holders in trust. It certainly looks as if the Pure Oil Company has devised an organisation which will effectually preserve its independence so long as its shareholders desire that independence. Mr. Archbold, in describing this voting trust of the Pure Oil Company to the Industrial Commission, called it "iniquitous." It is difficult to understand just how it is iniquitous, unless it is because of its success so far in keeping the Standard out of its councils. It is not a secret arrangement. It aims at no monopoly, at no restraint of trade. It claims only to be a device for protecting its obvious right to handle its own product. Of course, if we admit that the oil business belongs to the Standard, as Mr. Rockefeller claims, then the Pure Oil Company is certainly in the wrong!
As it stands to-day, the independents have a good showing for their fight. They have fully 900 stockholders, most of them producers. They handle a daily production of 8,000 barrels of crude oil; operate 1,500 miles of crude pipe-line and 400 miles of refined; are allied with some fourteen refineries, in some of which all the by-products of oil, as well as naphtha and illuminating oils, are produced; own one tank-steamer, the Pennoil, with a capacity of 42,000 fifty-gallon barrels, and charter several others; own oil barges on the Rhine, the Elbe and the Baltic; have fully equipped stations in Europe at Hamburg, Mannheim, Riesa, Stettin and Dusseldorf, in Germany; Rotterdam and Amsterdam, Holland; London and Manchester, England; and, in the United States, New York and Philadelphia. With conservative and loyal management, there seems to be no reason that the Pure Oil Company should not become a permanent independent factor in the oil business. Such a thing is worth the best efforts of the men who have made it. Their courageous and persistent struggle no doubt seems to most of them as of purely personal and local meaning. All they asked was to get a fair share of the profits in their business. They knew
[ 190 ]
