The sender before the same committee interpreted it as a request "to tighten up the machinery of their loose office."[386] Rice found out what the letter meant. "My rates were raised on that road over 50 per cent. in five days."
"Was it necessary to turn on more than one screw in that direction to put a stop to your business?"
"One was sufficient."[387]
The rates to the combination remained unchanged. For five years—to 1886—they did not vary a mill. After the screw had been turned on, he who suggested it wrote to the offending merchants at Nashville, that if they persisted in bringing in this outside oil he would not only cut down the price of oil, but would enter into competition on all other articles sold in their grocery. He italicized this sentence: "And certainly this competition will not be limited to coal-oil or any one article, and will not be limited to any one year."[388] "Your co-operation or your life," says he.
"Have you not frequently, as a shipper of oil, taken part in the competition with grocers and others in other business than oil, in order to force them to buy oil?"
"Almost invariably I did that always."[389]
"The expense and influence necessary for sustaining the market in this manner are altogether expended by us, and not by the representatives of outside oil," he further wrote. "Influence," as a fact of supply and demand, an element of price-making, is not mentioned in any political economy. And yet the "influence" by which certain men have got the highways shut to other shippers has made a mark as plain as the mountains of the moon on our civilization. "If we allow any one to operate in this manner," he continued, "in any one of our localities, it simply starts off others. And whatever trouble or expense it has given us in the past to prevent it we have found it to be, and still believe it to be, the only policy to pursue."[390]
They "are threatening," his Nashville agent, after the screw was turned, wrote Rice, "to ruin us in our business."[391]
The head of the Louisville "bone-cutters," when a witness before Congress during the trust investigation, stigmatized the action of his Nashville victims as "black-mail." They were "black-mailers" because they had sold a competitor's oil, and refused to continue to sell his own unless it was made as cheap or cheaper. Competition, when he practised it on others, was "sympathetical co-operation." Tried on him, it was "black-mail." "That man wanted us to pay him more than we paid the other jobbers"—i.e., he wanted them to meet the prices of competitors "because he thought we had the market sustained, and he could black-mail us into it. I bluffed him in language, and language is cheap."[392] The "language" that could produce an advance of freights of 50 per cent. in five days against a competitor was certainly "cheap" for the man whose rates remained unchanged, and who thereby absorbed his neighbor's vineyard. The inevitable result followed at last. Rice fought out the fight at Nashville seven years, from 1880 to 1887; then, defeated, he had to shut up his agency there. That was "evacuation day" at Nashville. It was among his oldest agencies, he told Congress, "and it was shut out entirely last year on account of the discriminations. I cannot get in there."[393]