Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/197

 handle the oil for themselves, Mr. Rockefeller, whenever he had the chance, sought to persuade the producers to do what he would have done had he owned the oil fields—that was, to keep the supply of crude oil short.

"The dear people," he said once when asked by an investigating committee if his monopoly of oil refining and oil transportation had not prevented the producer from getting his full share of the profits—"the dear people," he said, "if they had produced less oil than they wanted, would have got their full price; no combination in the world could have prevented that, if they had produced less oil than the world required."

It is quite possible that if Mr. Rockefeller had been able to convert the majority of the producing body to this theory, and the supply of crude oil had been kept scarce and prices consequently high, the oil producers would have forgotten their resentment at his early raids and would have relapsed into indifference toward his control. Material prosperity is usually benumbing in its effects. There always has been a factor in the great game playing in the Oil Regions, however, which not even Mr. Rockefeller could match. Nature has been in the oil game, and she has taken pains to prevent the only situation which would have enabled Mr. Rockefeller to reconcile the oil producers. Again and again when it seemed as if the limits of oil production were set, and when Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues must have believed that they would soon have the industry sufficiently well in hand to pay the producers a satisfactory price for crude oil, their calculations have been upset by the discovery of a great deposit of oil which flooded the market and put down the prices. This happened so often between Mr. Rockefeller's first public appearance in the business and the time when he completed his control of transportation, refineries and markets,