When the warfare against Toledo became a scandal ringing throughout the country and beyond, the organ of the trust in Toledo attempted to make it appear that the oil trust was not the party in interest. But there was open confession on the record. Its connection and its control were admitted by two representatives in conference with a committee appointed by the mayor at their request to discuss the situation.[537] They described the circumstances under which the members of the oil trust had gone into the project of the Toledo line and the project of the natural-gas business. One of the two stated that he came into it as its "more direct representative." The pipe line of the private gas company was built, he went on to say, by one of the principal corporations in the oil trust. At the same interview it was admitted that the oil trust owned 60 per cent. of the natural-gas company's stock.
The people of Toledo did not surrender to this success of their enemies in the money-market. The bonds which calumny and espionage prevented them from selling at wholesale to the great capitalists of New York and Boston they took themselves at retail. The Legislature having given authority for such sales, a committee of one hundred had been appointed by the citizens' meeting, October 19, 1889, to canvass all the wards of the city for subscriptions to the gas bonds. "Gas Bond Pledges" were circulated, to which people subscribed according to their ability, in amounts ranging from $2 to $5000. The employés at the Wabash Railway's car shops sent in a list signed by fifty names for a total of $1102, an average of $22 each. The labor of two hundred men for a week without pay was offered the gas trustees as an earnest of the good-will of the people. Piece by piece the city's pipe line was pushed through. At a critical moment a shrewd and patriotic contractor saved the enterprise by building a large part of the line, and taking for his pay the bonds the banks would not take. In June, 1890, the public were gratified by the announcement that their trustees had secured the means "for the construction of three miles more," making eight miles in all, or nearly one-fourth the entire line. In August a contract was made for five miles more, and so the work went on, step after step.
A SUNDAY IN JUNE
In the midst of the anxious discussion by the citizens of Toledo as to the character of the power which ruled them both by night and by day, the same question arose in the metropolitan religious press, but in its broader ethical aspects. After the petition of Toledo to be allowed to take the control of its light, heat, and power into its own hands had been laid before the Legislature, the National Baptist of Philadelphia, in an article on the trusts, criticised them as the prophet Nathan would have done. It gave to that in oil, "of course, the bad pre-eminence in all this matter." "This corporation has, by ability, by boldness, by utter unscrupulousness, by the use of vast capital, managed to control every producer, every carrier, to say nothing of the legislatures and courts." The Examiner, the leading religious weekly of the Baptist denomination in New York, rose against this. "We can readily understand how there should be differences of opinion in the matter of these trusts, and their influence is a proper subject of discussion; but to make it the occasion of so unjust and intemperate an attack on Christian men of the highest excellence of character is something that was not expected from a paper bearing such a name. The four most prominent men in the oil trust are eminent Baptists, who honor their religious obligations, and contribute without stint to the noblest Christian and philanthropic objects.... All of them illustrate in their daily lives their reverence for living Christianity."
The National Baptist did not submit to this attempt to cite men's creeds to prevent judgment on their deeds. It quoted the reply Macaulay makes Milton give to the similar pleas urged for King Charles: "For his private virtues they are beside the question. If he oppress and extort all day, shall he be held blameless because he prayeth at night and morning?" It held to its ground, and cited against the trust the recorded evidence, but it declared it was "a marked breach of propriety for the Examiner to bring their private character into the discussion." The National Baptist, going on to speak in praise of a series of lively cartoons in Harper's Weekly on the Forty Thieves of the Trusts and similar subjects, said, with some sadness: "It will be a sorry spectacle if the secular papers shall be ranged on the side of justice and the human race, while the defence of monopoly shall be left to the so-called representatives of the religious press."
Later, March 20, 1890, the Examiner returned again to its discussion of the religious performances of the chiefs of the oil trust as a matter of public importance. Of one of them it said: "The prayer-meetings of the Fifth Avenue Church are on Wednesday evening, and no business man in the church is less likely to be absent from one of them than he. His wife and children, when they are in the city, come with him, and it is by no means an unusual thing for the whole family to take part, each of them occupying one or two minutes of time. He and they are at church every Sunday when in the city, and no husband and wife keep up the good old Baptist habit more faithfully of exchanging a kind word with the brethren and sisters after the regular services are over. He dresses plainly, and so do his family, and every one of them has a kind heart and a pleasant word for all. They are among the last to leave the church and the prayer-meeting. Now the question is, How is it, as things go, that a man possessing the great wealth imputed to him should have so warm a fraternity of feeling for the lowly in their temporal conditions? And is there not an example here that might well be imitated in all the churches of our Lord?"
In an address on Corporations the reverend secretary of the Church Edifice Department of the Home Missionary Department of the Baptist Church followed the example of the leading Church journal. "The oil trust was," he said, "begun and carried on by Christian men.[538] They were Baptists, and, so far as the speaker knew, both the objects and the methods of the oil trust were praiseworthy." A clergyman of another denomination once called upon one of the great men of the trust to seek a subscription.