Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/158

 unconstitutional—acts to punish being forbidden by the constitution of the state—as well as by an immediate realisation that the prices fixed for services were in nearly every case less than cost. The bill was immediately amended. When it came back it was at once apparent that, in spite of this preliminary hitch, a tremendous fight to carry it was being organised by the oil men. Then determination to push it grew in proportion to the Standard opposition. The Standard, indeed, realised immediately that unless a hard fight was made the bill would go through by popular clamour, and they turned their big lawyer, Mr. Dodd, against it, set their newspapers—the Oil City Derrick, Titusville Herald and Bradford Era, all of them by this time subsidised organs—to argue against it, and sent Mr. Scheide, one of the ablest of their pipe-line managers, to present their side at Harrisburg. They also secured the services of a well-known young Republican member of the Legislature, Wallace Delemater, of Crawford County, one of the counties in the Oil Regions, to organise an opposition to the bill in the Legislature.

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