Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/163

 imitators. In fifty years a handful of men will own the country.

Mr. Rockefeller handled his critics with a skill bordering on genius. He ignored them. To see them, to answer them, called attention to them. He was too busy to answer them. "We do not talk much—we saw wood." This attitude of serene indifference is supremely wise. It belittles the critic and it gives the outsider who watches the game a feeling that a serenity so high must come from an impregnable position. There is no question but many a mouth opened to testify against the Standard Oil Company has been closed by Mr. Rockefeller's policy of silence. Only the few irreconcilables withstood his sphinx-like attitude, and yearly, from the compromising of 1880, these warnings and accusations were louder and more fierce. Probably the greatest trial Mr. Rockefeller has ever had has come from the persistency with which the few malcontents kept him before the public. They interfered with two of his great principles—"hide the profits" and "say nothing." It was they who had ruined the South Improvement Company; it was they who had indicted him for conspiracy and compelled him to compromise in 1880. It was they who now, after the splendid pipe-line organisation was completed and his market machinery was in order, kept up their agitation and their cursing. Their work began to tell. The feeling grew that the Standard Oil Company, or Trust, as it was by this time generally called, must be looked into. Even those who, dazzled by Mr. Rockefeller's achievement, were inclined to overlook its ethical side and to refuse to consider to what aggregation of power and abuse it might lead, began to feel that it would be quite as well to have the matter thrashed out, to have it settled once for all, whether the thing had been so bad in its making and was so dangerous in its tendencies as the "oil-shriekers" pretended. In the House of Representatives, when the question of