What right, then, has the oil producer to complain? Why, if all that is alleged is true, will they persist in sinking more wells, when, as they say, they are controlled by the Standard Oil Company? No one forces them to lose money by continuing in the business. Let them find other employment. They do not show that the Standard Oil Company does anything that combined capital on their part and equal business ability could not effect.
The cry of monopoly in this case is altogether unfounded, those opposed to the Standard Oil Company having just as much right to do all that that company does, and, therefore, there can be no monopoly, because they have no exclusive powers.
As to the railway companies, they can afford and have a right to transport the tonnage offered them by the Standard Oil Company at less cost, because it costs them less to do a regular and large business than an irregular and smaller one. They would simply be acting in accordance with business principles the world over.
These are the arguments, the statement of the position of a successful combination confident in its resources and of victory in the coming struggle. The justness, the correctness of the doctrines enunciated, and the wisdom of so doing at this crisis, we do not propose to criticise; but it is very safe to say that if the prosperity of the complainants depends upon relief in this direction they may as well cease producing.
There are too many of them for harmonious and concerted action against the powerful corporations they complain of; and if they should succeed in securing equal transportation facilities the prices would still be regulated by the monopolists, who carry more than four-fifths of the accumulated stock of the oil regions.
The proposed appeal to Congress to pass some law whereby each producer can compel railroad companies to carry his produce at regular rates, amounts to a confession of the desperate straits of the producers and of their weakness as well; and even if successful, which is most improbable, would not remedy the deplorable existing state of things.
Still lower rates would fail to give relief, with all the present avenues of trade filled to repletion and with an increasing output at the wells. Relief and permanent relief can be found only in the direction we have before indicated: in the general application of petroleum and its products to the manufacture of gas for illuminating and heating purposes, and its substitution for coal in the metallurgic and other prominent industries of the world.
