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CHAPTER VIII "no!" There has never been any real break in the plans revealed, " partly born," " and buried " in 1872. From then till now, in 1893, every fact that has come to the surface has shown them in full career. If they were buried, it was as seed is— for a larger crop of the same thing. The people had made peace, in 1872, on the pledge of "perfect equality " on the highways. Hardly had they got back to their work when they began to feel the pinch of privilege again. The Pennsylvania road alone is credited with any attempt to keep faith, and that only "for some months." " Gradually," as a committee of the people wrote to the managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, " the persons constituting the South Improvement Company were placed by the roads in as favorable a position as to rates and facilities as had been stipulated in the original contract with that company." ' As soon as pipe lines were proved practicable they were built as rapidly as pipes and men to put them in the ground could be had, but there was some lubricant by which they kept constantly slipping into bankruptcy. They were " frozen out," as one of their builders said, " summer as well as winter." By 1874-, twenty pipe lines had been laid in the oil country. Eighty per cent. of them died off in that and the following year.' The mere pipes did not die, they are there yet; but the ownership of the many who had built them died. There were conservatives in the field to whom competition 'Trusts, Congress, 1888, p. 363. Testimony. New York Assembly "Hepburn" Report, 1879, p. 1693. EQUALITY THAT DOES NOT EQUALIZE was as distasteful as to the socialists. To "overcome sue. competition," and to insure them " a full andregular" and " remunerative business " in pipe lines, in the language of t...
