Jasper County Democrat, Volume 9, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 May 1906 — WASHINGTON LETTER. [ARTICLE]

WASHINGTON LETTER.

Political and General Gossip of the National Capital. From our Special Correspondent: Such a sensation as has stirred official circles as the result of Commissioner Garfield's report on the Standard Oil Company, has not been known in Washington for a long time. There was little commendation for the report of the Bureau of Corporations in the Beef Trust case, and what little there was was negatived by the now famous immunity decision of .Judge Humphrey. But the Standard Oil Report is only a little less notable than the message with which the President sends it to Congress. The report in itself is an arraignment of the oil company that is perhaps not as entertaining reading as Miss Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company, but it contains much the same facts, told in a more official way and it is the most severe arraign merit of a corporation that has ever been known from such a high official source. It charges specifically that the Standard Oil Com- j pany Ims the practical monopoly of the oil business of the United States. It refines and handles' 23,000,000 out of 26,000,000 barrels of oil produced in this; Country each year. The few re-j finers that arc outside the control of the trust are those who are in

close touch with an oil producing j territory and who can supply a. limited area around their refineries. 1 This supremacy of the Standard, j the report says, has been gained | by all sorts of unlawful practices J It has recurved rebates in dtrectl defiance of the law till it was i found out when it quickly die- I continued the practice. It lias juggled the railroad tariffs and while some casps kept inside the strict letter of the law, it has taken all sorts of advantages that thej law never contemplated. It lias stuck to the State tariffs cm oil carrying and pieced them together so that the oil seemingly for State consumption only was really carried over the interstate routes. In various ways it has made a direct profit of $750,000 a year out of this unjust in many cases absolutely illegal railway discrimination. But the total of the case in which this sort of a profit was made, the report does not profess to have discovered. At the same time the profit out of the railway rates was a mere bagatelle to the amount that the company was able to make out of choking off competition and mulcting the public of outrageous prices for oil. The report states that half a cent a gallon is accepted by the trade as a fair profit to make on refined oil. Instead of this it was found that the price charged by the Standard in territory where it had succeeded in killing competition was from three to five cents higher than in the territory ! where it had to compete with the I few independent companies. Handling 23,tK)t),tXKJ barrels of oil a year, as it was shown to do, this) r made a tidy profit for the hard j working corporation.

The officers of the company ; claimed that they had merely taken advantages of natural conditions and that it was the hard ' work and foresight of the com-j pany to which it owed its supremacy in the oil field. The pipe- ; line mode of transportation was cited as one instance of this. But the report shows that the pipe liae idea, Hsjde from not being the invention of the Standard, was bought up and controlled by the enormous power of money behind the company and that instead of 1 being a national advantage, it like many other of the so called natural advantages, was simply the reBult of cruel and killiug competition on the part of *he great company The report cites particular in- ‘ stances where the law has been ! openly or secretly violated, giving! and places that bring the grand total of the railroad dis-! criminations atone up to | of a million dollars a year. Mr (iarfield says in this connection. ‘I have called attention to these! specific instances merely to show the methods by which discrimination was attained and the devices which if legal are still merely devices to obtain exactly the same results as would be obtained by rebates on interstate business. If the existing law merely prohibits the particular device for obtaining discrimination and permits the same result to be accomplished in a different way, then the legislation is to that extent a sham.” t t t The President’s message with which the report was sent to Congress was as biting as the report itself. He says the report shows that not only the Rate Bill but the Alcohol Bill ought to be passed, the first to give the Inter-

state Commerce Commission power to deal summarily with the evils of the present monopolistic situation and the lutter to open an avenue of competition that even the Standard Oil Company could not dose to the farmer and the others of the country who are entitled to relief from the intolerable burdens that this great monopoly has fastened on the people. The President says very clearly that the argument so often urged against governmenfkl control of corporations was that it tended to still© the spirit of personal initiative on which the prosperity of the country depended. But he says it has been abundantly proved that the tyranieal corporations which cau force even the railroads to truckle to them and do their bidding, do more to stifle personal initative than any other force and that we must pass laws putting it out of the power of the railroads to comply with the monopolistic demands of the great trosts. He crllb attention, too, to the feature of the report that says not only the Standard Oil Company but the Sugar Trust and other great interests have consistently defied the law and that it has been the exception rather than the rule for the American Sugar Refining Company to ever pay the full

legal tariff on its goods out of New York. In conclusion the President makes the radical announcement that the time is ripe for the United States to absolutely refuse to relinquish control over the coal and oil lands that are still a part of the public domain.