State inspection of oil and municipal ordinances about storage have been other "screws" that have been turned to get rid of competition. City councils passed ordinances forbidding oil in barrels to be stored, while allowing oil in tanks, which is very much more dangerous, as the records of oil fires and explosions show conclusively. His New Orleans agent wrote Rice concerning the manœuvres of his pursuer: "He has been down here for some time, and has by his engineering, and in consequence of the city ordinances, cut me out of storage. As matters now stand, I would not be able to handle a single barrel of oil."[394] In Georgia the law was made so that the charge to the oil combination shipping in tank-cars was only half what it was to others who shipped in barrels. The State inspector's charge for oil in tanks was made 25 cents a barrel; for oil in barrels it was 50 cents a barrel. But as if that was not advantage enough, the inspector inspected the tanks at about two-thirds of their actual capacity. If an independent refiner sent 100 barrels of oil into the State, he would have to pay $50 for inspection, while the oil combination sending in the same would pay but 25 cents a barrel, and that on only 66-2/3 barrels, or $16 in all. This difference is a large commercial profit of itself, and would alone enable the one who received it to sell without loss at a price that would cripple all others. In this State the chief inspector had the power to appoint inspectors for the towns. He would name them only for the larger places, where the combination had storage tanks. This prevented independent refiners from shipping directly to the smaller markets in barrels, as they could not be inspected there, and if not inspected could not be sold.[395] All these manœuvres of inspection helped to force the people to buy of only one dealer, to take what he supplied, and pay what he demanded. Why should an official appointed by the people, paid by them to protect them, thus use all his powers against them? Why?
"State whether you had not in your employ the State inspector of oil and gave him a salary," the Louisville representative of the combination was asked by Congress.
"Yes, sir."[396]
Throughout the country the people of the States have been influenced to pass inspection laws to protect themselves, as they supposed, from bad oil, with its danger of explosion. But these inspection laws prove generally to be special legislation in disguise, operating directly to deprive the people of the benefit of that competition which would be a self-acting inspection. They are useful only as an additional illustration of the extent to which government is being used as an active partner by great business interests. Meanwhile any effort of the people to use their own forces through governments to better their condition, as by the ownership of municipal gas-works, street-railways, or national railroads and telegraphs, is sung to sleep with the lullaby about government best, government least.
This second campaign had been a formidable affair—a worse was to follow; but it did not overcome the independent of Marietta. With all these odds against him, he made his way. Expelled from one place and another, like Memphis and Nashville, he found markets elsewhere. This was because the Southern people gave him market support along with their moral support. Co-operation of father and son and daughter made oil cheaper than the "sympathetical co-operation" opposing them, with its high salaries, idle refineries, and dead-heads. Rice had to pay no dividends on "trust" stock capitalized for fifteen times the value of the property. He did not, like every one of the trustees, demand for himself an income of millions a year from the consumer. He found margin enough for survival, and even something more than survival, between the cost of production and the market price. "In 1886 we were increasing our business very largely. Our rates were low enough so that we could compete in the general Southern market."[397]
Upon this thrice-won prosperity fell now blow after blow from the same hand which had struck so heavily twice before. From 1886 to the present moment Rice and his family have been kept busier defending their right to live in business than in doing the business itself. Their old enemy has come at them for the third time, with every means of destruction that could be devised, from highway exclusion to attacks upon private character, given currency by all the powerful means at his command. The game of 1886 was that of 1879, but with many improvements gained from experience and progress of desire. His rates were doubled, sometimes almost tripled; in some cases as much as 333 per cent. Rates to his adversary were not raised at all. The raise was secret. Suspecting something wrong, he called on the railroad officer July 13th, and asked what rates were going to be. The latter replied that he "had not the list made out." But the next day he sent it in full to the combination. Rice could not get them until August 23d, six weeks later, and then not all of them. As in 1879 the new tariff was arranged at a conference with the favored shippers.[398]
This was the first gun of a concerted attack. Rice was soon under fire from all parts of the field. One road after another raised his rates until it seemed as if the entire Southern market would be closed to him. While this was in progress the new Interstate Commerce Law passed by Congress—in part through the efforts of Rice—to prevent just such misuse of the highways, went into effect. But this did not halt the railway managers. A month after it was passed the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce was shown that discrimination was still going on, as it is still. At points as far apart as Louisville, New Orleans, Atlanta, St. Louis, and San Francisco switches were spiked against Rice, and the main lines barricaded of all the highways between the Ohio River, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and the Gulf of Mexico. In the face of the Interstate Commerce Act the roads raised his freights to points in Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi in no case less than 29, and in some cases as high as 150, 168, and 212 per cent. more than was charged the oil combination. Where the latter would pay $100 freight, he, shipping the same amount to the same place, would sometimes pay $310—if he got it taken at all.[399]
The general freight agent of one of the roads, when before the Interstate Commerce Commission, denied this. When confronted with written proof of it he could only say, "It is simply an error."[400]
Rice shows that in some cases these discriminations made him pay four times as much freight, gallon for gallon, as the monopoly. The differences against him were so great that even the self-contained Interstate Commerce Commission has to call them "a vast discrepancy."[401] The power that pursued him manœuvred against him, as if it were one track, all the railroads from Pennsylvania to Florida, from Ohio to Lake Superior and the Pacific coast. "Through its representative the oil combination was called before the Interstate Commerce Commission to explain its relation to this 'vast discrepancy.'"
"Your company pays full rates?"