Page:The History of the Standard Oil Company Vol 2.djvu/87

 around to do "dirty work," as the Oil Regions phrase goes, but they are pariahs in the concern. Mr. Rockefeller knows as well as any man ever did the vital necessity of honesty in an organisation, and the Buckleys and negroes who bring him secret intelligence never get anything but money and contempt for their pains.

For the general public, absorbed chiefly in the question, "How does all this affect what we are paying for oil?" the chief point of interest in the marketing contests is that, after they were over, the price of oil has always gone back with a jerk to the point where it was when the cutting began, and not infrequently it has gone higher—the public pays. Several of the letters already quoted in this chapter show the immediate recoil of the market to higher prices with the removal of competition. A table was prepared in 1892 to show the effect of competition on the price of oil in various states of the Union. The results were startling. In California, oil which sold at non-competitive points at 26½ cents a gallon, at competitive points brought 17½ cents. In Denver, Colorado, there was an "Oil War" on in the spring of 1892, and the same oil which was selling at Montrose and Garrison at twenty-five cents a gallon, in Denver sold at seven cents. This competition finally killed opposition and Denver thereafter paid twenty-five cents. The profits on this price were certainly great enough to call for competition. The same oil which was sold in Colorado in the spring of 1892 at twenty-five cents, sold in New York for exportation at 6.10 cents. Of course the freight rates to Colorado were high, the open rate was said to be nine cents a gallon, but that it cost the Standard Oil Company nine cents a gallon to get its oil there, one would have to have documentary proof to believe, and, even if it did, there was still some ten cents profit on a gallon—five dollars on a barrel. In Kansas, at this time, the difference between the price at competitive and non-competitive points