infancy, had already reached great proportions. Each railroad was
eager to get the largest share of the traffic of transporting oil.
Rockefeller, ruminating in his small refinery at Cleveland, Ohio, had
conceived the revolutionary idea of getting a monopoly of the
production and distribution of oil, obliterating the middleman, and
systematizing and centralizing the whole business.

Then and there was the modern trust born; and from the very inception
of the Standard Oil Company Rockefeller and his associates
tenaciously pursued their design with a combined ability and
unscrupulousness such as had never before been known since the rise
of capitalism. One railroad after another was persuaded or forced
into granting them secret rates and rebates against which it was
impossible to compete. The railroad magnates--William H. Vanderbilt,
for instance--were taken in the fold of the Standard Oil Company by
being made stockholders. With these secret rates the Standard Oil
Company was enabled to crush out absolutely a myriad of competitors
and middlemen, and control the petroleum trade not only of the United
States but of almost the entire world. Such fabulous profits
accumulated that in the course of forty years, after one unending
career of industrial construction on the one hand, and crime on the
other, the Standard Oil Company was easily able to become owners of
prodigious railroad and other systems, and completely supplant the
scions of the magnates whom three or four decades before they had
wheedled or brow-beaten into favoring them with discriminations.


CORPORATE WEALTH AND LABOR UNIONS.

The effects of this great industrial transition were clearly visible