your profit come in? We are entitled to impartiality. As we are advised, the law, common and statute, provides for it; it pronounces those participating in such a scheme conspirators against the public weal, and there is no court upon your line but what will enforce by mandamus and injunction the impartiality that we ask. The combination will promise you an immediate increase of revenue. If we are well advised, will you realise upon that promise? Can you make a contract with them that if we do not succeed in destroying, it will be their interest to keep? You will not have a refinery left; and they are now completing pipe-lines from Pittsburg to Oil City, and can deliver the oil received by all their pipe-lines, independent of your road and its branches. In case of a contract with them executed but afterwards broken, from what source will you derive your oil traffic and what court will enforce the broken contract in your favour? We urge that you cannot enter into any arrangement with the monopoly that can be permanently useful to it and to you, and doubt if it can be made temporarily so.
Suppose that you decline to enter into such a treaty, or any such scheme, but announce and adhere to the opposite policy? There is no law, not even that of necessity, to compel you to serve the ends of the Standard Oil Company.
If Messrs. Vanderbilt and Jewett believe that their aid alone is insufficient to the establishment of the monopoly, for how long will they carry its oil as at present for nothing, when they could have full rates, by uniting the railroad interest, and leaving the Standard Oil Company to do its business in common with all others?
If the Pennsylvania Railroad, having the geographical position in its favour, will announce and adhere to the policy of impartial and competitive rates, in three or six months, it can have all the facilities and extent of business which the Standard Oil Company can give the competitive roads, and by men who have all to gain by so doing.
We ask consideration of our views and of our assurance of good results from their favourable consideration.
If you choose to place the matter in the light of an experiment, its trial can cost you nothing but the failure to realise upon the immediate fulfillment of the promises of the common enemy, and that realisation we believe will not be permitted.
Very respectfully,
B. B. Campbell, of Pittsburg,
E. G. Patterson, of Titusville.Philadelphia, September 11, 1877.
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