Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 1.djvu/374

Rh other things, we could extend to you large facilities of tankage and capital to take care of the surplus oil until the present production can be checked.

"To,

Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Just received another batch of newspaper slips giving proceedings of Oil City meeting.

The meeting acted in ignorance and under a radical misconception of the actual facts, and with far more earnestness and zeal than judgment.

If you will take the trouble to appoint a committee of producers to investigate, we will show that the contracts with the railroads are as favourable to the producing as to any other interests; that the much-denounced rebate will enhance the price of oil at the wells, and that our entire plan in operation and effect will promote every legitimate American interest in the oil trade.

You patiently test a well before deciding upon its merits, like rational men. You examine other subjects before acting upon them. Is not this a subject of sufficient importance to be worthy of rational investigation?"

To ,

Franklin, Pennsylvania.

Your telegrams received.

My telegrams were not addressed to the mass-meeting, but to you as a friend, as is also this, to be read at your discretion to some of the principal producers attending the meeting, simply to induce them to investigate the subject about which they are excited before acting upon it.

A mass-meeting is not a deliberative body; it always acts under the feeling of impulse or passions, and meets for predetermined purposes, one of which in this case, as appears in the articles of the newspapers calling the meeting, was to denounce and show its scorn for anything and everything connected with the South Improvement Company. Hence it required no prophet to tell beforehand in what spirit my telegrams to you would be listened to. You ask me to go to Franklin to consult my true friends. I will most gladly meet you and your friends at any place favourable to calm investigation and deliberation, and therefore outside of the atmosphere of excitement by which you are surrounded, say at Albany or New York.

I can well understand that, however, the excited people of your region may misjudge, they have no other purpose than to promote the public interest, and knowing that you deservedly enjoy their confidence, I am strongly convinced that a free and frank interchange of views at the conference suggested would result in satisfying you and