If all the country had suffered from these raids on compe tition, had been the limiting of the business opportunity of a few hundred men and a constant higher price for refined oil, the case would be serious enough, but there is a more serious side to it. The ethical cost of all this is the deep concern. We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce. As a consequence business success is sanctified, and, practi cally, any methods which achieve it are justified by a larger.and larger class. All sorts of subterfuges and sophistries and slur ring over of facts are employed to explain aggregations of capital whose determining factor has been like that of the Standard Oil Company, special privileges obtained by per sistent secret effort in opposition to the spirit of the law, the efforts of legislators, and the most outspoken public opinion. How often does one hear it argued, the Standard Oil Com pany is simply an inevitable result of economic conditions; that is, given the practices of the oil-bearing railroads in 187z and the elements of speculation and the over-refining in the oil business, there was nothing for Mr. Rockefeller to do but secure special privileges if he wished to save his business.
Nov in 1872 Mr. Rockefeller owned a successful refinery in Cleveland. He had the advantage of water transportation a part of the year, access to two great trunk lines the year around. Under such able management as he could give it his concern was bound to go on, given the demand for refined oil. It was bound to draw other firms to it. When he went into the South Improvement Company it was not to save his own business, but to destroy others. When he worked so persistently to secure rebates after the breaking up of the South Improvement Company, it was in the face of an indus try united against them. It was not to save his business that he compelled the Empire Transportation Company to go out of the oil business in 1877. Nothing but grave mismanage ment could have destroyed his business at that moment; it was to get every refinery in the country but his own out of the way. It was not the necessity to save his business which compelled Mr. Rockefeller to make war on the Tide water. He and the Tidewater could both have lived. It was to prevent prices of transportation and of refined oil going down under competition. What necessity was there for Mr. Rockefeller trying to prevent the United States Pipe Line doing business?—only the greed of power and money. Every great campaign against rival interests which the Stand ard Oil Company has carried on has been inaugurated, not to save its life, but to build up and sustain a monopoly in the oil industry. These are not mere affirmations of a hostile critic ; they are facts proved by documents and figures.
Certain defenders go further and say that if some such com bination had not been formed the oil industry would have failed for lack of brains and capital. Such a statement is
puerile. Here was an industry for whose output the whole world was crying. Petroleum came at the moment when the value and necessity of a new, cheap light was recognised everywhere. Before Mr. Rockefeller had ventured outside of Cleveland kerosene was going in quantities to every civil ised country. Nothing could stop it, nothing check it, but the discovery of some cheaper light or the putting up of its price. The real "good of the oil business" in 1872 lay in making oil cheaper. It would flow all over the world on its own merit if cheap enough.
The claim that only by some such aggregation as Mr. Rocke feller formed could enough capital have been obtained to develop the business falls utterly in face of fact. Look at the enormous amounts of capital, a large amount of it speculative, to be sure, which the oil men claim went into their business in the first ten years. It was estimated that Philadelphia alone put over $168,000,00o into the development of the Oil Re gions, and New York $134,000,000, in their first decade of the business. How this estimate was reached the authority for it does not say.* It may have been the total capitalisation of the various oil companies launched in the two cities in that period. It shows very well, however, in what sort of figures the oil men were dealing. When the South Improve ment Company trouble came in 1872, the producers launched a statement in regard to the condition of their business in which they claimed that they were using a capital of $2oo,000,000. Figures based on the number of oil wells in operation or drilling at that time of course represent only a portion of the capital in use. Wildcatting and speculation have always demanded a large amount of the money that the oil men handled. The almost conservative figures in regard to the capital invested in the Oil Regions in the early years were those of H. E. Wrigley, of the Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. Mr. Wrigley estimates that in the first twelve years of the business $235,000,000 was received from wells. This includes the cost of the land, of putting down and oper ating the well, also the profit on the product. This estimate, however, makes no allowance for the sums used in specula tion—an estimate, indeed, which it was impossible for one to make with any accuracy. The figures, unsatisfactory as they are, are ample proof, however, that there was plenty of money in the early days to carry on the oil business. Indeed, there has always been plenty of money for oil investment. It did not require Mr. Rockefeller's capital to develop the Bradford oil fields, build the first seaboard pipe-line, open West Virginia, Texas, or Kansas. The oil business would no more have suf fered for lack of capital without the Standard combination than the iron or wheat or railroad or cotton business. The claim is idle, given the wealth and energy of the country in the forty-five years since the discovery of oil.