Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/172

 or exhibition unless in their final judgment, after consideration of the matter, they shall consider it necessary. There are very important private interests involved that ought not, under the guise of a public investigation, to be interfered with."

The committee examined the document and concluded to include it in its report. Like all great things, it was simplicity itself—an agreement which anybody could understand, by which some fifty persons holding controlling interests in corporations, joint stock associations, and partnerships of different states, placed all their stock in the hands of nine trustees, receiving in return trust certificates. These nine trustees themselves owned a majority of the stock and had complete control of all the property. Mr. Rockefeller, when questioned, stated that one of the trustees was a responsible officer in almost every refinery or organisation in the trust; that the trustees, as a body, knew by reports and correspondence, and by frequent consultation in New York with active promoters of each concern, just how the business was going on. "We all know how the business goes," said Mr. Rockefeller; "we get reports once in thirty days showing what it has cost for everything."

The trustees evidently ran the entire great combination under the agreement. But consider the anomaly of the situation. Thirty-nine corporations, each of them having a legal existence, obliged by the laws of the state creating it to limit its operations to certain lines and to make certain reports, had turned over their affairs to an organisation having no legal existence, independent of all authority, able to do anything it wanted anywhere; and to this point working in absolute darkness. Under their agreement, which was unrecognised by the state, a few men had united to do things which no incorporated company could do. It was a situation as puzzling as it was new. The committee in reporting on what it discovered did nothing to solve the puzzle. It simply sounded a warning: