Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

It is "our pleasure to make oil cheap"; but a written proposition was made to the merchants that if they would repent and return, the price would be 20 cents a gallon, with a rebate to the loyal dealers. As this oil could be, and was being, laid down in Columbus at 12 cents a gallon, the proposition amounted to a request that the merchants join in imposing a tax on the people of 8 cents a gallon, which must be added to the retail price, and go to swell the profits of the "sympathetical co-operation." "Can any one," said the Index, "after knowing these facts, doubt that in a pecuniary point our merchants could have done better by surrendering the principle and joining the ring? But, at the same time, could any reasoning man (even viewing it in the light of policy alone) advise such a course?—one which, if adopted, would only open the door for other monopolies to enter and demand high prices on meat, flour, and the other necessaries of life, until our city becomes the highest market in the land. Let all good citizens, then, unite in a steady effort to resist the yoke which this monopoly is now trying to force upon us, and let us teach them and all others that our people are too loyal to each other and too intelligent to allow themselves to be made the instruments of their own destruction.

"Remember, that should our merchants be forced to yield, the day of low prices will be a short one, and then these strangers, having accomplished their purpose and forced their yoke upon you and us, will return to their homes, and while rioting in the taxes wrung from you, with your own assistance, will laugh at you for allowing yourselves to be so easily duped, and, emboldened by their success in forcing upon you high-priced oil, will soon return to demand high prices on sugar, coffee, and every other article of trade."

The nose for news of the American press scented out the novelty of a whole community acting as one man in successful resistance to those who had till then found nowhere any cohesive brotherliness to make a stand against them. The newspapers of the county took the matter up. It was absolutely the first time any method had been found that could prevail against the tactics of divide and conquer, which had been elsewhere irresistible. Public attention was fascinated by the revelation that a brotherhood to ravage the people turned impotent when the people were roused to meet it with their brotherhood of the commonwealth. There was in the spectacle a moral illumination—the light that never fails. Instead of becoming, as had been planned, a warning to all the people of the dire destruction to be visited upon any who dared to disobey, the encounter between the one-man power of united Columbus and the one-man power of hundreds of millions of dollars became every day more brilliantly a sign in the sky, showing all the people how the invasion of their industrial liberties could be changed into a ruin more complete than the retreat from Moscow. Scores of such assaults on the people had been won before. "What was being done at Columbus," said one of the papers, "is but what they have done before at Aberdeen, and at hundreds of other places North and South."

But as despoilers always have to fear, one defeat may undo a lifetime of conquest. The success of the people of Columbus was teaching the people of the whole country, and of all markets, that their real enemy was not the oil trust, but the lack of trust in each other. The people were learning there was a magic in association more potent than the trick of combinations. The Index proposed to the people of the South to join the citizens of Columbus, and make the fight general. "There is this about it: if there was concentrated action among the smaller cities and towns throughout even this section of the State, we would have no fear of the result. The oil trust may be too strong for a single small locality, but if a combination of a certain number of localities handling oil were effected, they would soon be forced to retire. Such a combination can be and should be brought about at once."

The struggle at Columbus lasted three years. It had seemed unequal enough—a few thousands of dollars against hundreds of millions. But three years of this commercial warfare failed to break the spirit or resources of the brave—and wise because brave—people. The community never broke rank. They laughed when they were tempted with cheap coffee, flour, sugar, to join in the attempt to bankrupt their home merchants. They could see that the gift of forced cheapness, used to destroy natural cheapness, was a Trojan horse bearing within itself the deadliest form of dearness. Defeated, the oil lords gave up the contest, closed their store in Columbus, and left the people of that place free.

"England," says Emerson, "reaches to the Alleghanies; America begins in Ohio." In the Western Reserve of Ohio, hive of abolitionists and Union soldiers, was the same spirit of America which, at Columbus, Mississippi, had defended its market rights as outposts of all other rights. It was only a few years ago discovered that the flames of the "burning springs" of the Caspian Sea, China, and America, whose torches kindled the lamp of history, were beacon-fires uncomprehended by a procession of civilizations, and waiting to light man to the knowledge that the earth beneath him was a city of domes, huge receivers storing up the products of vaster gas-retorts below. Man found that he need not wait for this spirit to come to him out of the "caverns measureless to man." He could go to it, as in oil, and, tapping the great tanks, could lead their flighty contents to homes and mills, to emerge there as light and warmth and power.

Experience in oil had made ready skill and capital to use the new treasure. In a very few years thousands of miles of pipe were laid, and millions of capital invested in the natural-gas business, mainly in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The gas was found in the same general localities as oil, and the methods of procuring and distributing it were similar, and the similarity easily extended to the methods of administering this bounty of nature as "property." Toledo began to be supplied in 1887 with the new fuel through pipe lines by two companies. They obtained their franchises as competitors, but were soon found to be one in ownership, prices, and all details of management. The discovery that the two companies at Toledo were really one, and that one the evil one of the oil trust, aroused the apprehensions of the people, and these were increased by a number of circumstances.

The Toledo companies got from the city as a free gift a franchise worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, on condition that they would supply Toledo before a certain date. But in the midst of the work of laying pipes they suspended operations, and declared that they would do nothing more unless the City Council fixed, at rates dictated by them, the prices the people were to pay. These rates were enough to pay not only a fair dividend, but to return in a few years every dollar of capital invested in lands, pipes, etc. Later they demanded another increase which, according to the sworn statement by their superintendent of the amount of gas supplied daily, would have amounted to $351,362.50 a year. They made the charges regardless of the ordinance, and used delay in furnishing gas as a means to make people willing to pay these illegal rates. Consumers seeking to renew their contracts were informed that the price would be doubled. The companies had assured the people that they should get their heat at half the price of coal; but when the bills were footed up, the gas in many cases cost more than coal. The companies refused to supply fuel to an oil refinery which had been built in Toledo in opposition to the trust refineries. The companies discriminated against some customers, and in favor of others. The power to say which manufacturer should have cheaper fuel than his competitor was a power to enact prosperity or ruin.[513] It was a power to force themselves into control of any business they desired to enter.

Those who controlled these gas companies appeared in the Circuit Court of the city in a proceeding which alone contained warning enough to put any self-governing community on guard. The Court was asked to deny the right of farmers in Wood County to give a way over their lands to the Toledo, Findlay, and Springfield Railway, being built to give the independent oil-refiners and producers of the Ohio oil-field a route to market. The farmers in question had made leases to an oil corporation of the trust, giving only the specific right to bore for and pipe and store oil and gas. The farmers supposed that they had parted only with what they had signed away in the leases. They supposed they still owned their farms. When the new railroad sought the privilege of a right of way the farmers granted it. Suit was at once brought for an injunction to prevent this use of the land. According to the logic of the claim in these cases a farmer who has made such a lease could not build a road across his own farm without permission. "Most certainly not," was the reply made by one of the lawyers to the judge who asked if the farmer could do so.