this competition will not be confined to coal-oil or any one article, and will not be limited to any one year. We always stand ready to make reasonable arrangements with any one who chooses to appear in our line of business, and it will be unlike anything we have done heretofore if we permit any one to force us into an arrangement which is not reasonable. Any loss, however great, is better to us than a record of this kind." And four days later they wrote: "If you continue to bring on the oil, it will simply force us to cut down our price, and no other course is left to us but the one we have intimated." Wilkinson and Company seem to have stuck to Rice's oil, for, sixteen months later, we find Chess, Carley and Company calling on the agent of a railroad, which already was giving the Standard discriminating rates, to help in the fight.
The screw was turned, Mr. Rice affirms, his rate being raised fifty per cent, in five days.
Rice carried on his fight for a market in the most aggressive way, and everywhere he met disastrous competition. In 1892 he published a large pamphlet of documents illustrating Standard methods, in which he included citations from some seventy letters from dealers in Texas, received by him between 1881 and 1889, showing the kind of competition his oil met there from the Waters-Pierce Oil Company, the Standard's Texas agents. A dozen sentences, from as many different towns, will show the character of them all:
"I have had wonderful competition on this car. As soon as my car arrived the Waters-Pierce oil Company, who has an agent here, slapped the price down to $1.80 per case 110."
"… Oil was selling at this point for $2.50 per case, and as soon as your car arrived it was put down to $1.50, which it is selling at to-day."
"The Waters-Pierce Oil Company reduced their prices on Brilliant oil from $2.60 to $1.50 per case and is waging a fierce war."
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