Who dare to be just to merit not their own.”—Churchill.
“Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.”—Dean Swift.
“As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.”—John Keats.
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER.
Compared with a petroleum-sketch which did not touch upon the Standard Oil-Company, in different respects the greatest corporation the world has ever known, Hamlet with “the melancholy Dane” left out would be a masterpiece of completeness. Perhaps no business-organization in this or any other country has been more misrepresented and misunderstood. To many well-meaning persons, who would not willfully harbor an unjust thought, it has suggested all that is vicious, grasping and oppressive in commercial affairs. They picture it as a cruel monster, wearing horns and cloven-hoofs and a forked-tail, grown rich and fat devouring the weak and the innocent. Its motives have been impugned, its methods condemned and its actions traduced. If a man in Oildom drilled a dry-hole, backed the wrong horse, lost at poker, dropped money speculating, stubbed his toe, ran an unprofitable refinery, missed a train or couldn’t maintain champagne-style on a lager-beer income, it was the fashion for him to pose as the victim of a gang of conspirators and curse the Standard as vigorously and vociferously as the fish-wife hurled invectives at Daniel O’Connell.
Some folks display most wonderful agility
In their attempts to shift responsibility.
The reasons for this are as numerous as the sands of the sea. It is no new thing to shove upon other shoulders the burden that belongs properly to our own. In their fiery zeal to convict somebody people have been known to bark up the wrong tree, to charge the innocent with all sorts of offences and to get off their base entirely. Such people and such methods did not die out with the passing of the Salem witch-burners. The Standard was made the scape-goat of the evil deeds alleged to have been contemplated by the unsavory South-Improvement Company. That odious combine, which included a number of railroad-officials, oil-operators and refiners, disbanded without producing, refining, buying, selling or transporting a gallon of petroleum. “Politics makes strange bedfellows” and so does business. Among subscribers for South-Improvement stock were certain holders of Standard stock and also their bitterest opponents; among those most active in giving the job its death-blow were prominent members of the Standard Oil-Company. The projected spoliation died “unwept, unhonored and unsung,” but it was not a Standard scheme.