Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/171

 "They have, and have to-day very pleasant relations with those gentlemen."

It would have been interesting to have heard the comments of a number of gentlemen trying to carry on an independent business in 1888 on that answer: of the refiners in Oil City and Titusville, at that time preparing to carry their troubles to the Interstate Commerce Commission; of George Rice and others at Marietta, Ohio; of H. H. Campbell, of the Bear Creek Refining Company at Pittsburg; of Scofield, Shurmer and Teagle at Cleveland.

If all of Mr. Rockefeller's testimony had been of the nature of the above, the investigation would have been worth little to the people who demanded it. But when it came to the questions which, after all, it was most essential to have answered at that moment, Mr. Rockefeller, after some skirmishing, gave the committee as frank testimony as is on record from him. The information wanted was in regard to the organisation of the Standard Oil Trust. As pointed out in a previous chapter, there had been some kind of an agreement adopted in 1882, binding together the varied interests which controlled the oil business. But what it was, where it was kept, by what authority it lived, nobody knew. For six years it had succeeded in hiding itself. What was the understanding which had made a trust of a company? The committee asked to know. Mr. Rockefeller and his counsel were the soul of amiability under the demand. They had only one request, and Mr. Choate made it persuasively:

"If the committee please," he said, "I do not arise to make an objection to a request of the committee; we think that it is very proper that the committee should be made acquainted with this document and everything pertaining to it in order to advise them as to the nature and operation of this trust; at the same time, there are private interests and controversies involved which might be seriously prejudiced by a public exposition of its details, and therefore, in producing it, we, without asking the committee to make any promise or to commit themselves at all, request that while they make whatever use of it they please, it shall not be in all its details made a matter of public record