"They can use the power here given, and have used it to crush out opposition."[171]
"Of course, there is in the Erie contract a statement that every shipper of oil over the road shall be treated with 'fairness' by the Standard Oil Company, and our attention was drawn to that," the counsel of the Chamber of Commerce said.... "In the first place, they have the exclusive shipment of oil, and therefore nobody could ship oil, and there was no oil handled for anybody else; but if the Erie Company should send some for somebody else, why, the sloop could not get to the dock, and the machinery at the dock would not and could not work by any possibility so as to get that oil out of that dock and into a ship (except at the end of a lawsuit)."[172]
Evidently the "cancellation" of 1872 had not cancelled anything of substance. Indeed, the "no" of 1878 was wider than the embargo of 1872, for the fourth great trunk-line, the Baltimore and Ohio, was not one of the signatories then; but by 1878 it had, like all the others, closed its port to the people—farming it out as the old régime farmed out the right to tax provinces.
He used to meet the president of the oil combination "frequently in the Erie office," a friend and subordinate has recalled.[173] Railroad offices are pleasant places to visit when such plums are to be gathered there as this of the sole right to the freedom of all ports and control of the commerce of three continents.
Down to this writing, when the little group of independents who remain masters of their own refineries along Oil Creek seek to send their oil in bulk abroad, or to transship it at any one of the principal ports for other points on the coast, the same power still says the same "no" as twenty years ago.[174]
WHO PIPED AND WHO DANCED
Thus, by 1878, the independent producers and refiners found themselves caught in a battue like rabbits driven in for the sport of a Prince of Wales.