Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/292

 feller did, felt an exasperation almost uncontrolled over it. Yet the seaboard pipe-line was no development of the Standard Oil Company. The idea had been conceived and the practicability demonstrated by others, but it was seized by the Standard as soon as it proved possible. This quick sense of the real value of new developments, and this alertness in seizing them, have been among the strongest elements in the Standard's success.

And every new line of action was developed to its utmost. Take the work the Standard began in 1879 on the foreign market. Before the Standard Oil Company was known, save as one of several prosperous Cleveland refineries, the foreign trade had been developed until petroleum was fourth in our list of exports, and it went literally to every civilised country on the globe. In 1874 Colonel Forney made a trip through the Orient, and he wrote in one of his letters that he found both Babylon and Nineveh to be lighted with American petroleum, and that while he was in Damascus a census was taken to ascertain how much petroleum was needed for each house in the place, and a proposition was made for its entire use. "At present," said the Derrick, in commenting on this letter, "petroleum is the chief commercial representative of the United States in the Levant and the Orient."

The same dithyrambic paragraphs were written by oil men then, as by the Standard now, concerning foreign trade. For instance, compare the two paragraphs below—the one found in 1874 in the Derrick, the second in a defence of the Oil Trust published in 1900: