The offer to sell back the refinery was like the offer to let her have cars. To accept it was to pass openly and consciously into slavery. Two years before, when she was weak with grief, inexperience, and the fear that she might not succeed in her gallant task of paying her husband's debts and saving the livelihood of the children, she had thought of selling out at a sacrifice. They knew this because she had asked their advice, and now cheapened her down by reference to the valuation of that moment of despair. All the life energies of herself and her husband, the various advantages of position, the benefit of their pioneership since 1860, and of having established a place in so lucrative a business, all the good-will of customers, all the elements that contributed to the ability to earn the nearly $25,000 a year she was making, were brushed out of the bargain by the mere assertion of a figure at which it was alleged better works could be built. By the time the offer was made she had, moreover, put the sum she had received into such investments, she told the court, as she had been able to find, and the money to accept the offer was no longer in her hands. Indignant with these thoughts, and the massacred troop of hopes and ambitions that her brave heart had given birth to, she threw the letter into the fire, where it curled up into flames like those from which a Dives once begged for a drop of water. She never reappeared in the world of business, where she had found no chivalry to help a woman save her home, her husband's life-work, and her children. But when the men who had divided her property among them invoked the assistance of the law to complete the "equalization" told of in the previous chapter, she went into court and told her story to save her friends from ruin. There, under the gathering dust of years, this incident has remained buried in the document-room of the Court of Common Pleas of Cuyahoga County, until now brought forth to give the people a glimpse into what the real things are which our professors of market philosophy cover with their glittering generalities about the cost of production and the survival of the fittest.
This episode and that of the "Agreement for an Adventure" in the preceding chapter have been written up by the author from the original papers on file in the Court of Common Pleas at Cleveland, which he visited for that purpose in 1891. Certified copies of the documents were procured from the clerk of the court. Lately, the astounding fact was ascertained that all the documents except two or three formal pleadings were gone from the records of the court. But for these certified copies there would now be no authentic record of these cases. This disappearance bears a strong likeness to the suppression of the investigation by the Committee of Commerce of Congress in 1872, and the theft of the testimony taken by the House Committee of Commerce[121] in 1876, and the mutilation of the transcript submitted to Congress in 1888 of the evidence taken in the Buffalo Explosion Case.[122]
"NO!"
There has never been any real break in the plans revealed, "partly born," "and buried" in 1872. From then till now, in 1893, every fact that has come to the surface has shown them in full career. If they were buried, it was as seed is—for a larger crop of the same thing.
The people had made peace, in 1872, on the pledge of "perfect equality" on the highways. Hardly had they got back to their work when they began to feel the pinch of privilege again. The Pennsylvania road alone is credited with any attempt to keep faith, and that only "for some months." "Gradually," as a committee of the people wrote to the managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, "the persons constituting the South Improvement Company were placed by the roads in as favorable a position as to rates and facilities as had been stipulated in the original contract with that company."[123]
As soon as pipe lines were proved practicable they were built as rapidly as pipes and men to put them in the ground could be had, but there was some lubricant by which they kept constantly slipping into bankruptcy.
They were "frozen out," as one of their builders said, "summer as well as winter."