The reply came in a tone and with a smile so significant that it was answered by a comprehending laugh from the whole room—judges, lawyers, reporters, spectators, and all.
"Not yet!"
"NOT BUSINESS"
This "business success" is the greatest commercial and financial achievement of history. Its broad foundation was laid in the years from 1872 to 1879, the severest time of panic for others the world has known. A universal jaundice of ill-fortune has given its sallow complexion to every one else. From the Alleghanies to the Caucasus thousands of men have been somehow thrown out of work because so much new work has come to the world. "At the flash of a telegraphic message from Cleveland, Ohio," said the people of the oil regions in their appeal to the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1878, "hundreds of men have been thrown out of employment at a few hours' notice, and kept for weeks in a state of semi-starvation." These men filled up many of the insurrectionary ranks of the great railway strike of 1877, as the employés of the Pennsylvania Railway declared in a public communication at that time. The eight oil-producing counties of Pennsylvania were said by the general council of the petroleum producers, in a public address in 1879, to be "fast sinking beneath such financial distress that resistance to threatened bankruptcy or servitude could not long be made." They grew too poor to pay the counsel they employed to help them in the courts, the legislatures, and before the executive of Pennsylvania and Congress. "The universal complaint we find is the poverty of the people, not their unwillingness to give." "I am ashamed," said one of them in court, "to see our counsel every day on account of the beggarly amounts I have paid them. A large number of producers have subscribed that have not paid."[653]
Men who were "frozen out" of their occupation in transporting or refining oil took to digging wells. "That is the only thing they have been allowed to do. They went on in a wild way, hunting new oil, and when they found it they would develop it rapidly." This made oil fall in price, and the more they produced the more they had to produce. The wages of labor kept going down. They were lower in 1888 than they were twenty-four years before. "A well-digger that I paid $6 a day and his expenses twenty-four years ago is now working for $40 a month. That is true of every department of the oil business so far as the wages of workmen are concerned." "We were $10,000,000 poorer at the end of 1887 than at the beginning," said the association of oil producers of Pennsylvania. Their executive committee the next year said the people were on "the verge of bankruptcy."[654]
The railroads were no happier than the laborers, the producers, the manufacturers, or the merchants. As early as 1879 Vanderbilt II. declared that the oil business of the railroads—worth $30,000,000 a year—had been destroyed.
"I think the business is gone."[655]