Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/121

Rh and uncertain. The company had been incorporated in 1871, and vested with all the "powers, privileges, duties and obligations" of an earlier company—incorporated in April, 1870—the Pennsylvania Company; both of them were children of that interesting body known as the "Tom Scott Legislature. " The act incorporating the company was not published until after the oil war; its sponsor was never known, and no votes on it are recorded. The origin of the South Improvement Company has always remained in darkness. It was one of several "improvement" companies chartered in Pennsylvania at about the same time, and enjoying the same commercial carte blanche.

Bad as the charter was in appearance, the oil men found that the contracts which the new company had made with the railroads were worse. These contracts advanced the rates of freight from the Oil Regions over 100 per cent.—an advance which more than covered the margin of profit on their business — but it was not the railroad that got the greater part of this advance; it was the South Improvement Company. Not only did it ship its own oil at fully a dollar a barrel cheaper on an average than anybody else could, but it received fully a dollar a barrel "rake-off" on every barrel its competitors shipped. It was computed and admitted by the members of the company who appeared before the investigating committee of Congress that this discrimination would have turned over to them fully $6,000,000 annually on the carrying trade. The railroads expected to receive about one and a half millions more than from the existing rates. That is, an additional cost of about $1.25 a barrel was added to crude oil, and it was computed that this would enable the refiners to advance their wholesale price at least four cents a gallon. It is hardly to be wondered at that when the oil men had before them the full text of these contracts they refused absolutely to accept the repeated assertions of the