CHAPTER XXXII
"NOT BUSINESS"
This "business success" is the greatest commercial and financial achievement of history. Its broad foundation was laid in the years from 1872 to 1879, the severest time of panic for others the world has known. A universal jaundice of ill-fortune has given its sallow complexion to every one else. From the Alleghanies to the Caucasus thousands of men have been somehow thrown out of work because so much new work has come to the world. "At the flash of a telegraphic message from Cleveland, Ohio," said the people of the oil regions in their appeal to the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1878, "hundreds of men have been thrown out of employment at a few hours' notice, and kept for weeks in a state of semi-starvation." These men filled up many of the insurrectionary ranks of the great railway strike of 1877, as the employés of the Pennsylvania Railway declared in a public communication at that time. The eight oil-producing counties of Pennsylvania were said by the general council of the petroleum producers, in a public address in 1879, to be "fast sinking beneath such financial distress that resistance to threatened bankruptcy or servitude could not long be made." They grew too poor to pay the counsel they employed to help them in the courts, the legislatures, and before the executive of Pennsylvania and Congress. "The universal complaint we find is the poverty of the people, not their unwillingness to give." "I am ashamed," said one of them in court, "to see our counsel every day on account of the beggarly amounts I have paid them. A large number of producers have subscribed that have not paid."[653]
Men who were "frozen out" of their occupation in transporting or refining oil took to digging wells. "That is the only thing they have been allowed to do. They went on in a wild way, hunting new oil, and when they found it they would develop it rapidly." This made oil fall in price, and the more they produced the more they had to produce. The wages of labor kept going down. They were lower in 1888 than they were twenty-four years before. "A well-digger that I paid $6 a day and his expenses twenty-four years ago is now working for $40 a month. That is true of every department of the oil business so far as the wages of workmen are concerned." "We were $10,000,000 poorer at the end of 1887 than at the beginning," said the association of oil producers of Pennsylvania. Their executive committee the next year said the people were on "the verge of bankruptcy."[654]
The railroads were no happier than the laborers, the producers, the manufacturers, or the merchants. As early as 1879 Vanderbilt II. declared that the oil business of the railroads--worth $30,000,000 a year--had been destroyed.
"I think the business is gone."[655]
In 1892 a number of refiners and producers of Pennsylvania, in a formal appeal to Governor Pattison, asked him to investigate the causes which were working "to the injurious depression if not the ultimate destruction of a great industry." In the same year mutterings of a turbulent discontent and threats of violence and the destruction of property, repeating those of 1872, were heard again in Pennsylvania and in Ohio, which had become an oil-producing State. "Many of the oil producers," a member of their protective association in Ohio said, in the spring of 1892, "are in a bad way. They are at that point that they don't know just where their next sack of flour is coming from, and I am not surprised at anything they may do."
This area of low pressure, following the habit of American storms, made itself felt abroad in bankruptcies and falling wages from Scotland to Baku and beyond. Meanwhile the little nest-egg of nothing of the group which came into the field in 1862 grew to $1,000,000 in 1870; to $2,500,000 in 1872; to $3,500,000 in 1875; to $70,000,000 in 1882; and in 1887 to a capital of $90,000,000, which the New York Legislature reported in 1888, "according to the testimony of the trust's president," to be worth "not less than $148,000,000."[656] Before the trust was dissolved in name, in 1892, and the "trustees" betook themselves to the greater seclusion of separate corporations, acting in concert, its stock sold as high as 185, a valuation of $166,500,000 for the whole.
Its dividends had been $10,800,000 a year for several years. These ducal incomes and the vaster sums accumulated as undivided profits made themselves visible in the progressive _embonpoint_ of the capitalization. In the six years (1876-81) preceding their taking the veil as trustees their net earnings added up the total of $55,000,000. In the next six years (to 1888) the dividends alone--not the net earnings--were more than $50,000,000.[657] These did not absorb their profits. In one year they spent $8,000,000 out of their profits for construction, besides making the regular payments to stockholders.[658]
"All this vast wealth," the New York Legislature said, "is the growth of about twenty years; this property has more than doubled in value in six years, and with this increase the trust has made aggregate dividends during that period of over $50,000,000. It is one of the most active," the report continued, "and possibly the most formidable moneyed power on this continent."[659]
"This is an immense property," says the Interstate Commerce Commission," ... and it gives an immense power which is capable of being so employed as to put all competitors at a great and perhaps ruinous disadvantage."[660]
For the first time the New York investigation of 1888 revealed that it was only the beginning of the truth that these hundreds of millions were controlled by "trustees." It now became known that some one or more of the trustees owned personally more than half of every concern in the trust, and of the best ones owned all.
"These eight trustees control all these ninety millions of property scattered over the United States?" the president of the trust was asked.
"They have as trustees, and they have as individual owners both."[661]
In corroboration of this testimony the trust furnished the New York Senate Committee of 1888 a "list of corporations, the stocks of which are wholly or partially held by the trustees of the Standard Oil Trust." In this list, under the head of "New York State," appears this: "Capital stock, $5,000,000. Standard Oil Company of New York, manufacturers of petroleum products. Standard Oil Trust ownership, entire."[662] But when the company was threatened with the forfeiture of its charter by the proceedings before the Attorney-General in May, 1894, its president made oath as follows: "The Standard Oil Company of New York never permitted its stock to be transferred to trustees."[663]
Even this ownership by eight men is not the whole of the truth. The eight trustees have a ruling power within themselves. An examination of the personnel of the board at the beginning, middle, and end of its career as a board shows four men always there. This agrees with the remark reported in the press to have been made by the solicitor of the trust upon its ostensible dissolution in 1892: "A majority of the stock being held by four men."
A friendly journal, the New York _Sun_, of April 25, 1889, in an editorial paragraph concerning the wealth of one of the trustees, said: "His regular income is twenty millions of dollars a year. That makes him the richest man in the United States--perhaps the very richest in the world." This is nearly three times the dividends paid in 1892 to all its stockholders by the Bank of England. The Bank of England has built up this earning power by two hundred years' work at the head of the finances of the greatest empire of history. This American wins thrice its dividend capability in less than a generation by contriving and managing an institution which he says does not do any business. Another entirely friendly paper, with sources of information of the very best, put his income two years later at $30,000,000 a year.[664] No denial of the _Sun's_ statement was attempted, and the _Sun_ never withdrew or modified its figures. Shortly after the secretary of the trust gave, in a public interview, a statement of the income of its principal members. That of one of them he put at $9,000,000 a year; his own at $3,000,000.
This wealth is as much too vast for the average arithmetical comprehension as the size of the dog-star, 400 times larger than the sun. These incomes are sums which their fortunate owners could not count as they received them. If they did nothing but stand all day at the printing-presses of the Treasury Department while the millions came uncrinkled out in crisp one-dollar greenbacks, or worked only at catching the new dollars as they rolled out from the dies of the Mint, they could not count them. If they worked eight hours a day, and six days a week, and fifty-two weeks in the year, they could not count their money. The dollars would come faster than their fingers could catch them; the dollars would slip out of their clutch and fall to the floor, and, piling up and up, would reach their knees, their middle, their arms, their mouth, and Midas would be snuffed out in his own gold.
Commodore Vanderbilt, Parton tells us, was forty-four years old before he was worth $400,000. In the next thirty years he increased this to over $100,000,000--perhaps twice that; no one knows. Vanderbilt had to multiply this nest-egg of his forty-fourth year 250 times, but one of these "trustees" will be a billionaire when he has turned himself over only ten times. Poor's _Railroad Manual_ shows these men and their associates to be presidents or directors in thousands of miles of railroads, valued at hundreds of millions. Their names were prominent in the railroad "deal" of 1892 and 1893, which had for its end to put the whole of New England under one hand, controlling both its land and water connections with the rest of the country. They stand at the receipt of custom at the railroad gates to the oil regions; to the coal-fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois; the copper, gold, and silver mines of the West; the iron mines of the West and South; the turpentine forests and the lumber regions and cotton fields; the food-producing areas of the Mississippi basin; the grazing lands of the plains. They are owners in the principal steamship line between America and Europe, and in the "whalebacks," which appear destined to drive other models out of the freight traffic of the lakes, and have begun to appear on the Eastern and Western oceans, to capture the carrying business of the world. Every dollar for the construction of a State building at the World's Fair was advanced by one of them, as the principal journal of the State announced, and it referred to him as "the man who breathes life into its East coast towns, and the lifting of his pen by his hand is like turning upsidedown the horn of plenty." They are "in" the best things--telegraphs, the gas supply of our large cities, street-railways, steel mills, ship-yards, Canadian and American iron mines, town sites. Ore dug out of their own iron mines at the head of Lake Superior is carried over their own railroad to their own furnaces and mills. It rolls along until that which began to move as ore lies at the docks of their ship-yards as a finished vessel, cut out of the mountains, as it were, at one cheap stroke, or is loaded in the cars in some perfected shape of steel, as steam radiators or what not. They feed entire mountain ranges into their mills with one hand, and with the other despatch the product in their own cars and ships to all markets. Betrayal, bankruptcy, broken hearts, and death have kept quick step with the march of the conquerors in iron as in oil. They are in the combination in anthracite coal, with which the acquisition by an American syndicate of the Nova Scotia coal deposits is closely connected. Theirs is the largest share in the natural-gas business in Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, Indiana, Illinois. They are in the combination which controls lead, from pig to white lead, and turpentine and linseed-oil and paints.
"Its members," it was said in the application to the Attorney-General of New York, in 1894, for a forfeiture of one of their charters, "are now presidents and directors in 33,000 miles of road, one-fifth of the total mileage in the United States. Its surplus is invested in banking, in natural and manufacturing gas companies, in iron ore beds and coal beds and crude-oil production, in lead and zinc, in turpentine and cotton-seed oil, in steel, in jute manufacture, in ocean steamships, in palatial hotels, in street-railroads."
Most of their interests are in public functions, railroads, pipe lines, telegraphs, postal contracts, steamers, municipal franchises, and the like; but it is impossible to know their full extent with our present crude means for enforcing the truth that property is power and that civilization endures no irresponsible anonymous power. The corporation is an agency by which the capitalist can do business in ambuscade. "They are all in our company," said the manager of a very important public agency, "but their names do not appear." It is not out of deference to the obsolete idea that such matters are private business that all the details of their possessions are not given, but only because they are not known.
"There is no such thing as extemporaneous acquisition," Daniel Webster said; but he spoke of eloquence, not of the perfected modern commerce. Selligue, the French genius to whose discoveries nothing of equal importance has been added, is not dignified with an entry in the encyclopædias or biographical dictionaries. For "Colonel" Drake, who struck oil, a pension had to be provided by his friends in the regions which he had filled with fountains of wealth. Mr. Van Syckel, who first proved the pipe line to be practicable, died in Buffalo, paralytic, helpless, and poor.
The "age of oil" could not have come without the oil well and the drill and derrick, and these in America are the lineal descendants of the first salt well, drilled and whittled out of the rocks by the Ruffner brothers, in 1806, in the "Great Buffalo Lick" of the Kanawha. Their first "drill" was a great sycamore-tree, four feet through, hollowed out, set on end on the ground in the lick, and gradually lowered as the earth and stone within were dug away by a man inside. When they came to the rock, which they could not blast because it was under water, they hung a roughly-made iron drill by a rope to a spring pole and went inch by inch through the rock, "kicking down" the well. Metal tubes were not to be had, but the Yankee whittler solved the problem of tubing the well. Two slender strips of wood were whittled into two long, thin, half tubes, and tied together. This is the genesis of the bored "well" and the "drill and derrick."[665] It took eighteen months to accomplish this, but the wonder is that it was done at all "without preliminary study, previous experience or training, without precedent, in a newly-settled country without steam-power, machine-shop, skilled mechanics, suitable tools or materials."
These almost-forgotten men, shrewd, patient, undauntable, were the pioneers of the skilful well-borers who have gone forth from the Kanawha wells all over the country to bore wells for irrigation on the Western plains, for cities, factories, and private use, for salt, for gas, for geological and mineralogical explorations, and for oil. "Billy Morris," of the Kanawha borings, invented a tool simple enough, but not so simple as to be described here, called the "slips" or "jars," which has done more for deep boring than anything except the steam-engine, and for which, considering the part played in the life of man by oil, gas, water, brine, and other wells, we are told he "deserves to be ranked with the inventors of the sewing-machine, reaper, and cotton-gin."[666] But "Uncle Billy" made a free gift to the well-diggers of the world of his invaluable "slips," and slipped into poverty and an unknown grave. To Joshua Merrill, more than to any one else, belongs the honor of bringing the manufacture of oil in America to its perfection.[667] He made better oil than any one else, and he loved his work. "I was thirty-two years in the oil business. It was the business of my life."[668] But he had to dismantle his refinery, and join the melancholy procession of two thousand years of scouts, inventors, pioneers, capitalists, and toilers who march behind the successful men.
Yet, strange to say, these successful men did not discover the oil, nor how to "strike" it. They were not the lucky owners of oil lands. As late as 1888 they produced only 200 barrels a day--about 1 in every 3000--"an infinitesimal amount," their president said.[669] They did not invent any of the processes of refining. They did not devise the pipe line, and they did all they could to prevent the building[670] of the first pipe line to the seaboard, and to cripple the successful experiment of piping refined oil.[671] They own all the important refineries, and yet they have built very few. They did not project the tank-car system, which came before them,[672] and have used their irresistible power to prevent its general use on the railroads, and successfully.[673] They were not the first to enter the field in any department. They did not have as great capital or skill as their competitors.[674] They began their career in the wrong place--at Cleveland--out of the way of the wells and the principal markets, necessitating several hundred miles more of transportation for all of their product that was marketed in the East or Europe.[675] They had no process of refining oil which others had not, and no legitimate advantages over others.[676] They did not even invent the rebate. They made oil poor[677] and scarce[678] and dear.[679]
The power to chalk down daily on the black-board of the New York Produce Exchange the price at which people in two hemispheres shall buy their light has followed these strokes of "cheapness":
1. Freight rates to the general public have been increased, often to double and more what is paid by a favored few.[680]
2. The construction has been resisted of new lines of transportation by rail,[681]
3. And pipe.[682] This has been done by litigation,[683] by influence, by violence,[684] even to the threatened use of cannon,[685] and by legislation, as in Ohio and Pennsylvania, to prevent the right of eminent domain from being given by "free pipe-line bills" to the people generally.
4. The cost of pipeage has been raised.[686]
5. Rivers and canals have been closed.[687]
6. Oil has been made to run to waste on the ground.[688]
7. The outflow of oil from the earth has been shut down.[689]
8. The outflow of human energy that sought to turn it to human use has been shut down by restricting the manufacture by the combination and by others, by contract,[690] dismantling,[691] and explosion.[692]
9. High fees have been maintained for inspection,[693] and the inspectors have been brought into equivocal relations with the monopoly.[694]
10. The general use of tank-cars and tank-steamers has been prevented.[695]
11. The people have been excluded from the free and equal use of the docks, storehouses, and other terminal facilities of the railroads in the great harbors of export.[696]
12. Inventors and their better processes have been smothered.[697]
13. Men have been paid more for spying than they could earn by working.[698]
14. "Killing delay" has been created in the administration of justice.[699]
All are poorer--oil-producers, land-owners, all labor, all the railroads, all the refiners, merchants, all the consumers of oil--the whole people. Less oil has flowed, less light shone, and there has been less happiness and virtue. In every one of the few intervals, says Hudson, during which oil could flow freely to Pittsburg, all the businesses connected with it were active and expanding.[700]
When the trust's secretary was asked for the proper name of the combination, his reply was: "The Lord only knows; I don't." "An indescribable thing," he said again.[701]
"Do you understand the practical work of refining as a refiner?" he was asked.
"I do not.... I have not been inside a refinery in ten years."[702]
"Two mills a ton a mile for five hundred miles would be a dollar a ton?"
"I am not able to demonstrate that proposition."
"You have some arithmetical knowledge?"
"I cannot answer that question."[703]
He could not state what proportion of the oil trade is now controlled by the trust. He had never looked into that question. He did not know who knows these things.[704]
"You own the pipe line to New York?"
"Yes, sir."
"What does it cost you to do business on that pipe line?"
"I do not know anything about it.... I have never been in the oil regions but once in my life.... I am not a practical oil man.... For perhaps eight years I have given absolutely no attention to the details of our business."[705]
Asked upon another occasion, before the Pennsylvania Legislature, about the accounts of the company when he was its secretary, he said:
"I am not familiar with the accounts."[706]
"I am a clamorer for dividends. That is the only function I have," said another trustee.[707]
"When was your last rate given you, the rate at which you are now being carried (on the New York Central)?"
"I could not tell."[708]
The secretary had testified that this associate attended to getting the rates of freight; but the latter avowed that he could not remember "any rate" that he had paid "at any time." But a little later he who could not remember any rate he had ever paid was able to tell the committee, off-hand, the exact rate of freight on oil by steamer from Batoum in Russia to Liverpool, and knew the rate from the wells at Baku by rail to the sea at Batoum![709]
"Had you ever been interested in the refinery of oil in any manner when you first became connected with the oil business?" another trustee was asked.
"Never."
"Or the production of oil?"
"Never."
He was a railroad man, and had been taken into the combination for his value as such; but when he was asked if he could tell any of the rates of freight his company had paid, he said:
"I cannot."[710]
"What is your business and where do you reside?" another of the trustees was asked by the State of New York.
"I decline to answer any question until I can consult counsel."[711]
"What is the capital stock?" was asked of another.
"I do not know."
"How much has the capital been increased since?"
"I don't know."
"Where are the meetings of the Standard Oil Company held?"
"I don't know."
"How many directors are there?"
"I don't know."
"Do they own any pipe lines?"
"I don't know."
"I don't know anything about the rates of transportation."[712]
"What quantity of oil was exported by the different concerns with which you were connected from the port of New York in 1881?" the president was asked.
"I do not know."
"How many millions of barrels of oil were refined by such concerns in the vicinity of New York in 1881?"
"I don't know how much was refined."
"Did not the concern with which you were so connected purchase over 8,000,000 barrels of crude petroleum in 1881?"
"I am unable to state."
He was asked to give the name of one refinery in this country, running at the time (1883), not owned or substantially controlled by his concern. "I decline to answer."[713]
He was asked if he would say the total profits of his trust's companies for the last year (1887) were not as much as $20,000,000.
"I haven't the least knowledge on that subject."[714]
Phrenologists are right. Memory is not to be ranked with the mental attributes of the highest importance. The head of the New York Central could not tell when a stock dividend of something like $46,000,000 had been declared on one of his railroads--and a $46,000,000 dividend is something worth remembering. "I don't know.... I don't remember."[715] It is lucky for the rest of us that these great men forget something.
One of the chiefs of the oil combination was a witness in Cleveland in 1887 in a suit by the State of Ohio against certain railroads.
"What business in connection with the oil business is done in the building in which the oil trust has its office in New York?"
"I do not think I could state just what business is done in that building, I am sure."
Asked on the witness-stand in the Buffalo explosion case when it was he formed the "trust" with $70,000,000 of capital, the president replied: "I am unable to state," and he could not say where its articles of agreement were, nor who has control of it. When questioned before the Interstate Commission he could not tell within $25,000,000 how much business they were doing a year.[716]
These men keep no books. The whole arrangement is just a happy family, like Barnum's monkeys, birds, cats, dogs, and mice in the same cage. "It is a business of faith," one of the ruling four puts it. Another was asked about the by-laws under which he and his associates transacted their business. "I don't know that I have seen a copy," he replied, and as to where it was he was able only to "suppose."[717]
When the committee of the Legislature called for the books recording the transactions of the trust and its attorneys and committees, there were practically none to produce. All there was in the way of a record of transactions of a magnitude beyond those of any other commercial institution in this country or the world were a few pages of formal entries from which nothing could be learned. The executive committee received and passed upon the disbursements of money by the treasurer, and the reports of sub-committees and of members, who had sweeping powers of attorney, by which these countless millions were kept rolling themselves up into more, but it never kept any records.
"I have no knowledge of any formal record having been made," one of them said. The reports were "either verbal or on pieces of paper.... I think it was memorandums," he continued, and the memorandums were "undoubtedly destroyed." They were transcribed into the records of the trustees, he said, but the search of the committee showed that the transcription was a "skeleton," consisting mainly of the mere phrase, "Minutes of the executive committee approved." "The real minutes do not appear upon the book," Senator Ives, of the committee, said.
"There is no book to produce?"
"There is no book."
"And there is no memorandum?"
"There is no memorandum."[718]
"Does the trust keep books?" the "president" was asked by Congress.
"No, we have no system of book-keeping."
On further pressure he said that the treasurer had "a record to know what money comes in."
"You have never seen those books?"
"I do not think I have ever seen those books."
"Has any member of the nine" (trustees) "ever seen those books?"
"I do not know that they have."[719]
Simplicity is said to be always a characteristic of greatness. What could be simpler, and so greater, than this? The elements of success are only--
1. Not to know anything about the business.
2. To keep no books.
3. To have "a record to know what money comes in," and
4. Never to look at it.
Finally, the operations of these men have, in their own language, not been "business." Its secretary told Congress that the "trust" was "not a business corporation,"[720] and an associate declared in court that it "cannot do business." The report of the New York Legislature shows that on October 3, 1883, the president had by a formal instrument been made the attorney of the trust to sign and execute all the contracts made by it. The same instrument in express terms confirmed the execution of contracts heretofore signed by him, showing that he had been making contracts.[721]
"Those gentlemen" (the members of the trust who hold its power of attorney) "do actually execute contracts involving pretty large amounts, sometimes without a formal resolution of the Board of Trustees, do they not?" one of them was asked.
"Undoubtedly they do."[722]
Following their employers, the lawyers in the Pennsylvania Tax case for the oil combination argued that its operations were not business within the meaning of the tax law. If the "no money" of 1862 has become the control, in one industry alone, of $160,000,000 in 1892 by methods that are not "business," what are they?
NOTE.--The principal members of the oil combination were heard at great length in its defence before the committee of Congress investigating trusts in 1888.[723] Their testimony has been frequently used in our pages. But they felt that their case needed further elucidation, and asked the committee to hear them again. The committee declined to hear them again "explain or contradict," as they offered to do, but by printing their communication gave them the benefit of their denials and explanations.[724] Their offer was mainly to go again over the ground that the "South Improvement Company never did any business," that the combination "obtained no preferences" on the railroads, that they had cheapened transportation, improved machinery, made better oil at less cost, and so on. The chief officers and owners had been heard on all these points to the extent of hundreds of pages of testimony. But though it did not recall them to the witness-stand, the committee, in addition to printing their communication, printed most of the documentary evidence they desired to submit. This covered nearly two hundred pages more.[725]
The examination, which any one can make, of this record discloses an interesting fact concerning the proof, and the trust's offer to prove, which can best be shown in parallel columns:
TRUST'S OFFER TO PROVE. | THE PROOF. | It offered the evidence of the third|But the testimony of this witness vice-president of the Pennsylvania |states that his connection with Railroad to "show the South |the oil business of the Pennsylvania Improvement Company never did any |Railroad--the principal railroad in business, and its charter was |that scheme--did not begin until repealed in 1872." |1873.[726] | It offered the same evidence to |But this witness stated that his prove that the same rebates granted |road would give other shippers as it by the contract of October 17, |low rates as to the oil combination, 1877, "were also granted to every |"if they would guarantee the same shipper who contracted to do _all_ |quantity--not otherwise--under that his business over the Pennsylvania |contract";[727] and the contract Railroad." |itself states that no other shipper |should have the same rebate |--"commission," it is called--unless |his business gave the road "the same |amount of profit you realized from |our trade."[728] No shipper could get |the same rates by giving "all his |business." He must give "the same |quantity"--a totally different |proposition. | It offered the evidence taken in the|The evidence shows that this was Buffalo Explosion case, to show that|what was sworn to: "I have now a "C.B. Matthews testified falsely" |detective agency here" (Buffalo). "I in testifying that it was sworn to |employed L---- B----. At the time that the members of the oil |he was in my employ he was employed combination on trial employed |at the works of the Buffalo detectives in Matthews' refineries, |Lubricating Company" (Matthews' and that the detective was some time|company). "He made reports to me.... in Matthews' employ, and made his |I forwarded copies--one to New report to the lawyer of the trust, |York, one to Rochester.... The one and he got his pay from this lawyer.|forwarded to New York was addressed |to" (the lawyer of the oil |trust). "I met" (this lawyer, naming |him) "at New York City, at No. 44 |Broadway, which is the office of the" |(oil trust). "I received my pay from" |(him). "My instructions from" (him) |"were in writing."[729] | It offered "to prove that C.B. |This was what "was proved by a Matthews testified falsely in saying|witness," and referred to by that it was proved by a witness" |Matthews. that the Rochester representative of|"He" (the Rochester representative the oil combination said that the |of the oil combination) principal company in it "would sue |"said he thought they" (Matthews' Matthews once a month, or once a |company) "would not survive.... By week, if necessary, to squeeze him |the time they got through with all out." |the suits that they" (the oil |combination) "would bring, the |Buffalo Lubricating Company would |be pretty much used up.... He didn't |know as they would gain anything |really, but they would embarrass them |by bringing these suits, and if it |was necessary they would bring them |once a month--yes, they would bring |them once a week."[730]
Similarly, throughout, the trust's offer to prove falls when confronted with its own proof. Many more instances could be given, but more than one instance is not needed.