They did not. They put out a few extra thousand barrels each year. Others did the same. It was, of course, fatal to the "good of the oil business." Not only did these profits tempt many refiners to overrun their allotment; the few independents left profited by the prices and increased their plants; the great Empire Transportation Company combined refineries with its pipe-lines as Mr. Rockefeller was adding pipe-lines to his refineries. Thus competition was stimulated.
The effect on the men who produced oil was, of course, bad. They had found it impossible at any time, while the refined was kept so high, to force crude up to a corresponding point, though every effort was made. The producers threatened to combine and refine their own oil. When the Empire Transportation Company went into refining the producers heartily favoured the movement, and throughout the next year a severe competition kept prices down. The Empire was finally wiped out; the producers, aroused by this failure, combined against the Standard in one of the greatest associations they ever had. From 1878 to 1880 they fought continuously to restore competition. They secured the introduction into Congress of a bill to regulate interstate commerce; they fought for more drastic laws against railroad discrimination in the state of Pennsylvania; they persuaded the state to prosecute the Pennsylvania Railroad for disrimination; they indicted Mr. Rockefeller and eight of his colleagues for criminal conspiracy; and they supported by money and influence a scheme for a seaboard pipe-line connected with the independent refineries.[1]
If one will look at the chart he will see graphically the effect on Mr. Rockefeller's ambition of this fundamentally sound independent movement. The margin between crude and refined, thrust up to over twenty cents by the combination of 1878, fell rapidly under the combined efforts of the
- ↑ See Chapter VII.
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