CHAPTER XXXI

ALL THE WORLD UNDER ONE HAT

"This business belongs to us." This was the reply the president of the oil combination made to a neighbor who was begging to be allowed to continue the refinery which he had successfully established before his tardier but more fortunate competitors had left their produce stores, lumber-yards, and book-keepers' stools. He could remember, the neighbor told the New York Legislature, before there was any such company as theirs, and when the president of the poor man's light was still in the commission business opposite him and his refinery. He described how the president left this commission business, and "commenced to build a refinery there of a small capacity.... He used to say to me, 'What is a good time to sell?' and 'What is a good time to hold?' as he said he thought I knew." The day came when the neighbor who had been first found that the last was to be first. He was making $21,000 to $22,000 a year, but he had "to sell or squeeze." He had several conversations with the new-comer who had been so successful in learning when it was "a good time to hold." To save his livelihood, "I did almost condescend to tease him," he testifies. But the only reply he could get was: We have freighting facilities no one else can get.[625] This business belongs to us. Any concern that starts in this business we have sufficient money to lay aside a fund to wipe it out. "They went on just as if it did belong to them, and there were others started before he did in it which I thought it belonged to quite as much as it did to him.... I am wiped out and made a poor man.... I think they are making a profit out of my ruin."

His refinery had been giving him a profit of $21,000 to $22,000 a year. It had cost him $41,000, but he had to sell it for $15,000. This purchase of $41,000 for $15,000 was one of "the little economies" to which the trust ascribes its success. It was not a "good time to sell," but he sold. Part of the "squeeze" put upon him was the rebate given to the buyer. He could not have got the rebate if he had applied for it, but he would not apply for it. "I made application for lower freights, but not for any drawbacks; I did not suppose that was the right way to do business."[626]

"This business belongs to us." This remark was not prophecy, but history. It was in 1878, and the claim had been already made good. The New York Legislature, in 1879, reported that the speaker and his associates had control of 90 or 95 per cent. of the industry. "It has absorbed and monopolized this great traffic, which ranks second on the list of exports of our country."[627] This conclusion was based on the evidence of officers and stockholders.[628] Their shadow grew no less. The Interstate Commerce Commission found in 1890 that they "manufacture nearly 90 per cent. of the petroleum and its products in the United States."[629]

"Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle." For the perfection of this triumph no trifle has been disdained, from the well in the mountain to the peddler's cart in the city. The bargemen of the Alleghany, the coasters of the sea-shore, and the stern-wheelers of the Western rivers all had to go one way. "We drove out the shipments in the schooners from Baltimore and Washington, and we stopped almost the shipments by river down the Mississippi by boat," said one of the successful men. His plan had been so thorough as even to seek to "drive off the river schooners."[630]

The last stage in their economic development--that in which the people of the oil region lose the ownership of the oil lands and become hired men--is already far along. Although at first the oil combination owned no oil lands to speak of--"It does not own any oil wells or land producing oil, and never did," its president said, in 1880; "an infinitesimal amount," he said later[631]--it has of late years, through corporations organized for that purpose, been a heavy buyer and leaser of the best oil lands in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Kentucky, and the West.

Monopoly anywhere must be monopoly everywhere. At the beginning it was enough to control the railways; by these the pipe lines, refineries, and markets were got. These were secured, only to find that it was vital to control the source of supply. The producers once gave an illustration of what it would be for the sole buyer to come to the market and find that the oil he must have was not on sale at his price.[632] "We have during the past year," one of the combination said, in 1891, before a committee of the Pennsylvania Legislature, "invested a very large amount of money, and have induced our friends to come forward with new capital to engage in the business of producing oil."[633] By the policy of becoming producers the combination has changed its position from that of mere intermediary--though one as irresistible as a toll-gate keeper--to that of absolute owner. The spectre it has seen rise before it, of the producers organized as one seller to meet it as the only buyer, has been laid to rest.

"We are pushing into every part of the world, and have been doing so," the president told the New York Legislature in 1888.[634] Their tank-steamers go to all the ports of Europe and Asia, and their tank-wagons are as familiarly seen in the cities of Great Britain and the Continent as of America. An agitation of extensive proportions was begun in 1893 in the press of Canada and in the Dominion Parliament to admit American oil at a lower duty. There was no popular demand for such a step. No general reduction of the tariff was proposed. The movement was simultaneous in the press of different parts of Canada, and it was promoted by papers as important as the Toronto _Globe_ and Montreal _Star_. It was resisted with desperation by the 20,000 persons who are employed in the Canadian oil industries, the growth of thirty-two years--"not a rich, gay, bloated population, rioting with the plunderings of the farmers, revelling in all kinds of luxuries, making merry with their friends," says a newspaper correspondent, who visited them in December, 1892, "but a hard-working community, in which all live comfortably; few are rich."

This opposition was successful with the Dominion Parliament in that year, and it refused to admit American oil at a lower tax. But the finance minister then, by executive action, did in part what the Legislature had refused to do. By lowering the inspection duty and changing custom-house conditions he made a considerable reduction in the tax. The agitation to reduce the tariff was not relaxed, and was finally successful in 1894, when Parliament lowered the duties on oil, and to that extent surrendered the Canada producers and refiners to their American competitors.

The Scotch refiners, some of whom have been in business forty years, have become as loyal subjects of an American ruler as of their own queen. They make only as much as he allows, and sell at the price he fixes. He has demanded year by year a greater proportion of their business.[635] In 1892 they were notified that they must reduce their output by 10 per cent.[636] The Scotch, anxious for the accelerating future, begged that the "arrangement" might be made for three years instead of one. But this was denied them. The agent from America who brought them their orders would promise no more than "to place the matter in a favorable light before his colleagues in America."[637] By October of that year the capital of the Scotch companies, held mainly by small investors, had shrunk $5,000,000 in value. But to this item the London _Economist_ adds the consolation that "that powerful organization"--the American--"has for years professed the kindliest feelings for the Scotch producers." Dr. Johnson said that much may be made of a Scotchman if caught young. The American caught him old.

The disturbance fell heaviest, as always, on the working-men. "Reduction in wages is now being effected," writes the managing director of the oldest and largest of the Scotch companies in the _Economist_. "Another 10 per cent. reduction in miners' wages has been resolved upon," the _Economist_ announces in its issue of October 8, 1892.

One of the causes that contributed to the downfall of the Scotch refiners was the fact that the British government reduced the test required for illuminating oil. This new regulation opened the British markets to a flood of cheap oil from America.[638] The Scotch oil is better made and more expensive. "We cannot tell," said a correspondent of the Glasgow _Herald_, "what powerful interest the American oil combination did not bring to bear on our government. The public had then no champion, and as a rule never have on these occasions."

The unkindest cut of all is that it was from the Scotch manufacturers themselves that their American rival and ruler learned the secrets of the industry it is now absorbing on the instalment plan. In one of its publications it has told how its "experts visited the great shale works in Scotland, and studied their methods," and how "the consequence was that extensive works were erected."[639]

The economic development of Germany is not so much behind that of Great Britain and America as to seem uninviting to the unhasting but unresting American. Some years ago enterprising German importers invested a large amount of capital in tank-steamers, because they thought these solved the problem of the transportation of petroleum. When the Americans refused to supply them any longer with oil for their steamers to carry, they saw that there was more in this problem than they had guessed. Importers who had no steamers found one day that American enterprise had secured practically all of them, and had very decided notions as to whom cargoes should be taken. The heads of two or three of the largest houses boarded a steamer for New York, and came back stockholders in a German-American company which controls most of the German business, as the Anglo-American company controls that of Great Britain. "If the great company with unlimited capital cares to lose money, it can drive us from the field," was the explanation of the head of one of the largest German concerns, as quoted in the Weser _Zeitung_.

At the beginning of the next year some Holland firms were invited into the same shelter, and became the "fittest"; and then followed the Belgian and the Scandinavian countries. The Berlin _Vossische Zeitung_ of June 18, 1891, described the line of march: "One group of business men after another is thus made superfluous and pushed aside. First the wells, pumps, and refineries in America, then the American export trade, then the private freight vessels adapted for transportation of petroleum, then the European import trade, then the export trade from European ports, and, finally, this over-powerful company threatens to seize the entire retail trade in petroleum. It is a world monopoly." Hundreds of boatmen engaged in a flourishing river trade in Germany were driven out by tank-boats. If they had changed to tanks, they would have been dependent on their opponent for the oil to fill them. Importers in barrels were cut off by a change which the German government made in the tariff on barrels. The Americans were also helped by an increase in the German tariff on Russian oil of 50 per cent., which made it so much the more difficult for it to compete with American oil. As one way to kill competition where it still existed, all statistics were suddenly withheld by the German-American member of the trust. Neither exports nor imports were known except to the ruling company; all others were kept in the dark.

This success in Germany has not been due to favoritism on the highways. The extraordinary discrimination on railroads in America would be impossible in Germany. With hardly an exception the railroads are under the supervision of the State, and are very carefully controlled. Even the private roads would not dare to give any but the open rates. In Austria-Hungary, formerly, secret rates were in full swing, but the system is now said to be destroyed.

Prices have declined in Germany, and the people at large make few complaints except about the quality of the American oil. It has become more sooty than formerly. In the beginning it burns well, but it ends with giving a very poor light. This has been conjectured to be due to a mixture of the inferior Ohio oil with that of Pennsylvania; but "it cannot be proved," the German chronicler reports.[640] "The working people," says one of the Berlin papers, "will have to foot the bill, and the working people only. The well-to-do and rich of to-day can have other fuel and light, but to the oppressed working-man petroleum is as great a necessity as his potatoes." The German papers, in casting about for means of checkmating the increase of prices which they believe will result from the consummation of this monopoly, advocate the use of water-power and also wind-power to create electricity.

The attention that has been attracted to the growth of this power does not come from the public at large, but from those directly interested and the sympathy and interest of the German "national economists." The latter point out that the present cheap prices are "war prices." They predict that as soon as the world monopoly is established and all territory is under complete control a rise of prices will take place. They are advocates of State monopoly as better than private monopoly. If State monopolies prevent free competition, at least they are able, they say, to give some compensation to those who are hurt. In the tobacco monopoly hundreds of millions were set aside by the German government for this purpose, but even that was not considered sufficient. But this monopoly is a private affair. It swallows the profits of all those whom it destroys. Numerous industries have been ruined--importers, ship-owners, brokers, local dealers, exporters, retailers, river boatmen, and numerous other trades--but no one receives indemnity. The public opinion of the government, the Reichstag, the national economists, the philanthropists, is active in support of the middle class, but in spite of all this a whole department of industry has been torn away from it.

There are one or two "independents" in Germany whom, like the independents in America, the trust has not yet been able to crush, though it is turning the markets topsy-turvy for that purpose. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ of June 18, 1894, notes that the trust is selling refined oil in Europe at prices lower than those at which crude oil can be delivered from America.

The Austrian journals have been chronicling the absorption of the principal refineries of Austria and Hungary by a combination, of which the Rothschilds are the most important members, as they are of that in Russia. This combination, which first appears in 1892, has by 1894 accumulated a reserve of 3,000,000 gulden on a capital of 1,000,000 gulden, and its profits for 1894 are expected to be 100 per cent. The Prager _Lloyd_ of April 26, 1894, giving these and other facts, adds that "the government of Austria as well as of Hungary takes the ground that if a petroleum monopoly is to be formed it should be in the hands of the State, not of a corporation, certainly not of a foreign corporation, least of all an American one."

This remedy of a State monopoly as an alternative to private monopoly, as suggested in Austria and Germany, has as yet had few advocates in America. Our public opinion, so far as there is any public opinion, restricts itself to favoring recourse to anti-trust laws and to boycotting the monopoly and buying the oil of its competitors. But there are too few of these to go around, and they are shut out of most of the markets. The shrewd monopoly is itself the most diligent caterer to such American demand as there is for the "anti-monopoly" product. It does business under hundreds of assumed names, and employs salesmen at large salaries to push the sale of "opposition oil" in our disaffected provinces.

With the news from Germany came the announcement that similar control had been obtained of the business of the firm at Venice which did most of the oil business of Italy, and a new company had been formed, of which the American "trustees" own a majority. In a letter sent to Minister Phelps, at Berlin, a resident representative of the American oil combination says, as quoted in the New York _Tribune_, October 5, 1891: "For the furtherance of our programme and as participators in the large European investment which this programme involves, we have sought and been fortunate enough to secure the co-operation of a coterie of well-known merchants, who have been long and prominently identified with the petroleum commerce of the Continent." The Società Italo-Americana del Petrolio (the Italian-American Oil Company) is in Italy what the concerns just described are in the countries to the north of it. The head of the oil combination was quoted by the New York _Tribune_ of July 1, 1891, as saying: "The cable despatches are substantially correct as regards our interest in the German and Italian companies."

The French government a year ago lowered the tariff on petroleum one-half. This was followed, the French press reports, by the erection of a refinery by the American trust at Rouen, and the purchase by it of land in Marseilles, Cette, Bordeaux, and Havre for other refineries. The machinery needed was shipped from America. Large offices were opened at Paris by the American combination for the administration of the industry in France, which was to be concentrated into its hands like that of the rest of Europe. The sequel, if the _Frankfurter Zeitung_, a prominent German commercial paper, is correctly informed, is that the French refiners, as the Scotch did before them, have come to terms with the American trust. It has agreed not to start up its refineries in France, not to sell any refined oil in America for shipments to France, and not to allow any American outsiders to compete with the French refiners.

There was a report in June, 1892, that a Dutch company had succeeded in refining petroleum in Sumatra, one of the possessions of the Netherlands' East India colonies, and selling it in India. The solicitor of the trust, asked about it by the New York _Times_, June 5, 1892, said, "It cannot be true." The oil combination, he continued, "has agents in the Netherlands' East India colonies and at Sumatra, and it would certainly have heard of this corporation and its competition if there was anything worth hearing."

There are great oil-fields in Peru. Since the close of the war with Chili there has been an active development of them, and the commercial reports of San Francisco say that fuel oil is now being supplied from this source to our Pacific States. This has not been done by the Peruvians. It was an American who organized the oil industry of Peru. The principal company was formed by the same expert who went years ago from Pennsylvania to Russia to Americanize the oil interests of the Caucasus. After he had succeeded in that task he went to Peru. He died in the spring of 1894. At about the time of his death the newspapers, by a coincidence that arrests attention, chronicled the departure from New York of a well-known man who was going to Peru, as he stated in an interview, to look after the interests of the members of the oil trust. But there is no official information that they have any ownership or control there.

When one of the officers of the combination was before Congress, in 1888, he was asked if there had been any negotiations by his associates with the Russian oil men.

"We have never had any serious negotiations,"[641] he replied.

The word "serious" was a slip. He withdrew it. "We have never had any" was his revision. Three years later the same official, in a speech to persuade the Pennsylvania Legislature that the pipe-line interests of the oil country did not need the regulation by the State then under debate, but were abundantly safeguarded by him and his associates, said: "It may not be amiss for me to say that we have had, at different times during the last several years, most flattering propositions from people who are identified with the Russian petroleum industry, to come there and join them in the development and introduction of that industry. We have declined these offers, gentlemen, always and to this day, and have held loyal to our relations to the American petroleum."[642]

There had been negotiations, after all!

The reports of the United States consul-general at Berlin, in 1891, transmitted many interesting articles from the German papers concerning the alliance which it was believed had been made between the Rothschilds and the American oil combination. A company managed by the great bankers has obtained a commanding position in the Russian oil business, and the American and the Russian were even then said to have divided the world between them. The Berlin _Vossische Zeitung_ said: "Heretofore the two petroleum speculators have marched apart, in order to get into their hands the two largest petroleum districts in the world. After this has been accomplished they unite to fight in unison, and to fix as they please the selling price for the whole world, which they divide between themselves. So an international speculating ring stands before the door, such as in like might and capital power has never before existed, and everywhere the intelligible fear prevails that within a short time the price of an article of use indispensable to all classes of people will rise with a bound, without its being possible for national legislation or control to raise any obstacles."[643]

But some of the closest European observers have seen reasons from the beginning to believe that the Rothschilds are in the Russian oil business only as the agents of the American combination. This is freely asserted by the Continental press. The policy of the Rothschilds has been never to engage in commercial enterprise on their own account. The tactics used by the Rothschilds in oil have been an almost exact reproduction of those of the combination in America. From the first they gave the subject of freights their special attention. They showed no ability for new or independent undertakings, but they tried, to use the words of an Austrian-Hungarian consular report from Batoum in 1889, "following the example of the combination in the United States, to get the bulk of the Russian petroleum trade into their hands"; using the large money power at their command for speculation, freely advancing money for leases and delivery contracts, and specially acquiring all the available means of transportation. The experience of the people of Parker[644] is recalled by the statement that the Rothschild company would leave hundreds of cars loaded with petroleum on the tracks for weeks to prevent competitors from shipping and from filling their contracts. When the city of Batoum, in 1888, refused to allow it to lay pipes over the city lands to the harbor, it was with the enthusiastic approbation of the agitated citizens. The authorities gave as their reason that through large establishments of this kind the capitalists gained a monopoly, crushing out smaller producers to the disadvantage of all classes of the population. In the absence of official investigations, a free press, and civilized courts--that knowledge which is not only power but freedom--it is impossible for any one in Russia, or out of it, to know the truth as to the relations of the Rothschilds to the American monopoly. The latest news in the summer of 1894 is of a great combination of Russian and American oil interests, under the direction of the Russian Minister of Finance, for a division of territory, regulation of prices, and the like. Information of this was given to the world by that minister's official organ in November, 1893. Thus says the Hanover (Germany) _Courier_ of November 11th: "With the direct sanction of the Russian government the management of the enormous wealth that lies in the yearly production of Russian petroleum will be concentrated in the hands of a few firms.... The Russian government lends its hand for the formation of a trust that reaches over the ocean--a trust, under State protection, against the large mass of consumers. This is the newest acquisition of our departing century."

It was announced that, in pursuance of this plan, the Russians were to be given exclusive control of certain Asiatic markets. The officers of the American combination are not easily reached by newspaper men. But when this news came long interviews with them were circulated in the press of the leading cities, dwelling upon the "Waterloo" defeat they had suffered, and reassuring the people with this evidence that there was, after all, "no monopoly." The Russian interests are dominated by the Rothschilds, and if the Rothschilds are, as these European observers declare, merely the agents of the Americans, even unsophisticated people can understand the cheerfulness with which the trustees in New York dilate on their Waterloo at the hands of their other self. Only this could make credible the report that the world has been divided with the Russians by our American "trustees," who never divide with anybody. In dividing with the Russians they are dividing with themselves.

Though it is reported that discriminations by the government railroads of Russia were used to force the Russian producers into this international trust, still, at worst, every Russian producer was given by his government the right to enter the pool. But no similar right for the American producer is recognized by our trust. It admits only its own members. The others must "sell or squeeze." There is something in the world more cruel than Russian despotism--American "private enterprise."

One of the conditions said to have been made by the Russian government is the natural one that the American trust, as it has agreed to do for the French, must protect its Russian allies from any competition from America. Extinction of the "independents" has therefore become more important than ever to the trust. The prize of victory over them is not only supremacy in this country, but on four other continents. This will explain the new zeal with which the suppression of the last vestige of American independence in this industry has been sought the last few months of 1893 and in 1894. Especially strenuous has been the renewal of the attack on the pipe line the independents are seeking to lay to tide-water, and which they have carried as far as Wilkes-barre.[645]

That pipe line, as it is the last hope of the people, is the greatest menace to the monopoly. The independents, as they have shown by the fact of surviving, although they have to pay extraordinary freights and other charges from which the trust is free, can produce more cheaply than the would-be Lords of Industry, as free men always do.[646] By means of this pipe line, suspended though it is at Wilkes-barre, are now made the only independent exports of oil that go from America to Europe. Once let the "outsiders" with their line reach the sea-shore and its open roads to the coast of America and Europe, and it will be a long chase they will give their pursuers. Everything that can be brought to bear by market manipulation, litigation, and other means is now being done to prevent the extension of this line, and to bankrupt the men who are building it through much tribulation. The mechanical fixation of values, by which the refiners who use this line to export oil are compelled to meet a lower price for the refined in New York than can be got for the crude out of which it is made, has been already referred to, and, as shown above, the same prestidigitation of prices is being resorted to in Europe against the independents of Germany.

Early in 1894 the independent refiners and producers resolved to consolidate with this pipe line some other lines owned by them in order to strengthen and perfect the system, and put it in better shape to be extended to tide-water. This consolidation was voted by a large majority both of stock and stockholders. But a formidable opposition to it was at once begun in the courts by injunction proceedings in behalf of one man, a subordinate stockholder in a corporation of which the control is owned, as he admitted in court, by members of the oil trust.[647] The real litigant behind him, the independents stated to the court, was the same that we have seen appear in almost every chapter of our story, with its brigades of lawyers. "An unlawful organization," the independents described it to the court, "exercising great and illegal powers, ... and bitterly and vindictively hostile to our business interests." They came into court one after the other and described the ruin which had been wrought among them, telling the story the reader has found in these pages.

"It is our hope," they said, "when we once reach the salt-water that there will be no power there controlling the winds and the waves, the tides and the sun and moon, except the Power that controls everything. When we once are there the same forces that guide the ships of this monopoly to the farther shore will guide ours. The same winds that waft them will waft ours. There is freedom, there is hope, and there is the only chance of relief to this country.... Through three years of suffering and agony we have attempted to carry on our purpose.... You could have seen the blood-marks in the snow of the blood of the people who are working out their subscription as daily laborers on that line with nothing else to offer."

The injunctions asked for by this opposition were granted by the lower court, but the independents took an appeal to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. They first placed their petition for the rehearing in the hands of the chief-justice on Thursday, May 24th; on Monday, May 28th, the petition was renewed before the full court; on Thursday, May 31st, the court adjourned for the summer without taking any action upon the petition. The court in July agreed to hear the case at the opening of its next term, the first Monday of October. Section II. of Article I. of the Constitution of Pennsylvania says: "All courts shall be open, and every man, for an injury done him in his lands, goods, person, or reputation, shall have remedy by due course of law, and right and justice administered, without sale, denial, or delay." To guard against the injustice which might arise by the granting of special injunctions by the lower courts--like that granted in this case--which might remain for months without remedy, the Legislature, in 1866, enacted a law which reads as follows: "In all cases in equity, in which a special injunction has been or shall be granted by any Court of Common Pleas, an appeal to the Supreme Court for the proper district shall be allowed, and all such appeals shall be heard by the Supreme Court in any district in which it may be in session."

As if there had not been enough to try these men, misfortune marked them in other ways. The Bradford refinery of the president of their pipe line was visited by a destructive fire during these proceedings in court. The Associated Press despatches attributed the fire to "spontaneous combustion," whatever that may be. But in another newspaper an eye-witness described how he saw a man running about the works in a mysterious way just before the flames broke out. On the same day, by a coincidence, the main pipe of the independent line was cut, and the oil, which spouted out to the tree-tops, was set on fire at a point in a valley where the greatest possible damage would result, and the telegraph wires were simultaneously cut, so that prompt repairs or salvage of oil were impossible. The Almighty is said to favor the heaviest battalions, and accident, if there is such a thing, seems to have the same preference, as has been shown in many incidents in our history, such as the mishaps to the Tidewater pipe line, and the Toledo municipal gas line.[648]

An intimation is given in the Continental press as to one of the motives under which the Russian government acted in promoting the alliance between the Russian and American oil men. It desired, it is said, to secure the influence of the powerful members of the oil combination in favor of certain plans for which Russia needed co-operation in America. There has been nothing for which the Russian government has so much needed "sympathetical co-operation" in America as for the ratification of the Extradition Treaty. The Russian government has obtained this ratification, and obtained it in a way which indicated that some irresistible but carefully concealed American influence was behind it. The New York _World_, in its editorial columns of May 25, 1894, made the suggestion that the power behind this treaty of shame was that of the oil trust, earning from the czar the last link in its chain of world monopoly. It asked if it was the influence of the oil combination that induced the Senate's consent to this "outrageous treaty." "Was this one of the conditions upon which that monopoly was permitted to secure its present concessions from Russia? Did it wield an influence in the Senate like that which the sugar trust has since exercised, though for an advantage of a different kind?" The Philadelphia _Press_ points out that the Russian government had long and unsuccessfully sought to obtain the ratification of this treaty, but at last got it quickly and quietly. Did the oil combination, it asks, "succeed in bartering the character of this country as a political sanctuary for the monopoly of the world's markets?" Seldom has any public measure been so universally and so indignantly condemned in America as was this proposal to use the powers of Anglo-Saxon justice to return men who were accused only, and were, therefore, legally innocent, to be tried without jury, counsel, publicity, or appeal. Never has public opinion availed less. The Federal executive refused even to delay the ratification in deference to the sentiment against it. Those who were active in the agitation against the treaty found something inexplicable in the unresting and unlistening relentlessness with which it was pushed through. Napoleon said that in fifty years Europe would be all Russian or all republican. Even he did not dream that republican America would become Russianized before Europe. The San Francisco _Call_ of March 3, 1894, discussing the report that a commercial treaty with China was under consideration at Washington, says the negotiation is in the interest of the oil combination. It warns the public that the trust is willing to reopen the opium trade in reciprocity to China for better terms for the admission of American petroleum. This free trade with China and Russia in the souls and bodies of Russians, Chinese, and Americans would add only another instance of the many manipulations of government which this combination has successfully attempted in all parts of the world--in the tariffs of France, Germany, Cuba, Canada, and our own country; in the raising or lowering of the governmental requirements as to explosiveness of oil sold the people in England and the United States, and in the subsidy legislation by which it got from Congress for its ocean steamers a privilege rigorously denied by law to all other citizens.

In this the oil trust is but an illustration. What it has done scores of other combinations have accomplished, though not with equal genius. The Hon. John De Witt Warner, member of Congress from New York, has published a list of one hundred trusts which have been able to influence the tariff legislation of the country in their favor. The orgy of the sugar trust and Congress, out of which the tariff bill of 1894 was born, was in the plain view of all the people. "The appalling fact already disclosed," the New York _Daily Commercial Bulletin_, the most important commercial and financial daily in the United States, said in its editorial columns of June 4, 1894, "is that for some months past the sugar trust has been the government of the United States." The _Bulletin_ estimates that the profit to the trust of one detail of the tariff bill postponing the duty on raw sugar for six months will be $34,620,000. In all this our country is not singular. The governments of Europe are used as the instruments of profit for private enterprise to an extent which the people endure only because they do not understand it. The latest instance is one of the best. The _Investor's Review_ of London, England, in May, 1894, calls attention to the fact that upon the accession of Lord Rosebery to the Premiership of England the hitherto outspoken opposition of the War Office to the Maxim gun had become entirely silent, and the gun had been put into use in the army without competitive trial with other machine-guns, some of them its superiors. "This is an unfortunate fact for Lord Rosebery," says the _Investor's Review_, "because of his relationship to the Rothschilds." This great house, the _Review_ says, has "a strong pecuniary interest in the Maxim-Nordenfeldt Company," and his lordship's affinities to the house "have not in the past been confined to those of family relationship alone, but extend to community of interests on the stock exchange." The _Review_ therefore appeals to Lord Rosebery, for his own sake and the sake of the government "to prove by his deeds that he not only has had nothing to do with it, but will peremptory stop this crime." If not, the _Review_ hopes enough may be made of the scandal to overthrow Lord Rosebery's government, for it desires "to see a beginning made of the endeavor to purge Parliament of the guinea-pig director, the stock-gambler and punter, and the whole unclean brood of City 'bulls' and 'bears,' jobbers in patents, bribers and bribed, who help to degrade public life."

We of America are most sovereign when we sit in Constitutional Convention by our representatives, and change the fundamental law as we will. The Constitutional Convention gives us the unique power of peaceful and perpetual revolution, to make bloody and spasmodic revolutions unnecessary. Of all the inventions of that ablest group of statesmen the world has seen--the founders of this government--this is the greatest. The people of the State of New York are holding a Constitutional Convention in 1894 to enlarge the garment of 1846 to fit the growth of half a century. In that half-century the revolution in society and industry which had been getting under headway ever since the steam-engine and competition were invented has come to its consummation. But the basic law of the Empire State has faced this new world as changeless as the sphinx. Nearly half the other states have made new constitutions, or amended the old ones to bring law into line with life. Pennsylvania forbids the common carrier to become the owner of coal-mines, or to consolidate with competing carriers, or to give preference to any citizen. Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Colorado, and many other states have framed provisions to control the abuse of industrial and highway power. The State of Washington in its Constitution declares that "monopolies and trusts shall never be allowed in this State," and it forbids any association "for the purpose of fixing the price or limiting the production, or regulating the transportation of any product or commodity." The manual of the constitutions of the world prepared for the use of the New York convention shows that fifteen of the states of the Union have in one way or another recognized the revolution which has taken place in the industrial economy of the people, and sought to meet it with the necessary political safe-guards.

When the delegates of the citizens of New York State meet in May, 1894, at Albany, in such a time to face such problems, the press notes that a large proportion of them are corporation lawyers. The place of president of the convention is secured by the chief counsel of the oil trust. He is in Albany to resist the application to the Attorney-General of the State to move for the forfeiture of the charter of the principal corporation in the trust, and on his way he plucks the presidency of the Constitutional Convention. "It is truly a momentous event," he says in his opening speech, "when the delegates of many millions of people gather together after an interval of fifty years almost, for the purpose of revising and amending the fundamental law of the State." The delegates thus momentously assembled, when they came to choose the officer who was to wield over them a power as great as that of the Speaker over the Federal House of Representatives, momentously selected the most conspicuous attorney of the most conspicuous embodiment of the forces with which the people are in conflict. The president found words of kindly reference for many great questions--of education, suffrage, city government, and the like--but for the great questions of social power which fifteen states have found serious enough for constitutional cognizance he had not a syllable. No plan or even suggestion, great or little, for the new Constitution can reach the convention direct. All must go to the appropriate committee, to be smothered or reported, as the case may be. There are thirty of these committees, and they are made up by the president of the convention, who also designates their chairmen. Each committee has its subject, and the subjects cover the bill of rights, the regulation of suffrage, the control of corporations, the election of judges, future amendments of the Constitution, and every other part of the organic law. Practically the work of the convention will be the work of the committees, and the committees are the work of one who is not only the attorney of the oil trust, but is a part of the trust, a member of the organization. "I happen to own one hundred shares in the Standard Oil Trust," he said in his argument in Albany before the Attorney-General in behalf of the trust. The trust has given formal notice that out of deference to public opinion and the decision of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and in pursuance of an agreement with the late Attorney-General of New York,[649] it had dissolved itself. But this distinguished member disregards the dissolution, for reasons of personal convenience, as he tells the Attorney-General. "I have never gone forward and claimed my aliquot share." The character of this trust, of which the president and organizer of the Constitutional Convention persists in being a member to the extent of refusing to be "dissolved" out of it, has been adjudicated. It was, the Supreme Court of Ohio said,[650] "organized for a purpose contrary to the policy of our laws. Its object was to establish a virtual monopoly ... throughout the entire country, and by which it might not merely control the production but the price at its pleasure. All such associations are contrary to the policy of our State and void." A similar judgment has been passed upon the trust by the judiciary of the State of which this president of the Constitutional Convention, besides being an officer of the courts, is a citizen. It was entered into, the Supreme Court of New York has said,[651] "for the purpose of forming a combination whose object was to restrict production, control prices, and suppress competition, and the agreement was therefore opposed to public policy and void." And a higher court, the highest in the State, the Court of Appeals, decided in the sugar-trust, case that a trust was in avoidance and disregard of the laws of the State.

To the monopoly of oil, which was the starting-point, are being added by its proprietors, one after the other, as we have shown, a progressive series of other monopolies, from natural gas to iron. To these assets is now to be added our bill of rights. The long fingers of this power of mortmain reincarnate are long enough to reach from its counting-room to the Constitutional Convention. The new Magna Charta, to which the people look for help against void and unlawful combinations, is to be drafted by committees made up by the attorney of the chief of these void and unlawful combinations. The instrument which is to protect the people against monopoly will come to them only after every section has been exposed to the moulding touch of the greatest monopoly in history. "This business belongs to us," and theirs is the first and the last hand on the reins of the convention. The people can vote on the Constitution after it is made, but the trust will see it made. If the new Constitution is made so obnoxious that it is rejected, as that of 1867 was, the old Constitution will do for the next fifty years as for the last fifty. It is not monopoly that needs the revision.

Is this the end? When before the Interstate Commerce Commission, the head of the combination was asked:

"The properties included in your trust are distributed all over the United States, are they not?"

"Oh, not all over the United States. They are distributed."

"Are they not distributed, and are they not sufficiently numerous to meet the requirements of your business from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Gulf to the northern boundary?"

"Not yet."[652]

The reply came in a tone and with a smile so significant that it was answered by a comprehending laugh from the whole room--judges, lawyers, reporters, spectators, and all.

"Not yet!"