The same audacity and effectiveness are shown by the Standard in attacking situations created by new developments in handling business. The seaboard pipe-line is a notable ex ample. When the Standard completed its pipe-line monopoly at the end of 1877, the pipe-line was still regarded as the feeder of the railroad. Naturally the railroads were seriously opposed to its becoming anything more. In Pennsylvania particularly the laws had been so manipulated by the Penn sylvania Railroad as to prevent the pipe-line carrying oil even for short distances in competition with them. Now, for many years it had been believed that the pipe-line could carry oil long distances—many claimed to the seaboard—and as soon as the independents found that the oil-bearing roads were acting solely in the interest of the Standard they began an agitation for a seaboard line which finally terminated in the Tidewater Line, one hundred and four miles long, carrying oil from the Bradford field to Williamsport on the Reading Railroad, and it was certain that the Tidewater eventually would get to the seaboard. That the day of the railroad as a carrier of crude oil was over when the Tidewater began to pump oil was obvious both to Mr. Rockefeller and to the railroad presidents, and without hesitation he seized the idea. By 1883 the Standard was pumping oil to New York, and the railroads that had served so effectively in building up the trust were practically out of the crude business. It was this audacious and splendid stroke, practically freeing him from the railroads which had made him, which made the passage of the Interstate Commerce Bill a matter of comparatively small importance to Mr. Rockefeller. To be sure, he still needed the railroads for refined, but he could so place his refineries that this service would be greatly minimised. The legislation which the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania demanded for fifteen years in hope of securing an equal chance in transportation came too late. By the time the bill was passed the pipe had replaced the rail as the great oil carrier, and the pipes were not merely under Mr. Rockefeller's control, as the rails had been ; they belonged to him. It was little wonder, then, that the passage of the great bill did not ruffle his serenity. Little wonder that the Oil Regions, realising the situation, so tragic in its irony, as fully as Mr. Rocke feller did, felt an exasperation almost uncontrolled over it. Yet the seaboard pipe-line was no development of the Stand ard Oil Company. The idea had been conceived and the practicability demonstrated by others, but it was seized by the Standard as soon as it proved possible. This quick sense of the real value of new developments, and this alertness in seizing them, have been among the strongest elements in the Standard's success.
And every new line of action was developed to its utmost. Take the work the Standard began in 1879 on the foreign market. Before the Standard Oil Company was known, save as one of several prosperous Cleveland refineries, the foreign trade had been developed until petroleum was fourth in our list of exports, and it went literally to every civilised country on the globe. In 1874 Colonel Forney made a trip through the Orient, and he wrote in one of his letters that he found both Babylon and Nineveh to be lighted with American petroleum, and that while he was in Damascus a census was taken to ascertain how much petroleum was needed for each house in the place, and a proposition was made for its entire use. "At present," said the Derrick, in commenting on this letter, "petroleum is the chief commercial representative of the United States in the Levant and the Orient." The same dithyrambic paragraphs were written by oil men then, as by the Standard now, concerning foreign trade. For
instance, compare the two paragraphs below—the one found in 1874 in the Derrick, the second in a defence of the Oil Trust published in 19oo: 1874—"It lights the dwellings, the temples, and the mosques amid the ruins of ancient Babylon and Nineveh; it is the light of Bagdad, the city of the Thousand and One Nights; of Orfa, birthplace of Abraham; of Mardeen, the ancient Macius of the Romans, and of Damascus, gem of the Orient. It burns in the grotto of the Nativity at Bethlehem; in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; amidst the Pyramids of Egypt; on the Acropolis of Athens; on the plains of Troy; and in cottage and palace on the banks of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn." t000—" Petroleum to-day is the light of the world. It is carried wherever a wheel can roll or a camel's hoof be planted. The caravans on the desert of Sahara go laden with Pratt's Astral, and elephants in India carry cases of `Standard-white,' while ships are constantly loading at our wharves for Japan, Java and the most distant isles of the sea." Exports grew rapidly through the same machinery which had created the foreign market. In 1870 there were something over one hundred and forty million gallons of petroleum products going abroad, in 1873 nearly two and one-half hun dred million, in 1878 three and one-half hundred million. In 1870 the Standard began its work on the foreign trade by sending a representative abroad. Country after country seems to have been taken up, the idea being that the daily Standard Oil meeting should have the same full information before it concerning every place of foreign trade as it had of the American trade, and that gradually the company should con trol the foreign trade as it did the American industry, doing away with middlemen, "paying nobody a profit." This work, begun in 1879, has been carried on steadily ever since. Through it the Standard soon became largely its own exporter. It established stations of its own in one port after another of Europe, Asia, South America, and has built up a large oil fleet. It carried on an aggressive campaign for developing markets ; it looked after hostile legislation ; it studied the possi ble competition of native oils; it met every difficulty—preju dice, ignorance, poverty. Little by little it has done in foreign countries what it has done in the United States. To-day it even carts oil from door to door in Germany and Portugal and other countries, as it does in America, thus realising Mr. Rockefeller's vision of controlling the petroleum of America from the time it leaves the ground until it is put into the lamp of the consumer.
The same economy and alertness were applied to the matter of making oils. In laying hands on the refineries of the coun try, Rockefeller had 'acquired by 1882 about all the pro cesses of manufacturing known, both patented and free. These processes, including all the essential ones of to-day, had been developed entirely outside of the Standard Oil Company. As early as 1865, the year Mr. Rockefeller went into the business, William Wright wrote an exhaustive book on the Oil Re gions of Pennsylvania. Among other things, he reported quite fully what was being done in the refining of petroleum. He found that in several factories they were making naphtha, gasoline and benzine; that three grades of illuminating oils —"prime white," "standard white" and "straw colour"— were made everywhere; that paraffine, refined to a pure white article like that of to-day, was manufactured in quantities by the Downer works; and that lubricating oils were beginning to be made.