Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/159

 had engaged to defend it, was obliged to apologise for it at every point, and its most valiant supporter, Senator Lewis Emery, Jr., said frankly that the framer of the bill knew too little of the oil men's needs to be able to make a bill, and that this would have to be thoroughly revised.

In spite of all the reasonable, indeed overwhelming, objections to the Billingsley Bill, the oil men clung to it. Mass-meetings were held nightly from one end of the region to the other, petitions flooded the Legislature, a big delegation was kept constantly in Harrisburg lobbying for it. The support was intemperate, bitter, unreasonable. In March it was intensified by the knowledge that a self-constituted committee of leading oil men were in New York treating with the Standard in regard to certain of the abuses the bill aimed to cure. These men felt that the Standard was unjust in its dealings with the oil men, excessive in its charges, and arbitrary in its service, but they felt that the confusion the Billingsley Bill would bring into the business more than offset the grievances it righted, and they had gone to Mr. Rockefeller to see if matters could not be compromised. Now nothing could have more effectually added to the warlike spirit abroad in the Oil Regions at that moment than the suggestion of a compromise. Their cause was being "sold." It was "compounding with felony," and when, after a three days' sitting in New York, the committee came home with an agreement from the National Transit Company, making certain concessions—as two per cent. instead of three for shrinkage, twenty-five cents a day per 1,000 barrels, instead of forty, for storage, and with a promise that certain other points should be settled by joint committees—two of the leading members were hung in effigy in Titusville!

In April the final vote on the Billingsley Bill came. Harrisburg was alive with oil men determined that the bill should go through. The Standard was present, and if it had