Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/160

 less of a claque, it had more of the "sinews of war." Indeed, it was charged later by Senator Lewis Emery that the leader of the Standard forces in the Senate received $65,000 for his services—a charge which, so far as the writer knows, has never been either proved or disproved. The bill came to a vote after a passionate wrangle. It was defeated eighteen to twenty-five. A storm of violent protest from the oil men's representatives followed the defeat, and the lobbies, the hotels, and even the streets of Harrisburg were scenes in the next hours of bitter quarrels and excited gatherings. When finally the oil men withdrew from the town it was with the understanding that they were to meet two weeks later in Oil City to organise a new protective association. The protests and resolutions passed at their final gatherings foreshadowed no intention of reviving the Billingsley Bill. Indeed, the bill itself had received scant attention from them in the violent campaign over its passage which they had carried on for three months. All their passion had been expended on the Standard. This was a question of whether the Standard Oil Company ruled the Legislature of Pennsylvania or whether the people ruled it—so declared the oil men; and when their bill was defeated they charged it was by bribery, and henceforth quoted the defeat of the Billingsley Bill along with the Payne case as proof of the corrupt power of the Standard Oil Company in politics. Their outbreak, for it was nothing else, was the culmination of their indignation and resentment at fifteen years of unfair play on the part of the Standard Oil Company, of resentment at the South Improvement Company, at forced combination of refineries and pipe-lines, at railroad rebates and drawbacks, at the immediate shipment outrages, at the Tidewater defeat. It was revolt against the incessant pressure of Mr. Rockefeller's pitiless steel grip. It was bitterness at the idea that it was he who was reaping all the profit of a business in which they were taking the