Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/250

 too, for the Tidewater, whose refineries he had cut off, had stored their oil, built new plants, and were again ready to compete in the market.

This third corner of the oil market seems to have convinced Mr. Rockefeller and his colleagues at last that, however great the fun and profits of making oil very dear, in the long run it does not pay; that it weakens markets and stimulates competition. They learned a lesson in these years they have never forgotten—that when you make a scoop it must not be so big that you will never have a chance to make another one; that if you want to keep your power to manipulate the market you must use that power so modestly that the public in general will not realise you have it. Again and again the effect of the experiences of 1872, 1876 and 1880 crops out in the testimony of Standard officials. Benjamin Brewster once said to a Federal Investigating Committee, which had asked if the Standard could not fix the price of oil as it wished: "At the moment many things may be done, but the reaction is like a relapse of typhoid fever. The Standard Oil Company can never afford to sell goods dear. The people would go to dipping tallow candles in the old-fashioned way if we got the price too high." The after-effects of the first great raids, then, were salutary. The Standard learned the limitations set on monopolies by certain great economic laws.

But if the Standard Oil Company learned in its first attempts to raise the price of oil that they could not in the long run afford to make from 100 to 350 per cent., they by no means gave up their attempt to keep their control, and to hold up profits as high as they could without injuring the market or inviting too strong competition. If one will look at the chart showing the fluctuations from 1879, when control was achieved, to the beginning of 1889, one will find that for ten years the margin between refined