In February a hearing was given the bill, Mr. Dodd presenting the Standard side. It is rare that so able a lawyer has to fight so weak a measure, and Mr. Dodd riddled it easily. As a matter of fact the Billingsley Bill was as bad as it could be. It was characterised by all sorts of constitutional, legal and practical difficulties. The pipe-line business was an interstate business, and this bill attempted to regulate it — which evidently it could not do. It could, of course, regulate Pennsylvania oil, but, by so doing, it created two classes of oil in the lines, a situation which would have been confusing and undesirable. It was evidently intended that the prices it fixed should apply to the 30,000,000 barrels of stocks on hand, but these were held under contract, and could not be touched. There were many other objections to the bill. Even Judge Heydrick, the able lawyer whom the oil men had engaged to defend it, was obliged to apologise for it at every point, and its most valiant supporter, Senator Lewis Emery, Jr., said frankly that the framer of the bill knew too little of the oil men's needs to be able to make a bill, and that this would have to be thoroughly revised.

In spite of all the reasonable, indeed overwhelming, objections to the Billingsley Bill, the oil men clung to it. Mass-meetings were held nightly from one end of the region to the other, petitions flooded the Legislature, a big delegation was kept constantly in Harrisburg lobbying for it. The support was intemperate, bitter, unreasonable. In March it was intensified by the knowledge that a self-constituted committee of leading oil men were in New York treating with the Standard in regard to certain of the abuses the bill aimed to cure. These men felt that the Standard was unjust in its dealings with the oil men, excessive in its charges, and arbitrary in its service, but they felt that the confusion the Billingsley Bill would bring into the business more than offset the grievances it righted, and they had gone to Mr. Rockefeller to see if matters could not be compromised. Now nothing could have more effectually added to the warlike spirit abroad in the Oil Regions at that moment than the suggestion of a compromise. Their cause was being "sold." It was "compounding with felony," and when, after a three days' sitting in New York, the committee came home with an agreement from the National Transit Company, making certain concessions — as two per cent. instead of three for shrinkage, twenty-five cents a day per 1,000 barrels, instead of forty, for storage, and with a promise that certain other points should be settled by joint committees — two of the leading members were hung in effigy in Titusville!

In April the final vote on the Billingsley Bill came. Harrisburg was alive with oil men determined that the bill should go through. The Standard was present, and if it had less of a claque, it had more of the "sinews of war." Indeed, it was charged later by Senator Lewis Emery that the leader of the Standard forces in the Senate received $65,000 for his services — a charge which, so far as the writer knows, has never been either proved or disproved. The bill came to a vote after a passionate wrangle. It was defeated eighteen to twenty-five. A storm of violent protest from the oil men's representatives followed the defeat, and the lobbies, the hotels, and even the streets of Harrisburg were scenes in the next hours of bitter quarrels and excited gatherings. When finally the oil men withdrew from the town it was with the understanding that they were to meet two weeks later in Oil City to organise a new protective association. The protests and resolutions passed at their final gatherings foreshadowed no intention of reviving the Billingsley Bill. Indeed, the bill itself had received scant attention from them in the violent campaign over its passage which they had carried on for three months. All their passion had been expended on the Standard. This was a question of whether the Standard Oil Company ruled the Legislature of Pennsylvania or whether the people ruled it — so declared the oil men; and when their bill was defeated they charged it was by bribery, and henceforth quoted the defeat of the Billingsley Bill along with the Payne case as proof of the corrupt power of the Standard Oil Company in politics. Their outbreak, for it was nothing else, was the culmination of their indignation and resentment at fifteen years of unfair play on the part of the Standard Oil Company, of resentment at the South Improvement Company, at forced combination of refineries and pipe-lines, at railroad rebates and drawbacks, at the immediate shipment outrages, at the Tidewater defeat. It was revolt against the incessant pressure of Mr. Rockefeller's pitiless steel grip. It was bitterness at the idea that it was he who was reaping all the profit of a business in which they were taking the chief risks, and if things went on as they were that it was he who always would. Out of their burst of passion was to grow a solid determined effort, but for the moment they were defeated, and the defeat, which really was merited, was another added to their series of just and unjust complaints against Mr. Rockefeller.

All of these bitter and spectacular struggles aroused intense public interest. The debate on the Interstate Commerce Bill was contemporaneous with them — the bill was passed in 1887, and had its effect. The feeling grew all over the country that whatever the merits of these specific cases, there was danger in the mysterious organisation by which such immense fortunes and such excessive power could be built up on one side of an industry, while another side steadily lost money and power. A new trial was coming to Mr. Rockefeller, one much more serious than any trial for overt acts, for the very nature of his great creation was to be in question. It was a hard trial, for all John D. Rockefeller asked of the world by the year 1887 was to be let alone. He had completed one of the most perfect business organisations the world has ever seen, an organisation which handled practically all of a great natural product. His factories were the most perfect and were managed with the strictest economy. He owned outright the pipe-lines which transported the crude oil. His knowledge of the consuming power of the world was accurate, and he kept his output strictly within its limit. At the same time the great marketing machinery he had put in operation carried on an aggressive campaign for new markets. In China, Africa, South America, as well as in remote parts of Europe and the United States, Standard agents carried refined oil. The Standard Oil Company had been organised to do business, and if ever a company did business it was this one. From Mr. Rockefeller himself, sitting all day in his den, hidden from everybody but the remarkable body of directors and heads of departments which he had "acquired" as he wiped up one refinery and one pipe-line after another, to the humblest clerk in the office of the most remote marketing agency, everybody worked. There was not a lazy bone in the organisation, nor an incompetent hand, nor a stupid head. It was a machine where everybody was kept on his mettle by an extraordinary system of competition, where success met immediate recognition, where opportunity was wide as the world's craving for a good light to cheer its hours of darkness. The machine was pervaded and stimulated by the consciousness of its own power and prosperity. It was a great thing to belong to an organisation which always got what it wanted, and which was making money as no business in the country had ever made it.

What more, indeed, could Mr. Rockefeller ask than to be let alone? And why not let him alone? He had the ability to keep together the wide-spread interests he had acquired — not only to keep them together, but to unify and develop them; why not let him alone? Many people even in the Oil Regions were inclined to do so, some because they feared him — rumour said Mr. Rockefeller was vindictive and never forgot opposition; others because they were canny and foresaw that they might want his help one day; still others because criticism of success is an ungracious business and arouses a suspicion that the critic may be envious or bitter. But there were a few people, as there always are, whom no cowardice, no self-interest, no fear of public opinion could keep quiet, and these people insistently urged that the Standard Oil Company was a menace to the commerce of the country. We have been and are being wronged, they repeated. We have a right to do an independent business. Interference to drive us out is conspiracy. Let Mr. Rockefeller succeed in the oil business and he will attack other industries; he will have imitators. In fifty years a handful of men will own the country.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them. To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. "We do not talk much — we saw wood." This attitude of serene indifference is supremely wise. It belittles the critic and it gives the outsider who watches the game a feeling that a serenity so high must come from an impregnable position. There is no question but many a mouth opened to testify against the Standard Oil Company has been closed by Mr. Rockefeller's policy of silence. Only the few irreconcilables withstood his sphinx-like attitude, and yearly, from the compromising of 1880, these warnings and accusations were louder and more fierce. Probably the greatest trial Mr. Rockefeller has ever had has come from the persistency with which the few malcontents kept him before the public. They interfered with two of his great principles — "hide the profits" and "say nothing." It was they who had ruined the South Improvement Company; it was they who had indicted him for conspiracy and compelled him to compromise in 1880. It was they who now, after the splendid pipe-line organisation was completed and his market machinery was in order, kept up their agitation and their cursing. Their work began to tell. The feeling grew that the Standard Oil Company, or Trust, as it was by this time generally called, must be looked into. Even those who, dazzled by Mr. Rockefeller's achievement, were inclined to overlook its ethical side and to refuse to consider to what aggregation of power and abuse it might lead, began to feel that it would be quite as well to have the matter thrashed out, to have it settled once for all, whether the thing had been so bad in its making and was so dangerous in its tendencies as the "oil-shriekers" pretended. In the House of Representatives, when the question of ordering an investigation of trusts by the Committee on Manufactures was up in 1887, the liveliest concern was shown as to whether the Standard Oil Company, "the most important case" of all, would escape. More than one member asked to be assured before consenting to the investigation that the Standard would be put on the rack. The same interest was shown in the Senate of New York State, where an investigation was ordered for February, 1888. It was certain indeed now that Mr. Rockefeller would not be allowed much longer to work in the dark. He was to be dragged into the open, much as he might deplore it, to explain what his trust really was, to prove to a suspicious and hostile public that he had a right to exist.

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