This conviction has been faithfully lived up to. Under the name of the South Improvement Company the arrangement was ostentatiously abandoned, because to persist in it meant civil war in the oil country as the rising young anti-monopolist lawyer pointed out in the Constitutional Convention. Mark Twain, in describing the labors of the missionaries in the Sandwich Islands, says they were so successful that the vices of the natives no longer exist in name—only in reality. As every page will show, this contract no longer exists in name—only in reality. In the oil world, and in every other important department of our industrial life—in food, fuel, shelter, clothing, transportation,[80] this contract, in its various new shapes, has been kept steadily at work gerrymandering the livelihoods of the people.
The men who had organized the South Improvement Company paid the public revolt the deference of denial, though not of desistance. The company had got a charter, organized under it, collected twenty per cent. of the subscription for stock, made contracts with the railroads, held meetings of the directors, who approved of the contracts and had received the benefits of the increase of freights made in pursuance of the agreement. This was shown by the testimony of its own officers.[81]
But "the company never did a dollar's worth of business," the Secretary of the Light of the World told Congress,[82] and "there was never the slightest connection between the South Improvement Company and the Standard Oil Company," the president of the latter and the principal member of both said in an interview in the New York World, of March 29, 1890. "The South Improvement Company died in embryo. It was never completely organized, and never did any business. It was partly born, died, and was buried in 1872," etc.
Still later, before a committee of the Legislature of New York, in 1888, he was asked about "the Southern Improvement Company."
"There was such a company?"
"I have heard of such a company."
"Were you not in it?"
"I was not."[83]
So help me God!
At almost the moment of this denial in New York, an associate in this and all his other kindred enterprises, asked before Congress who made up the South Improvement Company, named as among them the principal members of the great oil company, and most conspicuous of them all was the name of this denier.[84]