide and conquer, which had been elsewhere irresistible. Public attention was fascinated by the revelation that a brotherhood to ravage the people turned impotent when the people were roused to meet it with their brotherhood of the commonwealth. There was in the spectacle a moral illumination--the light that never fails. Instead of becoming, as had been planned, a warning to all the people of the dire destruction to be visited upon any who dared to disobey, the encounter between the one-man power of united Columbus and the one-man power of hundreds of millions of dollars became every day more brilliantly a sign in the sky, showing all the people how the invasion of their industrial liberties could be changed into a ruin more complete than the retreat from Moscow. Scores of such assaults on the people had been won before. "What was being done at Columbus," said one of the papers, "is but what they have done before at Aberdeen, and at hundreds of other places North and South."

But as despoilers always have to fear, one defeat may undo a lifetime of conquest. The success of the people of Columbus was teaching the people of the whole country, and of all markets, that their real enemy was not the oil trust, but the lack of trust in each other. The people were learning there was a magic in association more potent than the trick of combinations. The Index proposed to the people of the South to join the citizens of Columbus, and make the fight general. "There is this about it: if there was concentrated action among the smaller cities and towns throughout even this section of the State, we would have no fear of the result. The oil trust may be too strong for a single small locality, but if a combination of a certain number of localities handling oil were effected, they would soon be forced to retire. Such a combination can be and should be brought about at once."

The struggle at Columbus lasted three years. It had seemed unequal enough--a few thousands of dollars against hundreds of millions. But three years of this commercial warfare failed to break the spirit or resources of the brave--and wise because brave--people. The community never broke rank. They laughed when they were tempted with cheap coffee, flour, sugar, to join in the attempt to bankrupt their home merchants. They could see that the gift of forced cheapness, used to destroy natural cheapness, was a Trojan horse bearing within itself the deadliest form of dearness. Defeated, the oil lords gave up the contest, closed their store in Columbus, and left the people of that place free.

"England," says Emerson, "reaches to the Alleghanies; America begins in Ohio." In the Western Reserve of Ohio, hive of abolitionists and Union soldiers, was the same spirit of America which, at Columbus, Mississippi, had defended its market rights as outposts of all other rights. It was only a few years ago discovered that the flames of the "burning springs" of the Caspian Sea, China, and America, whose torches kindled the lamp of history, were beacon-fires uncomprehended by a procession of civilizations, and waiting to light man to the knowledge that the earth beneath him was a city of domes, huge receivers storing up the products of vaster gas-retorts below. Man found that he need not wait for this spirit to come to him out of the "caverns measureless to man." He could go to it, as in oil, and, tapping the great tanks, could lead their flighty contents to homes and mills, to emerge there as light and warmth and power.

Experience in oil had made ready skill and capital to use the new treasure. In a very few years thousands of miles of pipe were laid, and millions of capital invested in the natural-gas business, mainly in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The gas was found in the same general localities as oil, and the methods of procuring and distributing it were similar, and the similarity easily extended to the methods of administering this bounty of nature as "property." Toledo began to be supplied in 1887 with the new fuel through pipe lines by two companies. They obtained their franchises as competitors, but were soon found to be one in ownership, prices, and all details of management. The discovery that the two companies at Toledo were really one, and that one the evil one of the oil trust, aroused the apprehensions of the people, and these were increased by a number of circumstances.

The Toledo companies got from the city as a free gift a franchise worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, on condition that they would supply Toledo before a certain date. But in the midst of the work of laying pipes they suspended operations, and declared that they would do nothing more unless the City Council fixed, at rates dictated by them, the prices the people were to pay. These rates were enough to pay not only a fair dividend, but to return in a few years every dollar of capital invested in lands, pipes, etc. Later they demanded another increase which, according to the sworn statement by their superintendent of the amount of gas supplied daily, would have amounted to $351,362.50 a year. They made the charges regardless of the ordinance, and used delay in furnishing gas as a means to make people willing to pay these illegal rates. Consumers seeking to renew their contracts were informed that the price would be doubled. The companies had assured the people that they should get their heat at half the price of coal; but when the bills were footed up, the gas in many cases cost more than coal. The companies refused to supply fuel to an oil refinery which had been built in Toledo in opposition to the trust refineries. The companies discriminated against some customers, and in favor of others. The power to say which manufacturer should have cheaper fuel than his competitor was a power to enact prosperity or ruin.[513] It was a power to force themselves into control of any business they desired to enter.

Those who controlled these gas companies appeared in the Circuit Court of the city in a proceeding which alone contained warning enough to put any self-governing community on guard. The Court was asked to deny the right of farmers in Wood County to give a way over their lands to the Toledo, Findlay, and Springfield Railway, being built to give the independent oil-refiners and producers of the Ohio oil-field a route to market. The farmers in question had made leases to an oil corporation of the trust, giving only the specific right to bore for and pipe and store oil and gas. The farmers supposed that they had parted only with what they had signed away in the leases. They supposed they still owned their farms. When the new railroad sought the privilege of a right of way the farmers granted it. Suit was at once brought for an injunction to prevent this use of the land. According to the logic of the claim in these cases a farmer who has made such a lease could not build a road across his own farm without permission. "Most certainly not," was the reply made by one of the lawyers to the judge who asked if the farmer could do so.

By occurrences like these an increasing number of influential citizens were convinced that the gas companies would hold a power over the comfort and daily life of the people not wise to surrender entire to any corporation. An agitation was begun for the supply of gas to the people by themselves acting through the municipality. Six thousand citizens sent a petition, in the session of 1887-88, to the Legislature to pass the necessary enabling act. There was a discussion of the project for two years. Public opinion grew more favorable every day. The citizens chartered a special train to carry a delegation to Columbus the day the pipe-line law came before the Senate. The Legislature in 1889 passed the law. It authorized the people of Toledo to issue bonds to the extent of $750,000 to buy gas land and build pipe lines. This legislation was, of course, bitterly opposed by the existing gas companies, and they demanded of the Legislature that before the law became operative it should be ratified by a three-fifths vote of the people. The friends of this scheme of municipal self-help and independence accepted the challenge. In the ensuing campaign the opposition to the people was officered by the president of one of the natural-gas companies, twice Governor of Ohio, afterwards United States Secretary of the Treasury. The natural-gas trustees of the City of Toledo in an official communication said: "There is reason to believe the money of the natural-gas companies was freely spent to defeat it."

The act was ratified April, 1889, by a vote of 7002 for to 4199 against--"a vote," say the trustees, "in which the heavy taxpayers were largely acting with the majority."[514] Organized labor took an enthusiastic part in the work of this election. The Central Labor Union held a special meeting which filled the largest public hall. Men paraded the streets with banners favoring the policy of independence. The Knights of Labor held meetings to discuss the project, and the Central Council, representing all the assemblies in the city, passed unanimously resolutions appealing to all members of the order and all working-men to support no candidate who would not pledge himself to the city pipe line. At a meeting of the glassworkers it was resolved to be "the duty of every working-man to vote 'Yes' for the pipe line next Monday." "Many of us glassworkers," said the resolutions adopted, "have been employed in factories in the Ohio Valley, receiving their natural-gas fuel from a gigantic corporation similar to that which now supplies Toledo. We have seen our employers unfairly dealt with, and arbitrarily treated in the matter of making rates. Some of them were forced to go into the courts, to prevent the extortion of the piratical company who were bent on assessing each citizen and industry at the highest rate possible, irrespective of its effect on the industries or the wages of the employés. Many manufacturers were compelled to move their plants to the cheap gas-fields of Ohio and Indiana. The employés were compelled to break up their homes and emigrate, in order to follow their trade for a livelihood." The question came before the people again the next spring, when both the Republican and Democratic parties by acclamation renominated a natural-gas trustee, whose term was expiring, to succeed himself. At the election the vote was 8958 for, and only 58 against--a practically unanimous indorsement of the project by the people.

Toledo now began to make history. "It is entirely safe to say," a well-known citizen declared in the Toledo Blade, "that in the history of this country no other people have been called to the experience which Toledo has been undergoing for the past year. Communities often are agitated and divided on questions of local policy; but no second case will be found in which a people, after settling such questions among themselves according to recognized rules, were confronted with warfare, bitter and persistent, such as this city is now called to meet, and at the hands of a combination wholly of non-residents, without the slightest proper voice in their domestic concerns." In every direct encounter with the "commons" the "lords" had been defeated--in the two years' debate which preceded the first appeal to the Legislature; in the Legislature, where the bill passed the House almost unanimously, and the Senate more than two to one; in the appeal to the voters; before the governor, who had been approached to cripple the enterprise of the municipality by naming unfriendly trustees. The gas companies had tried at each city election, after the Legislature acted in 1889, to seat in the City Council a majority in their interest; but the people, making the city pipe line the issue of the election, gave an overwhelming preponderance of their votes to the men pledged to see it through.

"Strong and subtle opposition"[515] was then brought to bear on the Common Council to prevent it from passing the necessary ordinances; but, in spite of it, both branches of the Council voted them unanimously. A clearer case of the will of the people and of law and order there could not be. A free and intelligent community, in a matter of vital concern to its industrial freedom and business prosperity, after thorough discussion, in which all sides had been freely heard, had by constitutional proceedings decided by an overwhelming majority upon a policy altogether within its legal, moral, and contract rights. The ablest lawyers, writers, and financiers that money could hire had had it under the microscope to find some breach for attack, but had not been able to find a flaw. All was constitutional, legal, proper, and expedient. A glance at the contestants brings out in clear outlines some conditions of our modern development which have come upon us almost unawares. The City of Toledo was a vigorous community of 90,000 people; its opponent was a little group of men; but they controlled in one aggregation not less than $160,000,000, besides large affairs outside of this. The assessed valuations of the property of the people on which Toledo could levy taxation was, in 1889, but $33,200,000. The total income of the municipality was $961,101; that of a single member of the little group opposing them had been acknowledged to be $9,000,000 a year, and was believed by the best informed to be several times as much. This individual income was greater than the product of all the manufactories of the city, and three times greater than the combined wages of the workmen in these establishments. There were several members of the natural-gas syndicate who collected and disbursed every year more than the community. Toledo had about the same population as Kansas in 1856. The slave power of the South that assailed the liberties of the 90,000 in Kansas numbered millions, but the new power in the North, which in a short generation had grown so strong that it did not fear to attack the 90,000 freemen of Toledo, counted only nine names. The people could act only after public deliberation, and through the slow stages of municipal and State procedure. Their antagonist met in secret council, and devised plans executed by a single hand, armed with the aggregated power of hundreds of millions of dollars, and liable, if found illegal or criminal, to only "nominal" punishment, or only 6 cents damages.[516]

At Columbus the struggle was with something very simple but extraordinarily difficult to overcome, as simple things often are--an obstinate, immovable, thoroughly angry public opinion, acting only through private voluntary means, its set will to exchange the fruits of its labor with whom and on what terms it pleased. There was absolutely no leverage to be got to bear upon the people of Columbus except by changing their feelings. Compulsion was out of the question. But at Toledo compulsion was possible. There the people had acted not through unofficial combination as at Columbus, but through the official machinery of the town and State. If the law could be turned against them by able counsel or compliant judges; if any smallest fault, however technical, could be found in the legislation of the State or the city or the practical administration of the official machinery provided for the natural-gas business of the city--if this could be done, the people of Toledo could be compelled, however little their will had changed, to see their enterprise of independence balked; this compulsion could be carried to the use of force if they resisted, and the militia of the State and the regular army could be brought into the conflict.

Such is the prize of power which tempts--more than tempts, drives as by fate--our overgrown wealth to fortify itself by control of judges, governors, presidents, commanders-in-chief--all the agents of the supreme authority and force.

Columbus was so local that its people were sufficient unto themselves. All they had to do was to keep on saying, We will not buy. But Toledo was a citizen of the great world of affairs and finance. It was part of London, New York, Chicago. Much of it was owned as an investment elsewhere. Sensitive nerves connected it with all the markets, especially the greatest of all--the money-market. It sold and bought and borrowed and lent far beyond its own border. What Wall Street gossips said about the people of Columbus would not make a dollar's difference to the whole town in a year, but a whisper started through the offices of the great capitalists in New York and abroad would flash back by wire to Toledo, and go like a quick poison through its industries and credit, private and public.

"Private enterprise" could not afford to let the people of Toledo go forward with their public enterprise. Many millions had been invested in getting control of a business representing $200,000,000. Many towns and cities, as Fostoria, Sandusky, Fremont, Clyde, Bellevue, Norwalk, Perrysburgh, Tiffin, and Detroit, were being supplied with gas at a handsome profit. If Toledo should set a successful example of self-supply, it would find imitators on every side. The essence of "private enterprise" was that the people should get their gas from Captains of Industry, and pay them for their captaincy two or three times the real cost as profit, just as monarchical countries pay kings for kindly supplying the people with the government which really comes from the people. The essence of municipal supply was that the people should supply themselves at cost without profit, and without Captains of Industry, except as the people provided them. Toledo, in fine, proposed to keep step with the modern expansion of self-government, which finds that it can apply principles and methods of democracy to industry. It proposed to add another to many demonstrations already made, noticeably in this very department of gas supply to municipalities, of the truth that the ability to carry on the business of supplying the various wants of mankind is not a sort of divine right vouchsafed from on high to a few specially inspired and gifted priests of commerce, by whose intermediation alone can the mysteries of trade be operated; but, like the ability to govern and be governed, is one of the faculties common to mankind, capable of being administered of, by, and for the people, and not needing to be differentiated as the prerogative of one set of men. The Toledo experiment was another step forward in the world-wide movement for the abolition of millionaires--a movement upon which the millionaires look with unconcealed apprehension for the welfare of their fellow-beings.

Mankind views with equanimity the expulsion of the profit-hunter from the businesses of carrying letters, minting coins, administering justice, maintaining highways, collecting taxes, in which millionaireism has been universally put an end to. It views with hopes of larger results the newer manifestations of the same tendency which in England have abolished millionaireism in telegraphs and parcel express; in Germany and France, Australia, and India have gone a long way towards the abolition of the millionaire in railroads; and in various cities and towns in Europe, America, and Australia have put up local signs, "No millionaires allowed here," by the municipalization of trade in water, gas, electricity, street-railways, baths, laundries, libraries, etc. The trust of millionaires was therefore fighting for a principle, and what will good men not sacrifice to principle!

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XXIII. FREEDOM OF THE CITY

Towns, like men, stamp themselves with marked traits. Toledo had an individuality which showed itself from the start. Its leading men clubbed together and borrowed money as early as 1832 to build one of the first railroads constructed west of the Alleghanies--the Erie and Kalamazoo, to connect Toledo and Adrian. When, in 1845, the steamboats on the lakes formed a combination, and discriminated against Toledo, the city through its council refused to submit, and appropriated $10,000 to get an independent boat to Buffalo. The city appropriated its credit and revenues to other important and costly enterprises, including four railroads, to keep it clear of the cruel mercies of private ownership of the highways. In 1889 it expended $200,000 to secure direct railway connections with the Pennsylvania and the Baltimore and Ohio railways for competition in rates with the Lake Shore Railroad.

As it had been authorized to do so by the State, the City Council of Toledo, April 29, 1889, ordered gas bonds to the amount of $75,000 sold, that work on the city pipe line might begin. Before proceeding with the enterprise confided to them, the natural-gas trustees gave the private companies an opportunity to save themselves from the competition of the city. They asked them in writing if they would agree to furnish gas cheaply for a term of years, or if they would sell their entire plant to the city? They did this, as they expressed it, as "an honorable effort ... to obtain cheaper gas without unnecessary expenditure, and without injury to established rights." After a delay of nearly a month a reply was received, refusing to enter into negotiations either for a reduction of charges or for the sale of the private plants to the city. The trustees then asked for a personal interview, but this was refused. Then when the city began preparations to sell its bonds, a cannonade was opened on it in the courts, the money-market, the gas-fields, the city government, the press, among the citizens, and everywhere. Injunctions were applied for in three courts, unsuccessfully in all instances. No injunction was ever granted in these or any other of the many suits brought for the purpose of enjoining the sale of the bonds. Courts will usually grant temporary injunctions awaiting a hearing on the merits when complainants will enter into ample bonds and indemnify defendants. But the parties instigating this litigation would not put up the necessary bonds. They thus could smirch the bonds without incurring any personal liability in so doing.

An expensive array of lawyers was sent before the United States courts to prevent the issue of the bonds on the ground that they were illegal, and the law under which they were issued unconstitutional. The principle involved had been frequently discussed and always upheld both by the Supreme Court of Ohio and the Supreme Court of the United States.[517]

"Does not your argument appear to be in conflict with the views of the Supreme Court of Ohio and the Supreme Court of the United States?" the judge asked. The counsel for the gas companies responded in substance: "If so, then so much the worse for the views of those courts."

As it was through the suffrage that the people of Toledo were able to do this, the attack was widened from an attack on the enterprise to one upon the sovereignty of the citizens which made it possible. "Everybody votes in Ohio--in fact, too many people," said the lawyer who applied for an injunction against Toledo. If he had his way, he declared, there would be fewer voters, and he stigmatized the arguments of Toledo as those of John Most, the communist.

"Unquestionably," decided Judge Jackson, "the Legislature may authorize a city to furnish light, or facilities for transportation, or water to its citizens, with or without cost, as the Legislature or city may determine.... Since the decision in Sharpless vs. Philadelphia it is no longer an open question whether municipalities may engage in enterprises such as the one contemplated by the act in question in this case. The act of January 22, 1889, authorizing the city of Toledo to issue bonds for natural-gas purposes, is clearly within the general scope of legislative power, is for a public use and purpose, and is not in contravention of any of the provisions of the constitution. The court being of the opinion that the legislation is valid, it follows, of course, that the injunction applied for must be refused."[518] When the news of Judge Jackson's decision was telegraphed to Toledo nothing less than the booming of cannon could express the joy of the citizens. They sent this message to the just judge: "One hundred guns were fired to-night by the citizens of Toledo in honor of your righteous decision to-day." Judge Jackson again upheld the bonds at Toledo, January 14, 1890, when he again dismissed the case against the city "for want of equity, at cost of complainants."

The favorable decision by Judge Jackson, although an appeal was taken, made it possible for the city to sell the $75,000 bonds which had been issued by order of the Council. The bonds brought par, interest, and over $2000 premium. With the money thus procured the city's Board of Natural Gas Trustees began operations. Their opponents had spread far and loud among the voters before the election--among those who would be likely to buy the bonds, everywhere it would hurt--the assertion that all the territory that was good had been bought up by them, and the city's trustees would not be able to get any. One of the companies had no less than 140,000 acres of gas lands in its possession or under contract, at a cost in rentals and royalties of $100,000 a year.[519] But the city trustees, even with the small sum at their command, were able to secure at the very beginning wells with a capacity more than four times as great as the private companies had had when the latter began the investment of a million or more to lay their pipe lines to Toledo.[520] Together with this supply the city trustees got 650 acres about 35 miles from Toledo of as choice gas territory as there was in Ohio, almost all of it undrilled, and they had offers amounting to 5000 acres more within piping distance from the city. The city's trustees made their purchases with success, and received the laudations of their constituents for having got lands and wells at better prices than the private companies.

August 26, 1889, after a decision in the United States courts that there was no ground on which to object to the issue of the bonds, the City Council voted the issue of the remaining $675,000.

Defeated in the public debate which preceded the decision of Toledo to supply itself; defeated at the State Capitol; defeated at the polls of Toledo time and again--every time; defeated in the Common Council; defeated in the gas-fields; defeated in the courts of their own choosing, the opponents of the city, thorough as only the very good or the very bad can be, refused to submit. When the two corporations, in 1886, were seeking the franchise indispensable for doing business in Toledo, they said to the Board of Aldermen: "We ask no exclusive privilege.... We cannot have too many gas companies." They also said: "If the city desires to furnish its own gas, there is nothing in this ordinance to hinder it. We are ready and willing at any time to enter into competition with the city or any other company." They said, on the same occasion, in answer to apprehensions which had been expressed about the danger of putting the fuel supply of the city into the hands of a monopoly: "You can go before the Legislature and obtain the right to issue bonds for furnishing yourselves with gas." It was by these assurances the companies induced the Common Council to grant them gratuitously the very valuable franchises they were seeking.

The right of the people to compete was not left to these assurances. It was specifically and formally asserted in the ordinance of July 5, 1887, fixing rates. This was the ordinance to procure which the gas company suspended its operations in mid-course, and declared it would not continue unless the prices which it wanted were made. The ordinance was, in fact, prepared by the company. It said: "Provided that nothing herein contained shall be construed as granting to existing companies any exclusive rights or privileges, or prevent any other company from furnishing natural gas to the citizens of said city." But the same learned counsel who, in behalf of the companies, had assured the city that "there was nothing in this ordinance to hinder it," went before the United States Court and pleaded that ordinance as good reason for the intervention of the Federal Government to prevent the city from going on with its enterprise.

The only morning paper--an able advocate of the city pipe line--suddenly changed owners and opinions. Among its new directors were two of the lawyers of the trust opposing the city, a director in one of its companies, and, besides them, the manager, a contract editor from Pennsylvania. His sole conspicuity there had been won in turning against the people of the oil regions a paper which had been their stanchest defender. This Toledo daily, in its espousal of the cause of the city, had been firing hot shot like this against the oil combination: "It wants a monopoly of the natural-gas business. This is what it is driving at." Under its new management it roared like a sucking dove, thus: "It is fashionable with demagogues and men who are not capable of appreciating the worth of brains in business to howl against it"--the oil combination--"as a grasping, grinding monopoly." Just after the people had decided in favor of the pipe line, and only a few days before it changed owners, it had said: "All manner of influences were brought to bear to defeat this proposition.... All the plausible falsehoods that could be invented, and all the money that could be used, were industriously employed, but the people saw the situation in its true light, and the majority voted right." It now made the defeat of the city's pipe line the chief aim of its endeavors. In this work "no rule or principle recognized in decent journalism was respected."

In all the history of Toledo no interest on its bonds had ever been defaulted or delayed; no principal ever unpaid at maturity. The city was prosperous, its growth steady; its debt growing less year by year in proportion to its population and wealth. Its bonds ranked among the choicest investments, and commanded a premium in the money-market.[521] But the credit and fair fame of the city were now over-whelmed with wholesale vituperation by this paper, and others elsewhere under similar control. Articles were carefully prepared for this purpose by skilled writers. These were then copied from one newspaper to another. By some arrangement insertion was obtained for them in financial journals in New York and in London, and in other foreign capitals. The Toledo organ declared that Toledo was an unsafe place for the investment of capital in any form. Its public affairs were said to be run by a set of "demagogues and speculators," whose administration was "piratical mob rule." The city pipe line was a "monstrous job," and the men who favored it were "a gang of throttlers and ravenous wolves." They were "blatant demagogues, who made great pretence of advancing the city's interest, but whose real aim is to enrich themselves at public expense." The bonds, which had been issued in due form by special authority of the Legislature, ratified by a vote of more than three-fifths of the citizens, and declared to be valid by the United States Court, were described as "chromos," "worthless rags," "bad medicine," "disfigured securities," "like rotten eggs, highly odorous goods," "but few persons at most can be found ignorant enough to buy them."

The Mayor, City Auditor, Board of Natural Gas Trustees, united with a citizens' committee of the Board of Trade in a plan to promote the sale of the bonds direct to the people of Toledo through a financial institution of the highest standing. This action the paper described as "a scheme for gulling simples," "a blind pool," "an unpatented financial deadfall"; compared it with "gambling, pool-playing, and lottery selling." These grave charges were widely circulated throughout the country. Bankers and capitalists in other cities who received them had no means of knowing that they were not what they pretended to be--the honest if uncouth utterances of an independent press chastising the follies of its own constituency. Newspapers which supported the city's project were assailed as ruthlessly as the community and citizens. The Blade was constantly referred to as "The Bladder." Another journal was given a nickname too vulgar to be printed here. One of the most prominent journals of Ohio was punished by the following paragraph, which is a fair sample of the literary style of monopoly: "That aged, acidulous addle-pate, the monkey-eyed, monkey-browed monogram of sarcasm, and spider-shanked, pigeon-witted public scold, Majah Bilgewater Bickham, and his backbiting, black-mailing, patent-medicine directory, the Journal."

An old journalist and honorable citizen who wrote over his initials, "C.W.," a series of able and dignified letters in the Blade, which had a great influence in the formation of public opinion in favor of the pipe line, was assailed with "brutal falsifier," "hoary old reprobate," "senile old liar." Caricatures were published depicting the buyers of the bonds as "simple greens." When the County Court of Lucas County, following the United States Court, sustained the bonds on their merits, and did so on every point in question, because, as the judge stated, "the equities of the case are with the defendants," the organ falsely stated that judgment for the city was given "because the merits of the case are involved in a higher court." When a capitalist of New York, who had been an investor in the bonds of Toledo and a taxpayer there for twenty-five years--one of the streets of the city was named for him--bought $10,000 of the city pipe-line bonds, the paper attacked him by name in an article headed "Bunco Game," charging him with being a party to a bunco game in connection with "public till-tappers" for "roping Toledo citizens into buying doubtful securities." When the Sinking Fund Commissioners of Toledo very properly invested some of the city's money in the gas bonds, they were held up by name as "public till-tappers," "menials" of a "hungry horde" of "boodle politicians," accomplices of "plunderers of the public treasury," unable to withstand "the brutal threats and snaky entreaties of the corrupt gas ring." For one of the associate editors the position of Deputy State Inspector of Oil was obtained--an appointment which cost the Governor who made it many votes in the next election, and did much to defeat him. Such an appointment might give a versatile employé the chance to do double duty: as editor to brand as bad good men who could not be bought, and as inspector to brand as good bad oil for sale.[522]

One of the means taken to defeat the pipe line was the publication of very discouraging accounts of the "failure" at Indianapolis, where the citizens had refused to give a natural-gas company belonging to the oil trust the franchise it demanded, and, forming an anti-monopoly trust, had undertaken to supply themselves. Some "influence" prevented the Common Council of Toledo from sending a committee to Indianapolis to investigate. A public-spirited citizen, prominent and successful in business, came forward, and at his own expense secured a full and accurate account of the experience of Indianapolis for the city. This proved that the people were getting their fuel gas at less than one-half what Toledo was paying. The contest against giving the Indianapolis franchise to a corporation of the trust had been a sharp one. Its success was due to the middle classes and the working-men, who stood together for freedom, incorruptible by all the powerful influences employed. "We will burn soft coal all our lives," one of their leaders told the Toledo committee, "rather than put ourselves in the power of such men."

In Indiana the Legislature meets only once in two years, and when this issue arose had adjourned, and would not meet again for a year. The people, not being able to get authority for a municipal gas pipe line, went to work by voluntary co-operation. Every voting precinct in the city was organized and canvassed for the capital needed. The shares were $25 each, and they were bought up so rapidly that the entire amount--$550,000--was subscribed in sixteen days by 4700 persons, without a cent of cost to the city. When subscriptions to the amount of $550,000 had been raised, $600,000 more was borrowed on certificates of indebtedness.

Gas lands were bought and 200 miles of pipe lines laid, all at a cost of about $1,200,000. The income in one year, during a part of which the system was still under construction, was $349,347. In the first year of complete operations the Indianapolis people's trust paid off $90,000 of the principal. The income for the year ending October 31, 1892, was $483,258.21, and the bonded debt has been paid. The stock, since January 1, 1893, has been paying dividends at the rate of 8 per cent. a year.

A prominent citizen of Indianapolis, one of the State judges, told the Toledo papers, in an interview: "The private companies had their gas laid to the city and along the streets several months in advance of the Citizens' Trust, but it did them little good. Everybody said: 'I will wait for the Consumers' Trust.' 'Yes, but we will furnish you gas just as cheap,' said the Indianapolis company; 'why not take it of us?' To this the citizens replied: 'To take gas of you means cheap gas to-day, but high gas to-morrow.' And wait for the gas they all did." The charge to manufacturers was 2-1/2 cents a thousand feet, as against 8 cents, at that time charged at Toledo. There were 12,000 private consumers. Cooking-stoves in Indianapolis were about $12 a year, against $19.50 in Toledo. One of the representatives of the private company declared at a public meeting at Indianapolis that its charges were made such as to give a full return of all the invested capital in three years, as that was the probable life of the supply. A year after the inauguration of the Indianapolis movement a committee of the citizens at Dayton, who had risen against the extortionate prices charged them, investigated the condition of affairs at Indianapolis. They reported that Indianapolis had paid $200,000 on its bonded debt, and was getting ready to pay as much more. The Consumers' Trust supplied between 10,000 and 11,000 consumers, and spent $1,000,000 less than the Dayton private company spent to supply 3000 fewer consumers. The annual charge at Dayton was $54.80; at Indianapolis only $26.80--less than half.

When facts like these were brought out, to the demolition of the fictions circulated in Toledo, the answer was characteristic. The "organ" could not deny the statements, but it fell upon the citizen through whose generosity the information had been got for the people, and assailed his private character in articles which, one of the daily papers declared, editorially, "would almost, if not quite, justify him in shooting their author on sight."

This newspaper charged the city natural-gas trustees with being "rotten to the core," and with every variation of phrase possible to its exuberant rhetoric sounded the changes upon their official career as a "big steal," "fostered by deception, falsehood, and skull-duggery." It sought to intimidate the Legislature and the courts when they failed to enact or construe laws against the people. It said: "Law-makers, judges, and others may feel the force of this element when the proper time comes and political preferment is sought."

It was money in pocket that facts like those of the experience of Indianapolis, Detroit, and other places should not be made known. Even ideas must not be allowed to reach the public mind. Professor Henry C. Adams, the well-known political economist, lectured in Toledo during this contest, in a University Extension Course, on "Public Commissions Considered as the Conservative Solution of the Monopoly Problem." The "organ" gave a synopsis of the lecturer's views, which is printed herewith in parallel columns, with a synopsis of what Mr. Adams really said, as revised by himself:

WHAT THE ORGAN OF MONOPOLY REPORTED. | WHAT THE LECTURER REALLY SAID. | The lecturer made reference to Toledo |Professor Adams thought the as an unfavorable place to discuss |solution of the monopoly problem the matter of municipal control of |must be found either in public quasi-public business and competition |control or in public ownership. of municipalities with private |He advocated public control, and corporations. But he deprecated anything|held that the State and Federal in that line. He did not mention |railroad commissions should have particular instances, but broadly |a fair trial, that their hands condemned the policy pursued by this |should be strengthened by further city in matters of this kind, and his |and adequate legislation. He remarks had a visible effect on his |entertained the hope that this audience. He considered municipal |control and regulation would control of business enterprises the |ultimately protect the interests worst form of monopoly, as they began |of the public in a satisfactory by having the unfair advantage |manner. He was willing to admit, of the law-making power, and the |however, if this effort to secure tendency to corruption was greater |the needed public control by the than when individual enterprises were |aid of commissions and asking privileges. The audience |legislation should fail, then was much pleased with the lecturer. |public ownershipwas the only |remaining solution. He held that |in local monopoliesit may still |be wise to try the experiment of |public control by aid of |commissions. He said, however, |that if anything should be owned |and controlled by and for the |people it would be |street-railroads, gas and |waterworks. He admonished his |audience not to be misled by the |argument that municipal ownership |would be dangerous because of |undue political influence, for |the local monopolies under |private ownership were already in |politics, and in a most dangerous |manner. He observed facetiously |that he hesitated to discuss the |question before a of municipal |control orownership Toledo |audience.

From the control of the markets to the control of the minds of a people--this is the line of march.

So direct, persistent, and bold were the charges of corruptions rung day after day by this journal against all the officials concerned in the city gas enterprise that some people began to believe there must be truth in them. But when the community at last turned upon its maligners, and the grand-jury brought indictments against the active manager of the paper and his chief assistant for criminal libel upon the city's natural-gas trustees, the whole structure of their falsehood went down at a breath. They had no defence whatever. They made no attempt to justify their libels or even explain them. Their only defence was a series of motions to get the indicted editor cleared as not being responsible for what had appeared in the paper. Counsel labored over the contention that the accused was none of the things which the language of the law holds for libel. He was neither the "proprietor," "publisher," "editor," "printer," "author," nor a person "who uttered, gave, sold, or lent" a copy of the newspaper, but only the "manager." The employés gave testimony which would have been ludicrous but for the contempt it showed for court and community. The journalist who was the "managing editor" of the paper under the indicted chief editor was asked:

"Who was the head of the paper when you entered upon your duties as managing editor?"

"I do not know."

"Who hired you as managing editor?"

"I really can't say that I was hired at all."

"Who employed you to come to Toledo?" The witness had been an employé in Pennsylvania of the editor on trial, and had followed the latter to Toledo to take the place of managing editor. "Nobody employed me."

The son of the indicted editor had also followed his father to Toledo, and was employed on his paper. Asked for what purpose he came, he said: "I had no purpose in coming."

The gentleman who had charge of the counting-room was asked who fixed his salary.

"I regulate my own."

The advertising manager declared:

"I have no knowledge who is my superior."

The accused had to let the case go to the jury without a spark of proof of the accusations which had filled the paper every day for months. He had no evidence to offer either that the charges were true, or that he believed them to be true. He stood self-confessed as having for years printed daily gross libels on citizens, officials, and community, as part of the tactics of a few outside men to prevent a free city from doing with its own means in its own affairs that which an overwhelming public opinion, and the legislative, executive, and judicial authorities, and its present antagonists themselves, had all sustained its right to do. The agent of this wrong was found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment in the county jail, with heavy costs and fine; like the unhappy agents at Buffalo--"made cheap" for others.[523] But sentence was suspended pending hearing of the motion for a new trial. This did not come up for a year. The court could find no error in the proceedings of the trial court, and could not sustain any of the objections made. But it found a point which even the lawyers had not hit on, and strained this far enough to grant the new trial. Then the convicted editor went before another judge--not the one who had tried him--pleaded guilty, and was fined, and so saved from jail.

One of the last scenes in this Waterloo was the abandonment of the newspaper with which the corruption and intimidation of public opinion had been attempted. Failure was confessed by the sale of the paper, and it was bought by a journalist who had been especially prominent in the defence of the city, and against whom on that account a bitter warfare had been waged by the daily which now passed into his possession. The Sunday Journal of Toledo, in commenting on the surrender, declared that the course of the organ had been one of the strongest factors of the success of the people. "In every possible way it slandered and outraged the city, where of necessity it looked for support. There could be but one result. Scores who had opposed the pipe line became its most ardent advocates purely in the general defence."

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XXIV. HIGH FINANCE

When Judge Jackson refused to enjoin the city from issuing its bonds an appeal was taken. The court and the lawyers of the city were promised that it would be carried up without delay. Months passed, and no use was made of the privilege of filing new pleadings and taking new testimony--that is, no use but to make the suits the basis for libels on Toledo and its bonds.

Time ran on until the day was at hand for opening bids for the bonds. That was to be Wednesday. Then the counsel for the opposition notified the city that on Monday they would begin the taking of depositions. This was not then or afterwards done, but on the strength of the notification news despatches were sent over the country that the proceedings against the legality of the Toledo bonds were being "pressed." In consequence of this and other manoeuvres, when Wednesday came there were no bids. A hasty rally of some public-spirited capitalists at home, learning of the emergency, made up a subscription of $300,000. The names of the citizens who made this patriotic subscription were printed in the daily paper under the heading of "The Honor Roll."

Only by extraordinary manoeuvres could the market for such securities offered by such a community have been thus killed in a time of great general and local prosperity, and extraordinary they were. What they were was formally and authoritatively ascertained by an investigation made by a committee appointed at a mass-meeting[524] of the citizens of Toledo called by the mayor, the Hon. J.K. Hamilton. The call ran:

"For the first time in the history of Toledo, its general bonds, secured by the faith and property of the city, and bearing a fair rate of interest, have been offered, and only such of them sold as were taken at home by popular subscription. It is deemed desirable that under such circumstances the citizens of Toledo should meet together and determine what further steps should be taken to carry out the will of the people as expressed by 62 per cent. of the voters of the city.

"It is believed that with proper effort a large additional popular subscription may be obtained, and thus notice given to the world that notwithstanding all opposition the citizens of Toledo have confidence in and will maintain the credit of this fair city, and that a great enterprise undertaken by its people will not be defeated by the machinations of private opposing interests, no matter how powerful and unscrupulous."

The meeting appointed a committee of three--David Robinson, Jr., Frank J. Scott, and Albert E. Macomber--"to prepare and circulate throughout the financial circles of the country a pamphlet which shall set forth the case of the city of Toledo in its struggle against those who by anonymous circulars and other dishonorable ways have attempted to prevent the sale of the Toledo natural-gas bonds." This committee put the facts before the public in a very able pamphlet, "The City of Toledo and Its Natural Gas Bonds." In an official statement asked for by this committee the city natural-gas trustees say: "Skilled writers were employed to furnish articles for Eastern financial journals, to cast discredit on the bonds on the very grounds that had been set aside by Judge Jackson's decision. Not content with this open warfare, anonymous circulars were sent to leading investment agencies in the United States, warning them to beware of these bonds, as they were under the cloud of doubtful constitutionality and an impending lawsuit. When the day arrived for bidding for the bonds no bids were made. Agents of investors were present, who came to bid, but by some unknown and powerful influence they were induced not to put in their bids. The writers are not aware that any similar mode of striking at the credit of a whole community was ever before resorted to in this country. It is an insult and a wrong not only to this city, against which it is aimed, but to people of independence everywhere in the United States who have a common interest in the maintenance of the rights of all."[525]

Press despatches impugning the validity of the bonds and misrepresenting the facts were sent all over the country. The anonymous circulars referred to were mailed to all the leading banks, investment agencies, capitalists, and newspapers. The New York Mail and Express said: "It would be decidedly interesting to know who is responsible for the ... methods by which it was thought to prevent the city from undertaking the enterprise. A number of volunteer attorneys and correspondents deluged bankers and newspapers with letters warning them against the bonds which the city proposes to issue, on the ground that it had no right to issue them. The Mail and Express received several communications of this kind."

"Not only the financial centres of this country," say the city's natural-gas trustees in their official report for 1890, "but those of Europe were invaded with these circulars."[526] The circular was headed "Caveat Emptor." It contained twenty-four questions, and every one of the answers, except those which referred to matters of record and routine, like the date, amount, name, etc., of the bonds, was incorrect. What hurt the people of Toledo most, as it was most base and baseless, was its attack on their hitherto unquestioned credit and financial honor. Asking the question, "How does the credit of the city stand?" the circular answered: "Refunding has been going on ever since 1883. The bonded debt was greater at the beginning of 1889 than of 1888; bonds bearing interest at 8 per cent. will become due in three or four years. The mayor, in his last annual message, admits the inability of the city to pay much of these except the refunding." "Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike," the authors of this attempt to pull down an entire city managed, by the interweaving of such phrases as "ever since 1883," "bonded debt greater," "inability of the city to pay," to create by insinuation the feeling of financial distrust for which their greatest industry and ingenuity had been able to find not a particle of foundation. No modern municipality is asked or expected or desired "to pay much except the refunding." Capitalists would greatly prefer that even the refunding should not be carried on, but that the debt should run along at the original high rates of interest, which they regretfully see dwindling away. The circular failed to state that the city was borrowing money at 4 per cent. to pay off debts bearing 8 per cent. The insinuations of the circular could have been used of "the credit" of the United States, New York, Paris, London, Chicago, with the same appropriateness--with this exception, that Toledo's municipal financial credit was relatively to its resources on a sounder and more conservative basis than these much more highly financed cities. The circular did not state that the proportions of debt to population had been decreasing for many years past.[527]

"Toledo has not two years' supply of gas," the circular said, "in all the territory acquired." The State Geologist, in his annual report for 1890, said that Toledo would have no gas to supply its pipe lines or citizens in 1891. In 1892 the city pipe line supplied gas to the value of $168,954.46. Three years have passed, Toledo wells still flow, and new ones are being found continually. "Whatever may have been his object," say the city gas trustees, "in volunteering such a statement, we know that so far in 1891 it is untrue, and that such positive declarations, based upon hypothetical conditions, are utterly unworthy of scientific pretensions."[528] The State Geologist also took part in his annual report in the debate between municipal control and private enterprise, siding altogether with the latter.

The quantity of gas land owned by the city was put by the circular at 300 to 500 acres. The city had 650 acres. The circular declared the life of an ordinary well to be one to three years. There is no such limit. Referring to the quantity of gas land the city had, the circular asked and answered:

"Cannot other territory be acquired?

"Not in Northwestern Ohio, and not nearer than the gas fields of Indiana."

This was untrue, for the gas trustees had already been offered, as stated, several thousands of acres of the best gas lands in addition to those they had bought. But the authors of the circular did their best to make it true. The city's natural-gas trustees say in their report for 1890: "As soon as the trustees were prepared to negotiate for gas wells and gas territory, the field swarmed with emissaries and agents of the Northwestern Ohio Natural Gas Company to compete with the trustees. In order to prove what had been previously stated, 'that Toledo could procure no gas territory,' no means were left untried; agents of that company even fraudulently represented themselves to the owners of gas property that they were connected with the gas trustees and working in their interest, and in some instances introducing themselves as the president of this board. Prices went up 1000 per cent. in some instances rather than let it fall into the hands of the trustees. A conspicuous officer of that company, as an excuse for paying an enormous sum of money for a gas well, is reported as saying, 'We did not want the gas well, but we had to buy it in order to keep Toledo from getting hold of it.'"[529]

Referring to the private companies, "Are the people of the city already supplied with natural gas for public and private use?" the circular asked. "They are," it answered, and goes on: "Why does the city want to go into the natural-gas business, then?" "To boom the lands of real-estate speculators." This is a charge affecting the Legislature and Executive and State courts of Ohio, the courts of the United States, the people of Toledo, and all the members of their city government. Burke confessed that he did not know how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. That art has been acquired since his day.

"Are these bonds of unquestionable validity?" this catechism of libel upon a community queries.

"By no means. Prominent taxpayers have suits pending attacking the constitutionality of the act under which they are issued."

"Have these cases," the last question ran, "ever been tried on their merits?"

"They have not."

They had been tried so far that the United States and State courts had refused on every ground urged to interfere with their issue and sale, declaring the legislation authorizing them to be valid. They had never been tried any further in the United States courts for a very good--or bad--reason. The "prominent taxpayers," after their defeat before Judge Jackson, took every possible means to prevent the case from reaching a final adjudication. The invariable rule of the United States Supreme Court has been to treat as final and conclusive the decisions of State courts as to such domestic issues. During the hundred years of its existence not a case can be found in which that court has overruled the fixed and received construction given to a State law by the courts of that State.[530] The only hope for the suit of the "prominent taxpayers" was, therefore, that the Supreme Court of the United States would for their special profit reverse the practice to which it had consistently adhered since the establishment of the government. What they really thought of their prospect of success in that effort they confessed when their case, no longer delayable, was upon the point of being reached.

They who had been so "anxious to get to the case as soon as possible" refrained from printing the record, a condition precedent to putting the case on the docket of the United States Supreme Court. The city wanted the decision, and in order that the case might not be dismissed for this failure to print the record, and a decision upon the merits be thus prevented, the city's gas trustees advanced the money--$1100--to the court printer for printing the record. Pushed thus against their will to trial, when the day came on which they must rise to state their case the opponents of Toledo folded their tents and stole silently away. On the motion of their attorney the case was dismissed, against the protest of the city. They paid all the costs, including the money advanced by the city for printing the record. To their defeat all along the line they did not want to add a formal decision against them from the Supreme Court, which was inevitable. And they ran away to fight another day.

Another purpose of these suits was confessed only a few weeks after this circular was issued. The existence of the suits was used to try to frighten the city's natural-gas trustees into accepting a "compromise." The compromise was that they should abandon the enterprise, sell out pipes and lands for a fraction of their worth, get their gas from the private company at higher rates, and put the city in its power for all time to come. "It will be three or four years before your case is through the Supreme Court," its representative told the natural-gas trustees, in urging them to accept. "You can't sell your bonds," he continued; "you have no money." The "compromise" was refused, but the city's pipe line had been delayed so long that the profits of the company for another twelvemonth were secure.

The demonstration against the bonds in the United States Circuit Court had been followed by similar suits in the State courts. Here again the city was successful. It was upheld on every controverted ground--in the enabling act, in the vote of the people, in the appointment of the trustees by the governor, and in the issue of the city bonds. Appeal was taken here, as in the United States courts, and, as there, for delay, not for decision. To checkmate further use of this lawsuit to smother the law and cripple the city, the friends of the pipe line began a suit against the authorities to force an immediate decision from the Ohio Supreme Court as to the legality of the bonds. It was certainly, as was said in the press, "a curious state of things when the defendant is compelled to bring suit against himself because the plaintiff refuses to allow trial in his own case."

These litigations, the circulars, the press, were only part of the campaign. One of the committees of the Common Council was brought under control, and induced to throw technical difficulties in the way of the sale of the bonds, which caused months of delay.[531] Effort was made to get the Governor to appoint natural-gas trustees hostile to the city, but failed. It was attempted, also without success, to get the Legislature to prevent the sale of the bonds at private sale. During all this controversy the city was most fortunate in receiving the needful authority from the State Legislature. This was due mainly to a faithful and able representative of Toledo in that body, the Hon. C.P. Griffin. He was offered every promise of political preferment and other allurements to betray his constituents, but he always remained faithful. Without his support the efforts of the city would have failed. His services amid great temptations deserve the grateful remembrance of the public.

Some of the devices of "private enterprise" were childish enough. "A Business Men's Protest" was published, which proved under the microscope to have been largely signed by men whose names could not be found in the directory. A similarly formidable-looking remonstrance against the pipe-line bill was sent to the Legislature. It had 1426 names; of these 464 could not be found in the directory, and over 300 of the 962 remaining names signed the petition for the city's bill. Many of them avowed that when they had signed the "Remonstrance" it had a heading in favor of the pipe line, which must have been changed afterwards. As part of the tactics of misinformation, a report was published--in January, 1890--claiming to give the business of both the private companies; but the members of the Council Committee on Gas, when afterwards examining the books for the gas company, found that it gave the receipts of only one company. A paper was prepared by a citizens' meeting for circulation among the manufacturers to ascertain how much they would contribute towards the city pipe line; but when reported back to the meeting it had become, in some mysterious way, a paper asking the manufacturers how much they would advance to quite a different scheme, the effect of which would be to sell out the city pipe line or convert it into a manufacturers' line.

These were the infantile methods of men who could not see the ludicrousness of the position they put themselves in by such efforts to keep a business which they were constantly declaring to be hazardous and unprofitable.

Detectives appear in almost every scene of our story, and are as common in its plot as in any extravagant melodrama of the Bowery thirty years ago. To counteract the anonymous circulars the City Council sent a committee headed by Mayor Hamilton--the "War Mayor," one of the ablest lawyers of the city, upright and loyal at all times to Toledo--to visit the Eastern money-markets. The committee, in their official report, state that they were assured by responsible dealers in municipal securities in New York and Boston that they would bid for the entire amount to be sold. "We regret, however, to have to report that the powerful and influential parties who have on all occasions and in every way sought to obstruct and defeat the enterprise for which the proceeds of these bonds were to be used, in some way succeeded in inducing those who intended to purchase to withhold their bids--in fact, no matter how guarded our movements, we believe that every person or firm with whom we had interviews was reported to the agents of the Standard Oil Company, for in every instance where from our interviews we had encouragement that the bonds would be bid for, within a short time more or less influential agents of opponents interviewed these parties and succeeded in changing their minds."

What a picture of "high finance," of the "beneficent inter-play of the forces of supply and demand," of the "marvellous perfection" with which capital moves under "natural laws" to carry its fertilizing influences where they are most needed! The officials of this free city compelled to sneak around in the open money-market under cover with "guarded movements," seeking buyers for its bonds as if they were stolen goods! About them a cloud of spies and detectives reporting every movement as if it were a crime to the little handful of trust millionaires in their grand building on Broadway! "They have entered the ---- Bank!" "They have just left ----'s office!" After each report the leash is slipped of a waiting sleuth, who flies away to run down the quarry.

The gas trustees made public a letter and telegram they received from a prominent New York bank:

"NEW YORK, November 27, 1889.

"DEAR SIR,--A gentleman named" (naming a man who signs the certificates of the Standard Oil Trust as treasurer),[532] "introduced by the card of Mr. ----" (one of the richest men in New York not otherwise known as connected with the trust), "called on us to-day and stated that understanding that our firm was on the point of bidding on the Toledo bonds, etc., he would caution against the purchase, as they were not legal. Mr. ---- represented himself as coming from ----" (one of the companies of the oil combination), "and referred us to their lawyer for further information. Now as this may hurt the sale of the bonds we want to be cautious, and on Friday will make further inquiries, and will wire you accordingly. We may not care to hand in our bids on this account."

The telegram sent on Friday is as follows:

"NEW YORK, November 30th.

"Fearing sale of bonds has been injured, will not bid at present."

"That tells the story," said one of the trustees, "in a nut-shell."

A local bank bid for $500,000 of the bonds, but did not sustain its bid. A reputable citizen, an ex-mayor, wrote for publication in one of the leading journals that he had been informed by a well-known banker there was reason to believe a banking firm which, in 1892, defaulted on its bid for bonds, had been indemnified by the opposition for the $5000 it thereby forfeited to the city, and for the profits it would have made from the sale of the bonds. With the city line crippled the gas company would pocket the profits on the sale of a million dollars' worth of gas a year. Five thousand dollars, or several times that, was a small insurance to pay for such a gain.

This was the game of hide-and-seek played in Wall Street by detectives and financial stilettos against "simple greens," who thought supply and demand still rule values. This was the reality which the officials of Toledo found behind the outward aspect of its magnificent buildings, the benevolent millionaires who look out through their plate-glass, the grandiloquent generalizations of professors about "the money-market."

The city was brought to the humiliation of seeing its officials meet in public session at an appointed hour to open bids it had invited from all the money centres for its bonds, only to have the news flashed all over the country that not a bid from abroad had been made. This opposition cost the city in one way and another not less than $1,000,000, according to the estimate of the city's natural-gas trustees. The feeling of the people was expressed in the following language in a circular sent out with the pamphlet report of the committee appointed in mass-meeting to make a statement of Toledo's case to the public:

"We have seen the modern aggregation of corporations--trusts--suppress other corporations in the same line of business. But this Toledo contest is believed to be the first instance where private corporations--creatures of the State--have assumed to exercise monarchical powers over a portion of the State--one of its leading municipalities; to dictate the policy of its people; to seek to control the legislation as to the laws that should be enacted for such portion of the State; to bribe and intimidate the votes of such city at the polls; to attempt to subsidize the press by the most liberal expenditure of money; to at last purchase, out and out, a heretofore leading paper of the city, place its own managers and attorneys as directors, import one of its long-trained men as editor, and turn this paper into an engine of attack upon the city, an attack upon the city's honor and credit, characterized by the most unscrupulous misrepresentation and a perfect abandonment of all the amenities of civilized warfare."

The Toledo public felt no doubt as to who were attacking it under the convenient anonymity of the two gas corporations. At a public conference, January 16, 1889, between the presidents of the private natural-gas companies and the people assembled in mass-meeting, the representative of the former said the only condition on which the members of the oil trust had been induced to interest themselves in natural-gas in Northwestern Ohio was that of absolute and unqualified control of the entire business through a majority of the stock of all the gas companies to be organized.

"The trust is interested in companies engaged in supplying natural gas?" the president of the oil trust was asked by the New York Legislature about this time.

"To a limited extent, yes."

"Have they a majority interest in any of these companies?"

"I think they have."[533]

This was identically the arrangement by which the nine trustees owned as their private property the control of the oil business. At several later conferences with the city's trustees and the Common Council the gas companies were represented by one of the principal members of the oil combination, the ingenious gentleman who had managed the negotiations with the railroads by which, under the alias of the American Transfer Company, the trust claimed and got a rebate of 20 to 35 cents a barrel,[534] not only on all oil it shipped, but on all shipped by its competitors. He was also its representative in the similar arrangement by which the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad agreed to carry its oil for 10 cents a barrel, to charge Rice 35 cents, and to pay it 25 out of every 35 cents Rice paid.[535] He had acted in the same interest throughout the gas field as well as in oil, and his pathway could be traced through one independent company after another, whose wrecks, like those in oil, are milestones.

July 27, 1889, in an item originating in New York, in the Tribune, a friendly paper, and given an extensive circulation by news despatches sent to the leading papers in other cities, it was said that the representatives of the oil trust "in this city say emphatically that they will attack in the courts the right of the city to issue them"--the bonds.

At the great meeting of the citizens, October 19, 1889, to organize a popular subscription to take the bonds killed in the money-market, the resolutions named the oil combination as the power responsible for the attacks on the city, and appealed to the people to observe that it, "no longer content with destroying individuals and associations which stand in the way of its moneyed interests, now rises to grapple with and destroy the rights of cities and states; we therefore ask all liberty-loving men to make common cause with us in the defence of the community against the aggression of colossal power."

The aldermen and the Common Council of Toledo unanimously adopted resolutions, September 15, 1890, requesting the State and Federal courts to give decisions as promptly as possible in the suits pending against the validity of the natural-gas bonds. These bodies in their official utterance declared that the oil combination, "through its officers and agents in the city of Toledo and at many other points in the United States, has circulated false and malicious statements about the bonds of the city of Toledo issued for natural-gas purposes." The natural-gas trustees of the city say in their report for 1890: "These injunctions and circulars, although fathered in the first instance by non-resident taxpayers, and in the second by irresponsible or anonymous parties, were traced directly to the oil trust, a trust having a large number of corporations within its control, among which is the North-western Ohio Natural Gas Company, and to whom the city of Toledo may reasonably attribute a loss of more than a million of dollars already. What further financial embarrassment it may suffer in the future cannot be measured by the depravity and moral turpitude which its seeds have sown in our midst."[536]

When the warfare against Toledo became a scandal ringing throughout the country and beyond, the organ of the trust in Toledo attempted to make it appear that the oil trust was not the party in interest. But there was open confession on the record. Its connection and its control were admitted by two representatives in conference with a committee appointed by the mayor at their request to discuss the situation.[537] They described the circumstances under which the members of the oil trust had gone into the project of the Toledo line and the project of the natural-gas business. One of the two stated that he came into it as its "more direct representative." The pipe line of the private gas company was built, he went on to say, by one of the principal corporations in the oil trust. At the same interview it was admitted that the oil trust owned 60 per cent. of the natural-gas company's stock.

The people of Toledo did not surrender to this success of their enemies in the money-market. The bonds which calumny and espionage prevented them from selling at wholesale to the great capitalists of New York and Boston they took themselves at retail. The Legislature having given authority for such sales, a committee of one hundred had been appointed by the citizens' meeting, October 19, 1889, to canvass all the wards of the city for subscriptions to the gas bonds. "Gas Bond Pledges" were circulated, to which people subscribed according to their ability, in amounts ranging from $2 to $5000. The employés at the Wabash Railway's car shops sent in a list signed by fifty names for a total of $1102, an average of $22 each. The labor of two hundred men for a week without pay was offered the gas trustees as an earnest of the good-will of the people. Piece by piece the city's pipe line was pushed through. At a critical moment a shrewd and patriotic contractor saved the enterprise by building a large part of the line, and taking for his pay the bonds the banks would not take. In June, 1890, the public were gratified by the announcement that their trustees had secured the means "for the construction of three miles more," making eight miles in all, or nearly one-fourth the entire line. In August a contract was made for five miles more, and so the work went on, step after step.

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