Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/274

 from the hands of the men who had developed it. It was to get rid of competition that war was made on the Tidewater Pipe Line, the Crescent Pipe Line, the United States Pipe Line, not to mention a number of similar smaller enterprises. It was to get rid of competition that the Standard's spy system was built up, its oil wars instituted, all its perfect methods for making it hard for rivals to do business developed.

The most curious feature perhaps of this question of the Standard Oil Company and the price of oil is that there are still people who believe that the Standard has made oil cheap! Men look at this chart and recall that back in the late sixties and seventies they paid fifty and sixty cents a gallon for oil, which now they pay twelve and fifteen cents for. This, then, they say, is the result of the combination. Mr. Rockefeller himself pointed out this great difference in prices. "In 1861," he told the New York Senate Committee, "oil sold for sixty-four cents a gallon, and now it is six and a quarter cents." The comparison is as misleading as it was meant to be. In 1861 there was not a railway into the Oil Regions. It cost from three to ten dollars to get a barrel of oil to a shipping point. None of the appliances of transportation or storage had been devised. The process of refining was still crude, and there was great waste in the oil. Besides, the markets were undeveloped. Mr. Rockefeller should have noted that oil fell from 61½ in 1861 to 25⅝ in the year he first took hold of it, and that by his first successful manipulation it went up to 30! He should point out what the successive declines in prices since that day are due to—to the seaboard pipe-lines, to the development of by-products, to bulk instead of barrel transportation, to innumerable small economies. People who point to the differences in price, and call it combination, have never studied the price-line history in hand. They do not know the meaning of the variation of