Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/177

 jamin Brewster, W. H. Tilford and O. B. Jennings, having nothing to do, as trustees of the Standard Oil Trust, but to receive and divide dividends, engrossing and interesting a task as that undoubtedly was. But, as a matter of fact, nothing else could be settled on them by anything in the testimony. For instance, in 1887 there was an alliance formed between the Oil Producers' Protective Association and the Standard for limiting the production of crude oil (a movement of which we shall hear more later). This certainly was in restraint of trade. But, on examination, the committee found the contract had been signed by the Standard Oil Company of New York. The trustees had nothing to do with it! Taking up, point by point, the conditions of which the oil producers complained, not one of them could be fixed on the trust. It had made no agreements, signed no contracts, kept no books. It had no legal existence. It was a force powerful as gravitation and as intangible. You could argue its existence from its effects, but you could never prove it. You could no more grasp it than you could an eel. Certainly the Committee on Manufactures was justified in confining its report to pointing out the fact that the Standard Oil Trust agreement was a shrewd and slippery device for evading responsibility.

And there the investigations of 1888 ended. There had been much noise over them, and for what good? So asked the discontented oil public. It simply had secured the form of an agreement which could no more be touched by legislation than human greed. It was characteristic that the oil public, intent on immediate remedies, should be discouraged. If they had applied to their cause the same patience and foresight Mr. Rockefeller did to his, they would have realised that, as a matter of fact, a respectable first step had been taken toward their real goal, a goal which has not by any means been reached—that is, a legal form of organisation for corporations doing interstate business which would enable the pub-