"By advancing the price of the crude material you necessarily advance the price of the refined?" another of the combination was asked.
"Yes, sir."[297]
The average price of refined at New York for export was 6.75 cents a gallon in 1887. This rose to 7.50 in 1888, the highest average price for any year between 1885 and 1893.[298] The effect of the restriction—"one of the most extensive ever attempted in commerce"—was thus to make oil and light and all its other products scarcer and dearer. The producers really got no good. After the shut-down had been in progress five months, their committee issued an address congratulating them on the "glorious results" achieved in the fidelity with which the pledge of restriction had been kept, but continued, "But prices are not yet remunerative."[299]
"We do not seem to have gotten it," one of the producers said to Congress, referring to the assistance they expected in an advance of the price to profitable figures.[300] No lasting gain came to any one unless to the monopoly, and it is possibly too soon to tell whether its gain will be "lasting."
Part of the speculation was that the profits of 2,000,000 barrels, contributed equally by the combination and the producers, were to be distributed among the working-men affected by the loss of employment. Men who had been earning $12 a day received a dollar a day from this fund, and lay idle.[301] A blistering picture of the condition of the region is to be seen in the testimony of one of the producers.
"The payments that you have made, or that your assembly has made, have been to individuals?"
"Yes, sir."
"State what the character of the occupation of the individuals thus relieved was in relation to the shut-in."
"Pumpers and roustabout men who had families sick and impoverished. That was a source of relief to them, and we did not withhold it. It was in our community, and we thought we could well afford to allow them that."
"For what did you pay them?"