Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/176



Full as the testimony on the Standard Oil Trust gathered by the Federal committee of 1888 is, its report touched but one point, and that was its organisation. To the committee it seemed that the agreement under which the trust operated was such as to make it exempt from the anti-trust legislation which was then contemplated by Congress. The legislation proposed was directed against "combinations to fix the price or regulate the production of merchandise or commerce." Now a mass of testimony had been presented showing that, from the starting-point of the Standard's history with the South Improvement Company, its aim has been to regulate the output of refined oil so as to fix the price, but this testimony, the committee saw clearly enough, did not apply to the trust which it was investigating. For—so swore the trustees—they had nothing to do with the business operations of the separate concerns. They simply held the stock of the various corporations, exercised their right as stockholders, received and distributed the dividends. Each company did its own business in its own way. The trustees were not responsible for it. There was something humorous to those familiar with the oil world, in the idea of J. D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, J. D. Archbold, Henry H. Rogers, Charles Pratt, H. M. Flagler, Ben-