That tribunal found that the Lake Shore road had contracted with this company to carry its products ten cents per barrel cheaper than for any other customers. It showed that this made a difference to the victims of the "Adventure" equal to more than 21 per cent. a year on their capital.
"The understanding," the court said, "was to keep the price down for the favored customers, but up for all the others, and the inevitable tendency and effect of this contract was to enable the Standard Oil Company to establish and maintain an overshadowing monopoly, to ruin all other operators, and drive them out of business." The course of the railroad the court declared to be one of "active participation in the unlawful purposes" of the oil company. The Lake Shore was to have all its business out of Cleveland, but, a competing railroad being built, the Lake Shore made a contract to give this new line a part of the plum, to induce it to unite in the policy of keeping freights down for the favored customer, and up for all others. When the President of the trust was asked afterwards by the New York Legislature if there had been no arrangement by which it got its transportation cheaper than others could, he replied, "No, sir." And later he reiterated that in their arrangements for freight there was "nothing peculiar."[103]
But the Supreme Court of Ohio, in describing this arrangement, diversify the staid rhetoric of their legal deliverance with the unaffected exclamation:
"How peculiar!"
They declared the contract between the two railroads "void," and "not only contrary to a sound public policy, but to the lax demands of the commercial honesty and ordinary methods of business." They also pronounced the contract between the railroad and the oil company as "made to build up a monopoly," and as "unlawful."[104]
The great lawyer, we have said, could not answer the questions he asked. The facts, we have said, were hidden in a secret contract. And yet the answers to the questions, the facts, had been all brought to the verge of disclosure by the investigation by Congress early in the same year, 1876.
Although the investigation, in consequence of the "I object" of the Hon. Henry B. Payne, of Cleveland,[105] had been referred to the Committee of Commerce, and though the railroad and oil clique men would not answer, and the committee would not press them, there was a volunteer witness from Cleveland, who began to upset all the plans to smother. This willing witness was a Cleveland refiner, a shrewd man, as would easily be believed by those who knew that he was the brother of an organizer of the oil combination. He, too, had been a member of it, but for some reasons was now "out," and was one of the swimmers who felt themselves being drawn down. He betook himself for relief to Congress. He dodged no subpœnas, but, going before the Committee of Commerce, he began to tell more fully than any other witness had ever done, or had ever been able to do, the story of the relations between the combination and the railroads, which he knew of his personal knowledge. When he began talking in this free way to the public authorities, his former associates saw that they had underestimated his abilities as a refiner. They began to feel that it might be well to make some concessions to this particular brother, though not to the Brotherhood of Man.
The investigation was summarily suspended,[106] and his testimony was spirited away. With the only power that could have interfered thus silenced, the surviving independents were corralled as we have described. This was done two short months after the first move was made, May 16th, for the investigation which might have saved the independents at Cleveland and elsewhere from the duress which drove men to death or adventures of reconciliation.
All over the oil regions the combination has followed this policy of "not to exceed half."[107]
Nineteen pages of the testimony of a member in the suit begun by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania are taken up with the operations of one of its constituent companies in the purchase or leasing of competing refineries, many of which were shut down or pulled down.