Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/72

 letters quoted above hint at what they will be. Many letters have been presented by witnesses under oath in various investigations showing that Standard Oil agents in all parts of the country have found it necessary for the last twenty-five years to act at times as these letters threaten. One of the most aggressive of these campaigns waged at the beginning of this war of exterminating independent dealers was by the Standard marketing agent at Louisville, Kentucky—Chess, Carley and Company. This concern claimed a large section of the South as its territory. George Rice, of Marietta, Ohio, had been in this field for eight or ten years, having many regular customers. It became Chess, Carley and Company's business to secure these customers and to prevent his getting others. Mr. Rice was handicapped to begin with by railroad discrimination. He was never able to secure the rates of his big rival on any of the Southern roads. In 1888 the Interstate Commerce Commission examined his complaints against eight different Southern and Western roads, and found that no one of them treated him with "relative justice." Railroad discriminations were not sufficient to drive him out of the Southwest, however, and a war of prices was begun. According to the letters Mr. Rice himself has presented he certainly in some cases began the cutting, as he could well afford to do. For instance, Chess, Carley and Company were selling water-white oil in September, 1880, in Clarksville, Tennessee, at twenty-one cents a gallon delivered in carloads—export oil was selling in barrels in New York at that date at 10$5/8$ cents a gallon. Rice's agent offered at eighteen cents. The dealer to whom he made the offer, Armstrong by name, wished to accept, but as he had been buying of Chess, Carley and Company, went first to see them about the matter. He came back "scared almost out of his boots," wrote the agent to Rice.

"Carley told him he would break him up if he bought oil of anyone else; that the Standard Company had authorised him to spend $10,000 to break up any concern