Rice, badly shattered, still sought and managed to find a few long-way-around routes. He presented to Congress in 1888 a table showing how he still managed to get to some of his markets. To Birmingham, Alabama—the direct route of 685 miles, as well as the Baltimore and Ohio, being closed to him—he shipped over seven different railroads forward and backward 1155 miles. The rates of all these roads added together made only $2.10 a barrel instead of $2.66, to which the shorter line had raised its price, for the purpose, as this comparison shows, not of getting revenue, but of cutting it off. To get into Nashville he had to go around 805 miles over five different lines instead of 502 miles, as usual, and still had a rate of $1.28 instead of $1.60.
From 1880, the moment he turned to the Southern field, after the destruction of his business in the West, everything that railroad men's ingenuity could do was done to prevent him from becoming a successful manufacturer who might increase the amount to be shipped, open new markets, and steady the trade by making it move by many minds of different views and reasons instead of by one. In order barely to live he was kept writing, telegraphing, travelling, protesting, begging, litigating, worrying, and agitating by press, prosecutions, private and public, and by State and national investigation. The ingenuity of the railroad officials in chasing him down was wonderful. Nothing was too small if it would hurt. Sometimes the railroad made through rates so high that it was cheaper for him to ship his oil along by short stages, paying the local rates from place to place until it reached its destination. In this way he got a car from Cincinnati to Knoxville at the rate of 32 cents altogether, when, if it had been shipped at once all the way on the through rate, it would have cost 40 cents a hundred. The railroads have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, used up armies of gifted counsel, and spoiled tons of white paper with ink to argue out their right to charge more for short hauls than long hauls; but when some traffic manager wants to crush one of his employer's customers, no short-haul long-haul consistency stands in his way.[407] It was not enough to fix his rates at double what others paid. All kinds of mistakes were made about his shipments. Again and again these mistakes were repeated; nor were they, the Interstate Commerce Commission shows, corrected when pointed out.[408] One of the stock excuses made by railroad managers for giving preferential rates to their favorites is that they are the "largest shippers," and, consequently, "entitled to a wholesale rate." But when Rice was the largest shipper, as he was at New Orleans, they forgot to give him the benefit of this "principle." When Rice wrote, asking if a lower rate was not being made, the railroad agent replied: "Let me repeat that the rates furnished you are just as low as furnished anybody else." "This lacks accuracy," is the comment of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Wishing to know if the Louisville and Nashville would unite with other roads in making through rates to him, Rice asked the question of its freight agent. He replied: "I do not see that it is any of your business." "It was undoubtedly his business," the Interstate Commerce Commission says, sharply; "and his inquiry on the subject was not wanting either in civility or propriety." When Rice asked the same road for rates, the officials refused to give them to him, and persisted in their refusal.[409] Like Vanderbilt before the New York Legislative Committee, they seemed to think excuses to shippers were a substitute for transportation, and evidently thought they had done more than their duty in answering Rice's letters. But as the Commission dryly observes, their answers to Rice's letters did not relieve him of the injurious consequences. In attempting to explain these things to the Interstate Commerce Commission, the agent of the railroad said:
"If I have not made myself clear, I—"
"You have not," one of the Commission interrupted.[410]
The refusal to give Rice these rates was an "illegal refusal," the Commission decided; "the obligation to give the rates ... was plain and unquestionable." This general freight agent was summoned by Congress to tell whether or not lower rates had been made to the oil combination than to their competitors. He refused to produce the books and papers called for by the subpœna. He had been ordered by the vice-president of the road, he said, to refuse. He declined to answer the questions of the committee. Recalled, he finally admitted the truth: "We gave them lower rates in some instances."[411]
Rice took to the water whenever he could, as hunted animals do. The Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri were public highways that had not been made private property, with general agents or presidents to say "No" when asked permission to travel over them. He began to ship by river. The chairman of the Committee of Commerce rose in his seat in Congress to present favorably a bill to make it illegal to ship oil of less than 150 degrees fire-test on the passenger boats of inland waters. The reason ostentatiously given was public safety. But, as was at once pointed out in the press, the public safety required no such law. The test proposed was far above the requirement of safety. No State in its inspection laws stipulated for so high a test. Most of the States were satisfied with oil of 110 degrees fire-test; a few, like Ohio, went as high as 120 degrees. All but a very small proportion of the oil sent to Europe was only 110 degrees fire-test. The steamboat men did not want the law, and were all against it. There was no demand from the travelling public for such legislation. General Warner, member of Congress, said, in opposing the bill: "Petroleum which will stand a fire-test of 110 degrees is safer than baled cotton or baled hay, and as safe as whiskey or turpentine to be carried on steamers. What is the object, then? There can be but one, and I may as well assert it here, although I make no imputation whatever upon the Committee of Commerce, or any member of it. It will put the whole carrying trade of refined petroleum into the hands of the railroads and under the control of ... a monopoly which has the whole carrying trade in the oil business on railroads, and they will make it as impossible for refiners to exist along the lakes and the Ohio River as it is impossible for them now to exist on any of the railroads of the country." Why the trust, though it was the greatest shipper, should seek to close up channels of cheapness like the waterways was plain enough. They were highways where privilege was impossible. With its competitors shut off the railroads by privilege, and off the rivers by law, it would be competition proof.
The United States authorities, too, moved against Rice, responsive to the same "pull" that made jumping-jacks for monopoly out of committees of commerce and railway kings. When the Mississippi River steamer U.P. Schenck arrived at Vicksburg with 56 barrels of independent oil, the United States marshal came on board to serve a process summoning the officers and owners to answer to the charge of an alleged violation of law. Several steamboats were similarly "libelled."
"We were threatened a great many times," the representative of the steamboat company told Congress.[412] The steamboat men were put to great expense and without proper cause. When the cases came to trial they were completely cleared in every instance. But the prosecution had done its work of harassing competition. The success of the campaign of 1879 in Ohio was now repeated over a wider field. The attack of 1886, "in a period of five months," Rice said before Congress, "shut up fourteen of my agencies out of twenty-four, and reduced the towns we had been selling in from seventy-three to thirty-four."[413] This was a loss in one year of 79 per cent., or about four-fifths of his business.