THE SMOKELESS REBATE
With searching intelligence, indomitable will, and a conscience which makes religion, patriotism, and the domestic virtues but subordinate paragraphs in a ritual of money worship, the mercantile mind flies its air-line to business supremacy. That entirely modern social arrangement—the private ownership of public highways—has introduced a new weapon into business warfare which means universal dominion to him who will use it with an iron hand.
This weapon is the rebate, smokeless, noiseless, invisible, of extraordinary range, and the deadliest gun known to commercial warfare. It is not a lawful weapon. Like the explosive bullet, it is not recognized by the laws of war. It has to be used secretly. All the rates he got were a secret between himself and the railroads. "It has never been otherwise," testified one of the oil combination.[731] The Chevalier Bayard declared proudly, as he lay on his death-bed, that he had never given quarter to any one so degraded and unknightly as to use gunpowder. Every one would close in at once to destroy a market combatant who avowed that he employed this wicked projectile.
The apparatus of the rebate is so simple that it looks less like a destroying angel than any weapon of offence ever known. The whole battery consists only of a pen and ink and some paper. The discharge is but the making of an entry—but the signing of a check. But when the man who commands this simple enginery directs it against a business competitor you can follow the track of wreckage like the path of a cyclone, by the ruins which lie bleaching in the air for years. The gentlemen who employ it give no evidence of being otherwise engaged than in their ordinary pursuits. They go about sedate and smiling, with seemingly friendly hands empty of all tools of death. But all about them as they will, as if it were only by wish of theirs which attendant spirits hastened to execute, rivals are blown out of the highways, busy mills and refineries turn to dust, hearts break, and strong men go mad or commit suicide or surrender their persons and their property to the skilful artillerists.
"And in the actual practice of daily life," says Ruskin, "you will find that wherever there is secrecy, there is either guilt or danger." "When did you discover the fact that these rebates had been paid?" one of the victims was asked.
"We never discovered it as a fact until the testimony was taken in 1879.... We always suspected it; but we never knew of it of our personal knowledge, and never would really have known it of our personal knowledge.... I had no idea of the iniquity that was going on."[732]
Nothing so demolishing was ever so delicate and intangible as this, for its essence is but a union of the minds of a railroad official and some business friend, perhaps a silent partner, bent on business empire. The model merchant, fortunate in having a friend willing so to use a power sovereigns would not dare to use, walks the public way, strong in his secret, and smiles with triumph as all at whom he levels his invisible wand sicken and disappear. "He has the receipt of fern-seed. He walks invisible."
Men who hunt their fellow-men with this concealed weapon always deny it, as they must. To use it has always been a sin, and has been made a crime in every civilized State. Under United States law it is, since 1887, an offence punishable with imprisonment in the penitentiary.[733] Moral ideals are not born in legislatures. When an act attains by a law the distinction of being made a crime, it is already well on its way to extinction. It is made infamous by law, because it has already become infamous before the conscience and honor of men. It was not the prohibition of highway privilege by the Constitution of Pennsylvania or the laws of the United States which made the rebate an iniquity. This legal volley is but a salute to the established conscience.
The question most often pressed before all the many legislative and judicial inquests held upon the dead bodies which strew every field of the oil industry has been whether the extraordinary powers which the invention of the locomotive and the transformation of public highways into private property had given railways over the livelihoods of the people had been used to make it impossible for any but a preferred few to live.