"The brevity of the time within which the investigation was required to be made rendered it impossible for your committee to do more than examine the persons most prominent in the management of its affairs. Its cause was thus presented to the most favourable light possible, and it is only fair to conclude that nothing was left unsaid by them that could be said in its favour. No witness came forward to accuse it of the great offences commonly laid to its charge. No proofs were made of its rapacity or of the greed with which it lays hold of every competitive industry, except such as might be drawn from the fact that it is the almost sole occupant of the field of oil operations, from which it has driven nearly every competitor. No witness appeared to prove its power over railroad and transportation companies and to wring from already im poverished lines better terms than other shippers, except such as might be drawn from the admission of its officers, made with hesitation, that this wealth and the amount of its business enabled it to obtain better terms than its poorer competitors." * The New York Senate made its investigation of trusts in February, i888. In March the Committee on Manufactures of the House of Representatives began a similar inquiry. This committee, like the earlier one, made the Standard its princi pal subject. Fully i,000 pages of a report of 1,soo pages are devoted to Mr. Rockefeller's creation—five times the space given to the Sugar Trust, ten times that given to the Whiskey Trust. The testimony was wide in range. Indeed, from the volume alone, a pretty complete history of the Standard Oil Company up to i888 could be written. Here are found the South Improvement Company charter and contracts in full. Here is Mr. Cassatt's testimony, taken in the case of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania vs. the Pennsylvania Rail road, showing the character of the rebates the Standard Com bination was able to secure from the railroads at that time. Here is a partial history of the growth of the Standard pipe lines. Many personal histories of refiners driven out of busi ness by the conditions brought about by railroad discrimina tions; full accounts of the war of the producing element on the Standard; all of the testimony in the Buffalo case, where two refiners were found guilty of conspiring to ruin an inde pendent refining concern; the reports of the Interstate Com merce Commission in the cases of George Rice; and much interesting explanation of various matters by leading Stand ard Oil officials appear in the report.
Mr. Rockefeller was on the stand, and one item of his testi mony affords a curious comparison. On the 28th of February, when before the New York Senate committee, Mr. Rocke feller was asked if he was not a member of the South Improve ment Company.
"I was not," he replied.
On the 3oth of the April following, when before the House Committee, the following colloquy took place : Q. I want the names particularly of gentlemen who either now or in the past have been interested with you gentlemen who were in the South Improvement Company ? A. I think they were 0. T. Waring, W. P. Logan, John Logan, W. G. Warden, 0. H. Payne, H. M. Flagler, William Rockefeller, J A. Bostwick, and—myself.
It was in this investigation that Henry M. Flagler gave explanations of various operations of the Standard, which have been quoted in the course of this narrative, notably ex planations of the South Improvement Company, of the ten cent rebate secured from all the railroads in 1875, of the pur chase of the Empire Transportation Company, of the rebate on other people's shipments enjoyed in 1878 by the American Transfer Company. Some of Mr. Flagler's testimony in this investigation compares as curiously with affidavits of his made in 188o as does that of his great chief. For instance, in 188o Mr. Flagler swore that "the Standard Oil Company owns and operates its refineries at Cleveland, Ohio, and also a refin ery at Bayonne in the state of New Jersey. That at no other place in the United States does the said Standard Oil Com pany own, operate, or control any refinery or refineries." * But in this investigation the following colloquy took place: Q. When did the Standard Company of Ohio first enter into an alliance with other refineries ? A. If you mean (by) an alliance, Mr. Gowen, I should say never.
Q. I am only endeavouring to aid your friends in getting at what they want. Here, I notice, they propose to prove by you—I will give it in this way—that on account of the disastrous condition of the refining business, the Standard, on October 15, 1874, entered into an alliance with a number of Pittsburg refineries.
A. That is more correctly stated by saying that the Standard Oil Company purchased the refineries owned by the parties in Pittsburg.
Q. Who were they ? A. Lockhart, Frew and Company, I think, was the company. Wait a moment. It was the Standard Oil Company of Pittsburg, it being a corporation, and Warden, Frew and Company, of Philadelphia, and, I should say, Charles Pratt and Company, of New York.
Q. Any others ? A. That is all.
Q. All those gentlemen, Warden, Frew and Company, and the Standard Oil Com pany of Pittsburg, Charles Pratt and Company, of New York, are now associated with you as parties interested in the present Oil Trust ? A. They are stockholders. The property formerly owned by them was at that time purchased by the Standard Oil Company.
Q. When you speak of purchasing their interest, you do not exclude them from their interest ? They united with you and remained as your associates in the business ? A. If it was not from the fact that ours was a corporation, we might call it a copartnership.
Q. They becoming interested in yours, and you in theirs ? A. Yes, sir.
Q. And you simply used your name to represent the joint ownership, as it was a corporation ? A. Yes, sir.* Full as the testimony on the Standard Oil Trust gathered by the Federal committee of 1888 is, its report touched but one point, and that was its organisation. To the committee it seemed that the agreement under which the trust operated was such as to make it exempt from the anti-trust legislation which was then contemplated by Congress. The legislation proposed was directed against "combinations to fix the price or regulate the production of merchandise or commerce." Now a mass of testimony had been presented showing that, from the starting-point of the Standard's history with the South Improvement Company, its aim has been to regulate the out put of refined oil so as to fix the price, but this testimony, the committee saw clearly enough, did not apply to the trust which it was investigating. For—so swore the trustees—they had nothing to do with the business operations of the separate con cerns. They simply held the stock of the various corporations, exercised their right as stockholders, received and distributed the dividends. Each company did its own business in its own way. The trustees were not responsible for it. There was some thing humorous to those familiar with the oil world, in the idea of J. D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, J. D. Arch bold, Henry H. Rogers, Charles Pratt, H. M. Flagler, Ben jamin Brewster, W. H. Tilford and 0. B. Jennings, having nothing to do, as trustees of the Standard Oil Trust, but to receive and divide dividends, engrossing and interesting a task as that undoubtedly was. But, as a matter of fact, nothing else could be settled on them by anything in the testimony. For instance, in 1887 there was an alliance formed between the Oil Producers' Protective Association and the Standard for limit ing the production of crude oil (a movement of which we shall hear more later). This certainly was in restraint of trade. But, on examination, the committee found the contract had been signed by the Standard Oil Company of New York. The trustees had nothing to do with it! Taking up, point by point, the conditions of which the oil producers complained, not one of them could be fixed on the trust. It had made no agree ments, signed no contracts, kept no books. It had no legal existence. It was a force powerful as gravitation and as in tangible. You could argue its existence from its effects, but you could never prove it. You could no more grasp it than you could an eel. Certainly the Committee on Manufactures was justified in confining its report to pointing out the fact that the Standard Oil Trust agreement was a shrewd and slippery device for evading responsibility.