Introductory material (continued 6)

The lawyer was pressed to tell how Albert could get out of his arrangement with his company. They could not get along without him, and were not likely to discharge him.

"If they won't release him or buy him out, the only other way," said the lawyer, "is to leave them, and take the consequences. If he has entered into a contract and violated it, I presume there will be a liability for damages as well as for the debts."

"I think there is other ways for Albert to get out of it," said the representative of the Vacuum method in commerce and morals.

"I see no way except to back out or sell out; no other honorable way," persisted the lawyer.

"Suppose he should arrange the machinery so it would bust up or smash up, what would the consequences be?"

"If negligently, carelessly, not purposely done, he would be only civilly liable for damages caused by his negligence; but if it was wilfully done, there would be a further criminal liability for malicious injury to the property of the company."

"You wouldn't want me, would you," said the poor man to his late employer and friend, "to do anything to lay myself liable?"

"You have been police justice," said the Vacuum man to the lawyer, "and have had some experience in criminal law. I would like to have you look up the law carefully on that point, and we will see you again."[461] Or, in effect: "See about how much crime we can commit," District Attorney Quinby paraphrased it afterwards to the jury.

In a day or so the two managers of the Vacuum—father and son—came back again with Albert.

"Have you looked up that matter, Mr. Truesdale?" asked they.

"Yes, I have looked it up."

"What do you think about it?"

"My impression has not changed. Such a course would involve him in a criminal liability if he did it on purpose. Everybody who advised or counselled him in such a course would be equally liable with him. The consequences, if you follow that course, would be that you would get into State's prison. If he is an honest man he won't think of taking any such action as that. I advise him to keep out of any such thing."

"Such things will have to be found out before they can be punished," was the Vacuum reply. "They will have to find him before they can do anything to him. We will take care of him." "Having in mind," said District Attorney Quinby to the jury, "what happened afterwards—that they should spirit him away."

"The suggestion is altogether wrong," persisted the lawyer. "The action would certainly be very hazardous as well as wrong."

On leaving, the elder of the two, evidently persisting in his plan, said to the lawyer, "If you want to communicate with Albert, you can do so through C.M."[462]—his son.

These men were too careless to note that the lawyer they were talking to was not their lawyer, but Albert's. When they were brought to trial for the crime that followed, and Albert, repentant, told the truth, the lawyer was free to testify against them. "I am entirely willing," said Albert in court, "that Mr. George Truesdale shall state what took place. I withdraw any legal objections I might have."

The accident which has let us see how the employés of a trust coolly debated with lawyers the policy of blowing up a competitor's works, is one of the few glimpses the American public will ever get into the relations of great legal lights and law-reformers with the mighty capitalists who wreck railroads and execute wholesale corruption of courts, legislatures, and trustees, and evade and transgress the laws with the sure march of those who know that indictments and bail-bonds and verdicts of "guilty" and the penitentiary are only for men not rich enough to plan crime "by advice of counsel." When such men went marauding through the treasury of a great railroad and the courts of an Empire State, we saw the greatest of law-reformers, with a host of legal luminaries, picketing and scouting for them. Every sound in nature is phonographed somewhere, as its waves strike, and Judgment Day will be rich with the revelations from these invisible rolls of the confidential conversations between "trustees" and counsel, who are not honorable lawyers as George Truesdale was, prostituting their functions as "officers of courts" into those of officers of crime.

All these trips from Buffalo to Rochester for these interviews made bad breaks in the construction of the works of the new company at Buffalo. The partners, who were wholly dependent upon Albert's knowledge and experience for the building of the refinery, and running it when built, were mystified and alarmed. Time and again he ran away without a word to them, and all work would stop until he came back. When he was on hand his task did not prosper as if his heart were still in it. When one of the three stills of the refinery had been set up ready for use, and before any oil was run, Albert went up to Rochester again. At this rendezvous the sinister suggestion of "doing something" was repeated. "You go back to Buffalo and construct the pipes and stills so that they cannot make good oil, and then if you would give them a little scare ... they not knowing anything about the business ... you know how to do it." Swearing he would not consent, but already succumbing to this temptation, as he had given way to the threat of ruin, he replied as before: "I don't propose to do anything to make myself criminally liable."[463] At their suggestion he took a man they sent all through the new works, showing him how the stills had been constructed, how the oil was to be made, and all the details of the refinery.[464]

The day came at last—long expected, delayed by these unaccountable absences—when the members of the new company were to have the happiness of seeing their enterprise set going. The one still that was ready was filled with crude oil. The morning of the start Albert weighted down the safety-valve with heavy iron, and packed it with plaster of Paris. "Fire this still," he said to his fireman, "as heavy as you possibly can." The fireman did as he was ordered. During the forenoon Albert came to him. "Damn it!" he said, "you ain't firing this still half. Fire this still! I want you to fire this still! You ain't got no fire under it!" He took the shovel himself and threw some coal in, although there was, as the fireman expressed it, "an inordinary fire." The fire-box grew cherry red.[465]

Albert knew well enough what the next chapter in the history of his associates was likely to be. He had carried a dark-lantern into the still-room one day when he was superintendent of the Vacuum. "I was badly burned by the explosion," he testified before the coroner's jury investigating the explosion in Rochester, in 1887. There were four explosions in the Vacuum works while he was there. In the second, four men were burned. As one of them ran to get water, with his clothes burning, he set fire to the gas coming out of the sewer. Flames flashed all about him. "There's hell all around!" he exclaimed. The third explosion came from an overheated condensing-pipe, and destroyed one of the buildings. The fourth burned up three tanks. Remembering all this, he now took himself off to the grounds of the Atlas Company, out of harm's reach. The brickwork about the still cracked apart with the heat.

But the "smash-up or something" had not been thoroughly arranged. Despite the heavy weight and the packing of plaster, the safety-valve lifted itself under the unusual pressure, and was a safety-valve yet. It was blown open, and a large mass of vapor rose and spread. This was the real accident: that the safety-valve broke loose instead of keeping the gases in to explode, as had been planned. The spreading vapor was not steam, as that had not been admitted to the still, but the gas of distilling petroleum, as inflammable as gunpowder. There was danger still, as great almost as that of explosion. A spark of fire, and it would have wrapped all within its reach in flames. The boiler fires were but twenty feet distant; not far from them the distilled oil was being gathered in the "tail-house"; near the tail-house stood the tanks of crude oil, hundreds of barrels of the fuel that conflagration loves—the kind of fuel the cooks use who, beginning with kerosene for kindling, make the whole house into a stove, and cook themselves and the family with the breakfast.

The kindly wind of a June day carried the cloud of gas away from the fire until it passed out of sight. The unsuspecting, inexperienced men, whose lives and property had been at the mercy of explosion, knew nothing of their peril until years afterwards. The worst they knew then was that the "batch" of 200 barrels of petroleum was spoiled, and that Albert, the only practical man among them, was gone, leaving them crippled for a year. They waited for him, but he did not come. They looked for him, but could not find him. Matthews went to the depot night after night, sometimes at midnight, or later, to watch the trains, but Albert never came.

"What would be the consequences?" Albert was asked afterwards in court, when he was telling about "the pretty heavy fires" he had made under the still—"what would be the consequences in case too hot fires were applied, and the gas should blow off the pipes and become ignited?"

"The consequences would be that, if ignited, there would be a fire."[466]

An Associated Press despatch from Louisville, Kentucky, June 30, 1890, describing an explosion in an oil refinery there, and the "five acres of fire" that followed, reproduces for us the picture which it had been planned to paint at Buffalo as part of the panorama of "the ordinary rules of supply and demand." A tank-car had been opened to run some oil out. As the workmen lifted the cap from the manhead of the tank a cloud of gas poured forth. It had been generated simply by the heat of the summer sun, without the aid of an "inordinary" hot fire. The men jumped and ran. Before they had taken a dozen steps the vapor, spreading over the ground and moving with the wind, had reached one of the sheds near by in which there was a fire. There was a flash. The men were bathed in a lake of fire. They ran with the flames streaming from them. At the infirmary their bodies were found to be charred in spots, literally roasted alive, and the flesh dropped off as their clothing was removed. Three men died and several were injured.

Several years after the Buffalo explosion, when those convicted for their part in it were fighting for stay of proceedings, new trial, anything to escape sentence, and were trying by every means in their power to impress upon the public the altogether innocent character of the little incident at the works of their rival, something happened at their own works—the Vacuum in Rochester—which gave the people an appalling sense of the terrors of the new school of supply and demand. Naphtha is one of the by-products of petroleum distillation, and is used by the gas companies in the manufacture of the greased air they furnish under the name of gas. The Vacuum Company were selling their naphtha to the Rochester Gas Company. It was delivered to the gas company through a pipe line. On the afternoon of December 21, 1887, there was an explosion on Platt Street, Rochester, tearing away the pavement, shattering the basement of a building, and filling the air with missiles. In a few seconds another explosion occurred a short distance away, making a hole in the street several feet in diameter, from which came large volumes of smoke and flame. A third and fourth "bust-up" rapidly followed, and then a fifth, in the Clinton Flouring Mill, tearing away a considerable portion of the building, blowing off the roof and upper stories of the Jefferson Mill adjoining, and shattering the Washington Mill. The Jefferson and Clinton and Washington mills were burned to the ground. People were killed by flying débris, burned to death, smashed by falling walls, crippled by jumping from the upper stories of factories and mills on fire. "There is probably no chemical product," says Professor Joy, of Columbia College, "which has occasioned the loss of so many lives and the destruction of so much property as naphtha.... From its highly explosive and inflammable nature it has proved little better in the hands of ignorant people than so much gunpowder."

"The counsel for the defence," said District Attorney Quinby, in summing up the case before the jury, "laughed at the idea of Matthews and his associates coming to Buffalo with a little money to compete. I congratulate him that instead of defending for conspiracy he is not here to-day pleading for the defendants' lives. If a person had been killed, and it had been under the advice and instruction of his clients, he would have been differently situated from what he is to-day. How well you men may be thankful that the gases from this still did not flow down and, becoming ignited, explode and kill the fireman! You ought to get down on your knees and thank your God that Providence prevented any such terrible thing as that for you."

After the "bust-up" had been planned, and before it was done, one of the Vacuum managers went to New York, where the "trustees" for whom he was managing the company were. After the "bust-up" Albert heard by telegram from New York, as had been arranged, and went to meet his old employer. "What do you say to going down to Boston?" he was asked on his arrival. Later a man came in and was introduced by the name of one of the three trustees who purchased and directed the Vacuum. On leaving, this "trustee" said: "I will see you again if you do not go to Boston." He thus showed that he knew of the plan that Albert should be taken away, and that they should go to Boston. The manager of the Vacuum now gave the world a genuine illustration of the harmony of labor and capital. He couldn't let Albert out of his sight. They went to Boston on the Fall River boat. The representative of a hundred millions took the laborer into his own state-room, and at Boston carried him into the splendors of Young's Hotel, where he registered, naming himself "and friend," and they shared one bedroom. They went to church together, and to Nantasket Beach, his friend introducing Albert to those whom they met under an assumed name. "You don't want to be known here," he said, "and I will introduce you by the name of Milner."

"That is the name I was known by while I was there."

"Albert has nothing to fear," said District Attorney Quinby on his trial. "He had never been in Boston before in his life. He had no acquaintance there. There was no reason why he should be registered 'and friend' at the hotel. There was no reason, so far as he was concerned, that he should be introduced under a fictitious name, except that his employer had been schooled in the wonderful university known as" the oil combination. In Boston, on a Monday, on the Common, within sight of the equestrian statue of the Father of his Country, his former employer made a contract with Albert to pay him $1500 a year for doing nothing except staying away from Buffalo.

"You won't have much to do, and you can stay here in Boston, and keep away from those fellows, and we will protect you."

"Who's going to make up if those fellows come on and sue me for damages? Who will make up this loss that I have been going to by sacrificing my property?"

"Leave that to me; I will fix that all right. You do just as I tell you, and you will come out all right.... Go wherever you like, stop where you like, and we will pay all your expenses while you are here."[467]

Albert loafed about Boston several weeks, sometimes helping to roll a barrel of oil in the Vacuum's store. When he wanted money he asked for it and got it. He had once been a hard drinker. Destruction was as carelessly invited upon the soul of a poor brother as upon the lives and property of competitors. He hung around Boston and Rochester nearly a year. Then his old employer, who was in California, sent for him to come there to help in a fruit cannery, his salary continuing as before. From the moment he deserted his partners, as Judge Edward Hatch, the counsel for Matthews, stated in the civil suit for damages in this conspiracy, Albert "never earned enough to cover the end of your knife-blade with salt at your dinner. But they pay him, in salary and bonus, over $4000. Why? To get him away, and to stifle lawful, legitimate, and honest competition; to stifle that which brings into every poor man's home an article of necessity at a cheaper rate." He stayed in California a few months, and, finally, sickened of the disgraceful part he was playing, turned at bay, and gave notice that he was going to leave. "This is kind of sudden," the agent of his employers replied, but said he would write to the principal director in New York and advise that he release him. "You will give me time, won't you? You know it takes a couple of weeks or longer to do business from here to New York." Albert waited, and in time the word came from New York. "I have heard from these parties, and they are willing to release you."[468]

Albert, who had put himself into the extraordinary position in which he was on the repeated pledges of the tempters that they would make it "all right" with him, and protect him from loss and harm, found that he had put his "trust in princes." When he came to settle he expected that those for whom he had sacrificed his honor, his property, and his career would make him some compensation. In answer to the question how much they ought to make up to him, he named $5000 or $10,000, which was certainly little enough, in view of the fact that the business he had sacrificed to them was one in which, as the Vacuum's career showed, $100 shares came to be worth $2666 each. But the representative of the trust declared he could not think of such a thing, and in full of all obligations gave him nothing but the balance due of the wages agreed on. Then he asked Albert to hold himself still further at their service. As they parted, he said: "Now we have settled up; now we are good friends.... If anything ever comes up in this matter I would like to have you stand by us.... We will see that you are paid all right, and give you $25 a day while we need your services." Albert replied that he did not feel under any obligations to the oil combination. "I do not know as my interest lays that way. I do not think I shall do anything to benefit them; they have injured me all that they can; they have switched me all around, all over the country; they have got me out of employ, not given me anything to do, which I sought to have them do. I do not think they have used me right, and I have sacrificed considerable money by this transaction, and you have always promised that it would be made good, and you have not done so."[469]

CHAPTER XIX

THROUGH THE WOMAN'S EYES

Matthews knew nothing and suspected nothing about the worst part of the plot against him until Albert's lawyer, Mr. Truesdale, nearly four years later, was called upon to testify in the suit Matthews brought for damages against the Vacuum people. This suit was to recover from them for having enticed Albert away, and having persecuted Matthews with false and malicious suits; but Truesdale's evidence at once revealed that there had been a deeper damnation still in the conspiracy against him. Mr. Matthews, one day on the street in Buffalo, ran across Albert, who had just come back from California.

"No man ever used another meaner than I have you," said the now repentant man to him, volunteering all the information he had, and agreeing to testify if called on. This revelation made the farmer-refiner a reformer. This was the public's business. If such things could be plotted and done with impunity by one man against another, there was an end forthwith of every liberty the republic boasted. Especially menacing was such a conspiracy when concerted by the rich fanatic of business against the poorer citizen to prevent the latter from disputing the claim that a great market was a private preserve, and that the right to trade in it is a privilege which "belongs to us."[470] Matthews could have used his discovery as an irresistible weapon to force his enemy to his knees, but he laid his evidence before the district attorney. This official presented it to the grand-jury, which found that the facts warranted indictments. When the first indictment was quashed on technical grounds a second grand-jury, sifting the facts, agreed with the first that the accused should be held to answer in the criminal courts. This was six years after the crime. The five persons indicted were the two former owners of the Vacuum, now the resident managers of it for the combination, and the three members of the oil trust, as the combination then called itself, who had bought the Vacuum for it, and had been elected by the trustees directors to manage it for them, and had so managed it even to the most picayune details. The case caught the ears of the world, not because crime was charged against men who had dazzled even the gold-filmed eyes of their epoch by the meteor-like flash of their flight from poverty into a larger share of "property"—the property of others—than any other group of millionaires had assimilated in an equal period; not for that, but because the charges of crime against these quickest-richest men were to be brought to trial. Members of the combination had been often accused; they had been indicted. This was the first time, as District Attorney Quinby said in his speech to the jury, that they had found a citizen honest enough and brave enough to stand up against them—the only one. "There is no man," he said, "so respected to-day in Buffalo as he for the method he has used to bring these men to justice." He succeeded in doing alone what the united producers of the oil regions failed to do, although their resources were infinitely greater. The people of the entire oil country failed utterly to do so much as get the members of the oil combination, when indicted for conspiracy in 1879, to come into court to be tried. All its principal men were indicted—the president, the vice-president, the secretary, the cashier, and others. They could not even be got to give bail. One of them had said when the indictments were found, that the case would never be tried, and it never has been. The Governor would not move to have those of the accused who were non-residents extradited, as he would have done, does daily, in the case of poor men, and the courts so tangled up the questions of procedure that the people withdrew, and left the indictments, as they remain to this day, on file in the Clarion County court, swinging like the body of some martyr on a road-side gibbet in the pagan days, polluting the air and mocking justice.[471]

That the trust was thoroughly alarmed, and saw the necessity of rallying all its resources to save itself, was apparent from the formidable display with which it appeared in the court-room. Present with the five defendants, as if also on trial—a solid phalanx—were its president, the vice-president, the manager of its pipe-line system, the principal representatives of the trust in Buffalo, and many others. Their regular attorney of New York was present with two of the leading lawyers of Buffalo. Besides these there was a distinguished man from Rochester, reputed the ablest lawyer in western New York, whose voice is often heard in the Supreme Court at Washington. He had two important members of the Rochester bar as assistants, one of them in the summing up unmercifully scored by the District Attorney for fixing witnesses; and, not least, a well-known United States District Attorney, who made the convention speeches by which a distinguished citizen of Buffalo was nominated, successively and successfully, for Sheriff, Mayor, Governor, and President. The defendants come here, said the people's attorney, with the best legal talent the country affords, the best the profession can furnish; for the trust—"they are practically the defendants in this action—with its great wealth, has the choice of legal talent." Other eminent lawyers were also consulted, but were not present. Never was a weak defence made the most of with more skill than these gentlemen exhibited upon the trial.... But great as was the ability of the defence, Mr. George T. Quinby, the District Attorney, and his assistant, William L. Marcy, proved a match for them. Every political and moneyed influence that could be brought to bear was used to mislead the District Attorney, but all to no purpose. The jury could see that the complainant, Charles B. Matthews, did not get the indictment to sell out, otherwise he would have sold it out and not have insisted upon a trial. The fact that the case was on trial, at a cost of many thousands of dollars to the defendants, was conclusive upon that point. An emissary, trying to get Matthews to call off the District Attorney and to hush up this criminal prosecution, said the oil trust could "give him anything, even to being governor of a Western territory."[472] "You will have a chance," Matthews told the District Attorney, "to line the street from your house to the City Hall with gold bricks." But this public prosecutor had no price. He grasped the full scope of this extraordinary case, which involved not only a crime against persons and against the people, but against that true commerce of reciprocal and equal service on which alone the new civilization of humanity can rest.

The room in the Buffalo court-house, where the case was being heard, was bright with the sunshine of a May day, putting out the shadows of indictments and verdicts lurking in corners and pigeon-holes. Although it was a criminal case, the on-looker saw, strange as it seemed, that whatever strain there was in the situation appeared to be felt least by the accused, and most by the public and the jury. The nearer the eyes of the on-looker travelled towards the prisoners, the lighter and brighter was the scene. Close to the accused sat a bench full of notables, evidently friends lending moral support. That the bench was occupied by men of importance was evident. They were supported by platoons of eminent counsel and detectives. Only the judge betrayed no consciousness of the presence of the herd of millionaires. The whisperings and pointings and namings by one spectator to another showed that the people's curiosity was greatly excited by the sight of the richest men in the country, if not in the world, with attendant millionaire esquires in or about the dock of a criminal court. On this particular day the notables and their suite had come in specially good-humor. Nods of kindly recognition went about and smiles rippled everywhere as, settled into their seats, they listened to the recital by the witnesses. It had been as good as a play to hear the working-man, Albert, tell on the stand how he had been bribed and threatened with ruin until he yielded to the suggestion that he should "bust up" the works of his friends, partners, and employers, and run away. There had been nothing funny to Albert in those threats: "We will ruin you," "We will crush you," "You will lose what little you have got left."[473]

"Then the compensation you got was $300 and the pleasure of selling out your friends?" Albert was asked by one of the great lawyers.[474] Albert did not smile, but "they seemed to enjoy hugely," reported the press, "the idea that men could be bought so cheap." The eminent counsel of the prisoners took the cue from their clients, and treated the proceedings as a farce. When the State's Attorney was questioning his witnesses, they objected to his questions with laughs and sneers until he became indignant, and asked, with considerable emphasis, to have the joke explained to him—a need the jury also felt, as their verdict showed. When the Boston agent of the trust told that his instructions from headquarters were that if there was to be any selling at a loss to let the new competitor have the loss,[475] they all laughed again.

So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box. She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front, in a row, looking straight at me."

The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point—the home-maker's and the home-keeper's—which the smiling row before her were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced, brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked what she was—an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen years, and we had accumulated some property—mortgages and money and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then travelled over the continent for a year—from Buffalo to Boston, to Rochester, to San Francisco.

"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you were going?"

"No, sir."

"Or your wife?"

"No, sir."

While the wife was in Buffalo wondering what had become of her husband, he was in New York with his venerable ex-employer, getting lessons like the following in the secrets of building up a great commercial enterprise:

"The best thing you can do, Albert," said the latter, "is to go and write a telegram, and tell your wife to go back to Rochester."

"You'd better write it; I am a poor writer," said Albert.

"No," he said; "I do not want to appear in this case at all. Write it so," he continued, "that she can move on the Fourth of July, and they can't attach her things."[477]

The first word she got from her husband was this telegram to move between two days, and back to Rochester the dutiful woman packed herself and her things.

"It was two or three weeks before I heard from him direct or knew just where he was," she said.

"I asked Charles"—one of the two managers—"how Al was, and he said Al was all right."

"Would he tell you where he was?" the State's Attorney asked.

"No, sir; when I wrote to my husband I left the direction blank, and gave the letter to Charley. I got an answer through Charley."[478]

For three weeks they would not let her know where her husband was. "Think of that," said the District Attorney. "She had to go and take her poor little letter to her husband, thinking, perhaps, if he was away from her tender care he might get to drinking, because he does drink some; but when with his wife they lived year in and year out without his tasting a drop; ... afraid that he might get to drinking, and that she could not watch over him.... It was a cruel thing to do."

"C. told me to go to the real-estate agents," Albert's wife continued, "and try to sell our property and get it into money. He made out a list of real-estate agents from the city directory. I guess that is all he did about assisting me in the sale of the property."

"I asked C. if my husband could not come home from Boston. I was sick. He said 'Yes.' Al came home and stayed a week or two. Then he went back to Boston. C. told me they did not want the Buffalo company to know where Al was."[479]

Albert was a man infirm under temptation. The employer knew, by fourteen years' acquaintance, the weakness this man had acquired in his service in the army. He gave him idleness, money, temptation, and an assumed name to go to the devil with, if that agent of the trust was to be found in Boston.

"You want to take good care of Al," said the good old man to his clerk in Boston, "and not let him get homesick. If he wants any money, let him have it." Albert travelled the broad way made smooth for him.

"Of course I never went around with him," said the clerk, in a deposition; "a porter that I had was the party that went around with him in the evening. I would hear what was going on, and I could judge about the size of Al's head when he came around in the morning."

With all Albert's faults he kept one dignity to the end which makes him tower above his seducers—the dignity of the laborer. A life's discipline in daily toil had made his whole fibre too honest to enjoy idleness, even at the rate of $1500 a year. He was free to come and go amid the gaudy joys of a great city, as irresponsible under the assumed name given him as if he wore the ring of Gyges. He had money for the asking, and boon companions. But the habit of a lifetime of honest, hard manual work was too deeply ingrained into the very substance of his nature for him to become a cheap American Faust, revelling in a pinchbeck paradise. This simple son of poverty had all his life handled only real things, and had at every point had the mind's native wantonness and riot checked by the hard surface which had calloused his hands, and the outer air which had cooled him as he worked. His were dreams of honest rest earned by honest work, and of family joys. The self-indulgence that was revealed by the "size of his head in the morning" was an animal exuberance that, as the result showed, did but stain the "rose-mesh of his flesh," and went no deeper. Albert could not stand the idleness of his Boston life. He went back to Rochester.

"I want something to do."

"What brings you here?" said his employer. "Go back."

After hanging around the office in Boston a few weeks longer, the workman's nature reasserted itself again. He went back again to Rochester. "I want something to do." "We have not got anything for you to do just now," he was told. "You are all right."[480]

Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well. Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went, as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran, but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife, treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there was not anything that he knew that he could do."

"I don't want Al to go. I won't go. Give him something else to do."

"I have nothing else."[481]

She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half. "I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484]

It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able, by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly. He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of the door.

"Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney, "that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and the testimony was shut out.

Albert's wife kept close to his side, and held him steady. No, Albert did not care to go to Russia. Advertisements of an alum-mine in Corry then began to appear in newspapers where Albert's attention could be called to them. By a lucky chance the captain happened to know the capitalists whose boundless powers of enterprise could find full outlet only by developing the hitherto unsuspected resources of Corry for supplying the nations of the earth with alum. By a joyful coincidence, these capitalists wanted for superintendent of their bottomless alum-mines just such a man as the captain knew his dear Albert to be. Would Albert like to go to Italy to learn the true science of alum manufacture, and to show the effete monarchies how an American could disembowel the earth of its alum? Salary, $5000 and expenses. No, Albert had no unslaked ambition to go to Italy as superintendent of mines of alum, or green cheese, or any other lunar commodity.

At least, Albert would take a drink? That poor Albert would do; and when he failed to come home at night his wife went up and down the streets seeking him. "A persistent effort had been made" by the trust, Mr. Matthews testified, "to get Albert out of the country. I was afraid they would get him away, as he might not be used in this case. Men had been sent there to get him drunk, and had debauched him."[485] Money was potent enough to persuade lawyers to make it a part of their professional duty to help in this. One of the trust's lawyers sat with Albert and its detective in the stall of a cheap saloon, and plied him with liquor to get from him some letters of Matthews' they wanted. "There they sat," said the keeper of the saloon; " ... they got what they called for, probably.... I couldn't tell how many drinks they got into Albert on that occasion; I think they drank there."[486]

While this courtship was in progress with Albert in Pennsylvania, wires were being pulled to get him indicted in New York. The grand-jury of Rochester was asked to indict him for receiving stolen property in a watch trade he had made seven years before. This would have ruined him as a witness in the forthcoming criminal case against the members of the oil trust, but the grand-jury decided that there was no evidence on which to indict. When Adam Cleber, a stolid-looking German laborer, who worked in the same place with Albert in Corry, took the stand for the State at the close, an eager excitement filled the court-room. The State's Attorney was known to have his darkest sensation still in reserve. What it was he would not, of course, disclose in advance, but those hardly less familiar than he with the evidence hinted that the fertile genius of the captain, having exhausted itself in the ideas of the trips to Russia and Italy, had fallen back upon the genius of his superiors, and had arranged to have Albert go a-hunting, and get a "bust-up" as much as possible like the one he had been induced to attempt upon his employers and partners.

"Did the captain tell you what he wanted you to do to Albert?" Cleber was asked.

"Yes—" That was as far as Cleber got.

"I object!" screamed one of the lawyers.

"I propose to show that the captain made a request of this witness in regard to what he should do to Albert, and what he should come and swear to about Albert, there being no truth in the matter he wanted Cleber to swear to," the State's Attorney urged to the Court. The judge took the matter home for consideration over-night, and announced in the morning that he would not admit the evidence. It was acknowledged by one of the lawyers for the members of the trust on trial that he had employed the captain to get evidence for them; but the judge, instead of admitting Cleber's testimony, and leaving the question of its value to be settled by the jury, excluded it.

In his closing speech District Attorney Quinby said: "Why, in Heaven's name, my friends, didn't you place the captain on this witness-stand? He would have been a feast for you and a feast for me. His ways have been curious and sinuous, his methods have been peculiar and corrupting, and they did not dare to put him on the stand because if they did he would have left it to go to prison. That is the reason. They know it."

The brave and steadfast woman told her part of this story on the witness-stand. Her home had been broken up again and again. As she herself said afterwards: "I had to live with my carpets packed, and moved around like a gypsy." Her husband had been tempted to commit a crime which compelled him to lead the life of a fugitive. He had been spirited away and secreted; she had not been allowed to know where he was, and could communicate with him only through a third person; they had moved around, in her expressive phrase, until they had moved into two rooms; the savings of fifteen years' hard work were all gone, and the independent business, in which her husband had just got his footing, swept away. He and she faced the world with no other assets than their child and the palms of their hard-working hands.

"Well, it's taken all we had," she says; "we've lost it all, but I'd rather it would be so than to have the money they have, and go about hiding and sneaking. I'd like money, but not so well as that. When I said to 'Charley,' 'I shall have to sell all my furniture'—'Oh, that's nothing.' And when I told him it had cost us $100 to pay the expenses of selling real estate—'That isn't much.' It wasn't much to them, but it was to us, who had made every dollar by hard work. Well, we'll have to do without the money, and just live along by honest work. We can live that way. We have had all this trouble and lost our money, and haven't made money enough to buy a calico dress."

All the good that had come of this loss of savings and home and honor had gone to those at the bar of justice and their associates sitting in the tickled row before her. On the cross-examination, which was to crush the witness and her damaging testimony, the distinguished counsel, not content with all the suffering and loss already inflicted on this wife, tried to humiliate her still further, but the woman's wit of truth was too much for the lawyer's wit of wile.

"Don't you recollect," the lawyer asked, "that you went to the house of the manager of the Vacuum, and that you saw him in the parlor, and that you asked him to take your husband back?"

"I never asked him to take my husband back."

"Then you did not ask him at the time and place I spoke of?"

"I never asked him anywhere to take him back."

"Don't you recollect upon that occasion being considerably affected, and asking him to take your husband back, and his speaking of the way in which he had left the company, which he characterized as shameful, and that you cried—shed tears?"

"I never asked him to take him back. I recollect going there. I recollect I felt bad, because I was talked to so much about it. I had reason to feel bad. I am trying to tell the truth as near as I can."

"Then what was the occasion of your bad feeling?"

"It was because I thought we were going to lose everything, and would not have nothing left. That is what I felt bad for—was shedding tears for, if I did. I don't know as I did."[487]

Then came the laugh. From millionaire to lesser millionaire went the enlarging laugh. The mighty cortege of the retained ex-judges, famous constitutional and criminal lawyers, detectives, camp-followers laughed. It was the laugh of hundreds of millions, and it clinked and tinkled and rang. As if every mouth were a bagful of gold, and as if every bag had burst, the golden notes of mirth filled the air, and struck the ceiling, and rolled over the floor, rebounded and fell and rose in mellow chimes of sound, and the golden rain dripped everywhere. Millions on millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of the coin of the republic, and in every coin a cackle.

"Yes, they all laughed at me," the little woman told her friends; "it looked like such a great joke to them. Perhaps I did not tell it very well, but I told the truth."

In closing the case the State's Attorney said to the jury: "A sorrow was placed on that woman's heart that can never be removed. One of the pathetic things in this case was that when this woman was on the stand, telling her little story, how they were afraid they might lose the few thousand dollars they had saved, the $6000 or $7000 they had been struggling for for fifteen years, these New York gentlemen with their millions laughed in her face at the idea of her being sorry to lose the pittance of $6000 or $7000. It was the only time in the case, really, I felt that these gentlemen were outraging common decency."[488]

Some time after the trial was over, and sentence passed and satisfied, these men sent for Albert to come to Rochester. He went with witnesses. There in the office of a leading lawyer he was tempted with desperate propositions to do something or say something that would break the force with which these disclosures must act on public opinion. "They need not think," he replied, "that they can get me to make a false oath to let them out of a hole. I would not do it for all the combined wealth of the trust. When my wife was on the stand they laughed her in the face when she told about losing all we had. Do you suppose any man with a particle of American blood could have any love for them? I think as much of my wife and daughter as any of them of theirs, and I will do nothing to disgrace them." This hard-working and hard-living laborer and his wife had, by thirteen or fourteen years of toil and stinting, saved $6000. The laughers had in the same time saved about $300,000,000, and somebody else had done all the work. The poor man and his wife had been afraid that the $300,000,000 would devour the $6000. It said it would, and it had. Shall not they laugh who win?

CHAPTER XX

TAKEN FROM THE JURY BY THE JUDGE

The District Attorney put the president of the light of the world on the stand. His evidence showed that the purchase of the three-quarter's interest in the Vacuum Company, sold because "there were restrictions in the shipments," was made by the three New York men on trial. "They are share-holders in the trust," he said. When they bought the stock they transferred it to the oil trust. He had known of the contemplated purchase. Having thus proved that the three indicted directors from New York on trial were members of the oil trust, and were managing the Vacuum for it, the District Attorney proceeded, in pursuance of a logical plan of inquiry, to bring before the jury what the trust was, and its relations to the companies it covered.

"What is it ... if you know?" the District Attorney asked. The president, through his counsel, objected to the question.

"What is the object of this?" the judge asked the District Attorney.

The trust, the District Attorney explained, owns a majority of the stock of this Vacuum Company and others, and controls the manufacture in this country of substantially all the lubricating and illuminating oils. These defendants belonging to the trust, and "one of these being chairman of a committee of the trust, it was the desire and motive of the three to do away with competition, to destroy and ruin the competitive works in Buffalo."

The Court asked the president of the trust if it was a manufacturing company.

"It is not, your honor."

The Court ruled out the question "What is it?" although in doing so he used language apparently contradicting his ruling, saying, in effect, that it was "quite immaterial what the objects or purposes of the oil trust are, unless these defendants are in some way interested so as to create a motive to do what it is claimed they did do." Again, when the District Attorney sought to ascertain in what other corporations engaged in the manufacture of oil in 1879, 1880, and 1881 the trustees on trial owned stock, it was objected to and the objection sustained, although the Court but a few moments before had said, "I will allow you to show everything these defendants have done upon the question of motive, ... to show what their business is, the companies they have stock in, whether it is an oil company or some other company—that is, any company engaged in the manufacture of oil that would come in competition with the Buffalo company...."

The judge, declaring that he would admit such evidence, refused to admit it. What the District Attorney would have been able to uncover as to the responsibility of the "trustees" for what was done by the subordinate companies, the reader, freer than the jury in this case, can find out for himself.

The nine trustees, of whom three were on trial, owned as their individual property more than half of this as of every establishment in the trust. They decided who were to be elected directors and officers of each company. They exercised full control over these officers when elected. They declared the dividends. The profits of all these shares are put into one purse, and distributed in quarterly dividends among the trustees in proportion to their interest in the trust—the purse-holder.[489] In the case of the Vacuum Company, accordingly, we find that the minutes of stockholders' meetings record the presence of members of the oil trust, in person and by proxy, representing a majority of the stock, electing the officers and directors, and declaring the dividends. How thorough and minute is the supervision over the vassal companies an employé, who had been in the service of the combination for several years in a confidential way, and "had access to every book and paper and their cipher arrangement," has told.[490] They "control every movement of every branch of their business." The subordinate companies "make a report every day of all their business.... They have blanks there on which they make a report of all their shipments, where shipped, and who shipped to, and all their purchases; and they report every month the exact percentage they have made out of their crude oil, of all the different products they get out of it. They report everything in detail."

This was in 1879. Ten years later, in 1888, the testimony of the president shows that the system is the same. "They know the cost at every refinery. They get such reports once in thirty days; each report shows just what it has cost for everything.... Made out on regular blanks."[491]

But when put on the stand in this case, in Buffalo, he had professed himself altogether ignorant of any such reports.[492] Asked if the Vacuum Company had made them, he replied:

"I can't recall any such reports."

Asked if it was obligatory upon the Vacuum Oil Company to make reports, he said:

"I can't state."

But the manager's testimony in the same case shows that the system of reports which his superior "could not recall" was in regular operation.

"There are reports of sales of the Vacuum Oil Company made to certain parties in New York."[493]

The three trustees who bought the control of the Vacuum stock did not keep it for themselves. They transferred it to the trust, and received for it shares in the trust. They were not stockholders in the Vacuum, but stockholders in the trust. It was the trust which was the real stockholder in the Vacuum. The profits on this Vacuum stock, therefore, went into the common fund in which the trust accumulated the profits of all its controlling ownerships in companies all over the country—all over the world. Every trustee shared in the profits of every company so controlled, whether in the United States or Europe or Asia. The president of the trust, now on the witness-stand, was a large participator in the profits of the Vacuum, because he was a large owner in the trust which possessed three-quarters of it. Similarly as to the three trustees indicted and on trial, and every other trustee.[494] The case was interwoven, notwithstanding the exclusion of this by the judge, with evidence that the three members of the trust on trial were the managers of the company for the trust, and were consulted habitually about the current details by the salaried agents.

"After this purchase was made did you continue to represent the purchasers in the management of the affairs of the Vacuum Oil Company?" one of the three was asked.

"I did."

After the purchase of the Vacuum by the trust, Mr. Matthews, before he left to go into business on his own account, had to go to its office in New York half a dozen times, to see the New York directors when he wanted instructions. His testimony on this point covers thirty pages of the official testimony, and shows repeated interviews between him and the members of the trust about every kind of detail of the business of the Vacuum. When Matthews asked the manager of the Vacuum to give him more pay, the latter had told him to speak to one of the trustees—one of the three now on trial. "It will be as he says about it." Again, as to another matter, he said to Matthews: "I cannot tell you. There is no use for me to pretend that we run our business, for we do not."[495]

This evidence must be sought in the original records of the case at Buffalo, as it is left out in the transcript furnished by the trust to the committee of Congress, which represents the case against the two local managers only. The Rochester manager, after the explosion, and at the time of sending for Albert to come to New York, telegraphed to his son: "Our views with regard to Albert confirmed." By whom? as Matthews' lawyer asked. The manager saw one of the three accused trustees in New York after he returned from the trip to Boston to hide Albert. "I told him that I had hired him," he testified.

The trustee denied this, as the president denied the monthly reports. But he has himself furnished the evidence that his employé told the truth. In their answer in court to the allegations of the suit against them for damages, he and the other two trustees concerned in the Vacuum direction testified that they advised the Rochester managers "to endeavor to retain the said" Albert, ... "and after" he "had left the employment of the Vacuum Oil Company ... they further advised that he should be re-employed if it could be done by reasonable increase of his wages. They were afterwards informed that he had been re-employed." This shows they knew about the negotiations before, during, and after. They knew the man was to have more wages, though the increase was only $300 a year, and their income was millions yearly. When he had been gotten away they were informed of that too. The District Attorney knew all about this answer in the civil case, but under the statutes of New York it could not be used in a criminal prosecution against those who had made it. He put the trustee on the stand, and did his best to get him to tell the same story, but in vain.

The body-guard of lawyers surrounding the great men who made the court-room a veritable curiosity-shop for the people of Buffalo, did a deal of acting throughout the trial to impress on the jury that the whole proceeding was a farce. They laughed and yawned and pooh-poohed, and sneered at the District Attorney's questions and points, and went through all kinds of dumb-shows of indignation and ennui that their clients should be so needlessly called on to waste priceless time. But this could not prevent their faces from lengthening as the story was told by witness after witness, as more than one observant reporter saw and noted. When the evidence was all in, and District Attorney Quinby had closed his case, the situation was desperate. There was no doubt about that. The great men of the trust on trial had been proved to be the actual directors of the Vacuum at every turn of its daily affairs. Before any evidence was introduced for the defence, one of the distinguished lawyers arose and moved the discharge of the three members of the trust, who were a majority of the Board of Directors of the Vacuum Company, and managed it for the trust. The prosecution were not taken unawares by the motion. The District Attorney's able assistant, William L. Marcy, had gathered all the precedents and equipped himself to resist the discharge. He and the District Attorney fought hard to have the principals in the company go to the jury with their agents, but in vain. Mr. Marcy pointed out that, as shown in the case of The People vs. Mather, "to charge partners as conspirators it is not necessary even to show that they were the original conspirators. It is sufficient if at a subsequent time they become party to it by accepting the benefits derived from the conspiracy. The case lays that down in exact terms."

The Judge: "Must there not be an adoption?"

Mr. Marcy: "That is an adoption—accepting the benefits."

The Judge: "They may accept the benefits without knowing."

Mr. Marcy: "Then the jury may infer that knowledge from all the circumstances. The jury are the tribunal to determine whether or not the parties had the knowledge." Mr. Marcy pointed out that there was everything to lead the jury to infer that these men were parties to the plan. "Where did the meetings of the Board of Directors take place? At Rochester, where the works are? No; at New York, where these men carried on their other business. The Rochester representatives dance in attendance wherever these New York parties desire them to go." He pointed out to the judge that the trustee whom Albert met in New York after the explosion knew of the plan to take him to Boston. He showed that the same trustee, when remonstrated with by Matthews for bringing patent suits without foundation, said that he intended to carry them on, and if he was beaten in one court, he would carry them to a higher court. Just in the same way the Rochester representative of the trust had said: "I will bring lawsuits against you. I will get an injunction against you." "When the Rochester manager," said Mr. Marcy, "hired Albert, he did not pretend to be able to make a bargain until he had been to New York and consulted about it. He was in New York before he telegraphed to him to come to New York. This significant fact points home the conspiracy upon the gentlemen who reside in New York."

But the judge, and not the jury, rendered the verdict as to the three members of the trust on trial. He failed to remember or observe the law that leaves it to the jury to render the verdict. He announced that he had decided to grant the motion for their discharge. There was silence in the court-room for a moment. Then: "Gentlemen of the jury, hearken to your verdict as advised by the Court," came in sonorous tones from the clerk; "you find the defendants"—naming the three members of the oil trust at the bar—"not guilty of the crime, as charged in the indictment, so say you all."

The jury looked scared at being addressed so peremptorily, but said nothing.

"The New York men looked happy," said one of the observers, "but their Rochester associates and codefendants did not smile." Upon the discharge of the trustees, one of the Buffalo dailies said that whether there was any conspiracy at all is an undecided question, but it should be remembered that the oil trust and the Vacuum Oil Company "have been honorably acquitted of the charge of having anything to do with the matter. As the case now stands, it is simply The People against"—the two Rochester managers.

Poor men! It was for this that they succumbed to the attacks of the oil trustees upon their business, sold them for $200,000 three-quarters of a concern which produced $300,000 in dividends in one year for the lucky conquerors, became vassals instead of masters in their own refinery. It was for $10,000 a year, divided into $6500 for one and $3500 for the other, that they undertook to fetch and carry for their suzerains, even to the gates of the penitentiary; and when discovery and conviction came, to bear in silence upon their own shoulders the guilt and shame from which others got only "more."

The trial of the two remaining defendants proceeded. Neither of them took the stand. In a deposition the elder said it was Albert who had spoken about misplacing the pipes; but when asked what he said in reply to a suggestion, which no one better than he knew the significance of, he replied: "I made no reply to it, but I thought it would be a very scandalous proceeding."[496] Albert had told how, in conversation in California, his employer had described his plans with regard to Matthews.

"We would have just got them fellows in a boat, right in the middle of the stream, and we would have tipped them two over, and drowned them, and you would have been all right."[497] "If I ever made such a remark," this defendant deposed, "it was in a playful humor. I am in the habit of making playful remarks."

Witness after witness had to confess, under cross-examination, that his testimony had been written and rewritten by himself or the lawyer for the defence, and carefully conned before coming on the stand. The District Attorney asked one of these tutored witnesses why he had read over the written preparation of his testimony in the rotunda of the court-house just before going on the stand.

"I read it over," he replied, lucidly, "for the simple reason of reading it over."

"Just to practise in reading?"

"Well, perhaps we might call it practice in reading."[498]

"This preparation of the testimony," said the District Attorney to the jury, "which I stigmatize as infamous, this going to a witness and writing him down, and having him fix it, and write it over again, and keeping it in his mind, and reading it over, and so going on the stand, is not the way to try a lawsuit, in my mind. I write nothing down. I coach no witnesses. I want a witness to tell me his story. I put him on the stand and he tells me his story; but no writing down, no reading over. It is not right, and it is very liable to be very wrong."

Several witnesses were introduced to prove that Matthews had offered to settle the criminal prosecution. He could not have done so had he wished to. The criminal case was in the hands of the State. Of the witnesses who made this charge against Matthews, one was a stockholder in the trust, another had been a stockholder in one of its pipe lines, and both had to admit on cross-examination that the occasion of his alleged agreeing to settle the case had been that they had gone to him for their friends, unsolicited by him and unexpected, to find out at what price he would sell his works to the combination." I was anxious to settle the criminal prosecution," said one of these ambassadors.

"Anxious for whom?" asked the ever-ready District Attorney.

"I should say—nobody," replied the witness, in confusion.

"Mr. Matthews told him," said Mr. Hiram Benedict, one of the best-known citizens of Lockport, who was present, "that if they bought the capital stock of the company they could do what they chose with the civil suits, but with the criminal suit he had nothing to do; the people had that in charge."[499]

The lawyers tried to make a jest of the whole proceeding, and affected to look upon the incidents of this rivalry with their powerful client as something too trivial to be noticed. "Is it a trivial matter," asked District Attorney Quinby, "that it shall be decided, once for all, in a court of justice, that in an alleged republic you and I shall not start a business which is a rival to some one else? That is the issue here, and yet the lawyers for the accused tell us it is trivial. It is the most important question that was ever left to a jury of twelve men in this or any country in this age of monopoly." The jury thought so too. The meaning of the policy of suppressing competition was skilfully described by Judge Edward Hatch, Mr. Matthews' counsel in the civil suit for damages, and here again the jury, representing the people, thought so too. "When a man or a corporation is in a position to control the market as to a given article, then everybody is within their power, and it rests with their conscience to determine what shall be the price. Every time you farmers at home, or your wives or daughters, take your oil-can, turn it up, fill your lamp, and then sit down to read by it, you can understand what is meant by this proposition to crush these men out.... It was a matter that not only these three men were interested in, but every person that lived in the community. Competition would run along to a point where you could get the oils that you use in your families, to grease your wagons, and to burn in your houses, or for any other purpose, at a price that should give the manufacturer a fair profit, and at the lowest possible price. On the other hand, if you leave that open to these parties to regulate as they saw fit, having a monopoly of the market, then you rest upon the conscience of a corporation and put your faith in a soulless individual."

It is one of the few bright lines in this picture that whenever the people got a chance to make themselves heard, their utterance was always right and true. The four juries which passed upon the facts understood them, and had the moral standard by which to judge them aright.

One of the trust's employés was put on the stand to break the effect of the evidence that the competition of the new works had put down the price of oil. "In the early part of 1881—the winter of 1881"—he said, "common oil was 5½ cents a gallon"—this to prove that the reduction had preceded the appearance of the new refinery. He was confronted by the District Attorney with one of his own bills of oil sold in February, 1881. "That would seem to be a sale of 120 degrees oil at 12 cents a gallon," he confessed, and added, awkwardly, "I was asked as to the winter of 1881. That is not the winter of 1881 as I understand. I meant to speak from July, 1881, and so on."[500]

The great lawyers held up to the ridicule of the jury the idea that the gases of distilling petroleum were dangerous. Matthews stated on the stand that he had seen this gas burn up derricks, property, and several men. The lawyers could not let anything so absurd go unchallenged.

"Did it explode?" he was asked smartly.

"Yes, sir."

"And how did the 'explosion' burn up the men and property?" with a knowing look to the jury.

"The gases crept quietly to the boilers, unobserved," said the witness, "and all at once the whole atmosphere was ablaze."

The witnesses who tried to prove that no harm could have resulted from the tampering with the still broke down. One of them was the inspector of oils at the combination's refinery at Cleveland. He, too, had once been an independent refiner, but had passed under the yoke. He declared with every possible variation of phrase that there could not have been an explosion at the Buffalo works; but the District Attorney got out of him piecemeal admissions that the "escaping petroleum gases would be inflammable"; that "in a damp day you would expect them to settle close to the still"; that then, if they came in contact with fire, "you would have a large flash, and consume those vapors; if a person was in the vicinity he would burn."

"I ask you if it would be a safe thing to fill a still with 175 barrels of petroleum, put under it an extremely hot fire, so that the front portion of the still is a cherry red, and a weighted safety-valve is blown off—would you consider that a safe thing to do?"

"I would not."

Still another of these witnesses ended, like Balaam, by saying just the opposite of what had been wanted of him. He testified that the escape of gases from the stills, and even their ignition, was a matter of no consequence—"it may occur at any time"—until he was cross-examined. It turned out then that his own works had been burned three times by the gases from distillation taking fire. "These gases," he had to admit, "took fire and burned the receiving-house. A man got burned up with it."

"Are you willing," the District Attorney asked, sarcastically, "to go down to the Buffalo works and have them run some vapor, on a quiet day, on the ground, and let you stand in the middle of it and touch it off?"

"I am not anxious to do that."[501]

Every one looked to see Matthews crushed by the cross-examination, in accordance with the widely advertised promises of the counsel on the other side.

"As he stood up to take the oath," said the New York World, "and confronted the men with whom he had been at sword's-point for six years, men of unlimited wealth and almost unlimited influence, and controlling the most gigantic monopoly of any age or any country, Charles B. Matthews looked, as a good observer said, what he proved himself to be, a fighter, who will never know when he is whipped. Hard knocks and a struggle of years against an all-powerful enemy have whitened his hair, and set firm, hard lines about his face. His eyes are deep-set under a protruding forehead and black, bushy lashes, and are dark, firm, and searching. His jet-black beard is luxuriant but coarse, his whole head and face bespeak the dogged persistence in following a foe that is characteristic of the man. He is tall, well built, and with those whom he knows to be friends he is kindly and almost jovial in his manner." He told his story, and the jury believed it. One of the most damaging portions of his testimony was that given to connect the New York members of the trust with the conspiracy by showing that they had the actual, practical, continuous management of the Vacuum in matters small as well as large. Matthews, when in their employ, was kept running to New York continually to see one or the other of them about some detail of the business. Seeking to break down the force of this testimony, the big gun of the legal battery opened on him.

"But you did not see the name" of the oil combination "up over the office that you went into (in New York)?"

"I do not think I ever saw the name over the office that I went into. I think that name is not often in view over where they do business."

"What makes you think so?"

"My experience and observation."

"What experience and observation have you had?"

"Do you want I should tell it all?"

"No, you need not tell it all. We will let that go now." Matthews had been in their employ. He knew about the staff of lobbyists they keep to go from capital to capital as needed.

For lack of evidence the jury was offered abuse of Matthews, spoken by the brilliant attorney on a shout which enabled the populace outside the court-house to hear his speech, and, as the verdict proved, deafened the jury to his eloquence. The jury preferred the view given by the District Attorney. "When I look upon the troubled face of Matthews," said District Attorney Quinby in his closing of the case, "I know what is coming upon his head. When I know the struggle he has gone through, the integrity that is in his heart, I would say to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant, you have withstood the powerful arm of this insatiable corporation. You stand to-day honored from one end of this land to the other.' ... I am proud that in the county of Erie has been born a gentleman who has had the bravery and fortitude he has shown."

CHAPTER XXI

CRIME CHEAPER THAN COMPETITION

The jury was composed of nine farmers, one tailor, one store-keeper, and one railroad foreman. "So intelligent a jury," said the Buffalo Express, "is proof perfect that the verdict it returns is the only one warranted by the law and evidence." The jury found all the defendants guilty whom the court allowed them to try. The verdict, "Guilty as charged in the indictment," was given May 18, 1887. Every possibility of appeal and reversal was resorted to. The judge granted a stay, and this left the defendants unsentenced. A motion for a new trial postponed the day of fate until December 24, 1887.

When the judge decided against the new trial an appeal was taken, and was carried through every court except the highest. Legal procedure in New York makes the courts a hunting preserve for those who can afford the luxuries of litigation. The law was changed by the Field code so that demurrers and counter-appeals, proceedings and ancillary proceedings, on technical points can be carried, one after another, from court to court, while the real point at issue has to wait untried below for the results of this interminable contest. By grace of this power to carry preliminary and technical questions from court to court, at the pleasure of quibbling and appealing lawyers and procrastinating judges, from courts of Oyer and Terminer to the Supreme Court at General Term, to the Court of Appeals, rich corporations and individuals are able to tire out altogether all ordinary opponents. It was only by help of very able and highly paid lawyers, officers of the courts and of justice, that the law of New York was "reformed," so that the technical parts of a case could be to such an extent disengaged from the main body, and sent forward and backward, up and down, through the whole series of appeals, consuming endless time and money, while poor men seeking justice kick their heels in the lowest courts.

As the time for pronouncing sentence came on, petitions for mercy were circulated in Buffalo and Rochester. The members of the jury which had found the accused guilty were labored with separately to sign a recantation. Only six succumbed and signed a statement that the prisoners were found guilty, not because they had conspired to blow up their rival's refinery, but because they had enticed away Albert. This recantation was in the face of the judge's charge, which had made the plot to blow up the Buffalo works the chief and the important inquiry in this case, and the verdict had been given under the influence of this view of the case. Six of the jury saw the impropriety of making this statement after they had disbanded and passed from under the legal and moral restraints they felt when sitting under their oath of office, and refused to sign it.

When the paper from the complaisant six jurors was handed in, the District Attorney said in court: "These jurors received money for making these affidavits. If required to do so I will prove the statement." He was not called upon to do so. "These affidavits," he said afterwards, "were procured for the purpose of influencing the Court to administer the lighter punishment, since they tended to show that the verdict was directed against the lighter offence. One of the jurors told me he had been offered money to sign one of these affidavits, and he knew of one juror who had received $10 for signing one."

When the last possibility in the way of proceedings for a stay or for a new trial had been exhausted, except argument of an appeal in the Court of Appeals, which was known to be useless, sentence was pronounced. The penalty provided in the statutes was imprisonment for one year in the penitentiary, or a fine of $250, or both. The lawyers pleaded that the elder of the convicted men was old, that the younger had just returned from a wedding tour in Europe, that some of the wealthiest and most prominent citizens of Rochester had petitioned for mercy, and that six of the jury had done likewise. Each was sentenced to pay a fine of $250. Notice of appeal was given by the convicted, and a year was consumed on both sides in preparations to fight the case to a bitter finish. But the appeal was abandoned. A new trial and new sentence might have ended worse. The fine was paid, and these employés of the trust, upon whose record as reputable and inoffensive citizens for all the years of their business career no shadow had fallen till they entered its employ, took thereby the place assigned them by the jury—that of convicts guilty of crime.

Crime, it seems, may in this country be cheaper than competition. They who received the larger part of the benefit of the enticement of Albert, of the harassing litigation, of the damage done by the explosion, and of the bankruptcy which was finally produced by these means, went free of all punishment; and the employés found their crime but little less than a pastime. After his conviction, and before his sentence, one of the two married. His wedding was attended by many of the great men of the trust—magnates in the New York world of affairs and its affiliated interests. It glittered with gold and silver and precious stones which they sent to signify to the world that they stood sponsor for him.

The case of some humble boycotters was then fresh in the public mind. Certain working-men, on strike, handed around printed circulars in the streets of New York, requesting people not to buy beer sold by their employer. In a few weeks from the time they dropped those circulars in the streets they were in the penitentiary at Sing Sing. It was shown on their trial that they were entirely ignorant of the fact that they were violating any of the laws of the State in what they did. It was shown on the trial of the oil men that they did know that the course they had in view was criminal, and were warned by a lawyer it might land them in prison. "It was very fortunate," said the New York World, "that they were not poor men convicted of stealing a ham."

One of the reasons given by the judge for his leniency was that prominent citizens of Buffalo and Rochester had begged for mercy. "With the very highest respect for the judge," said the Buffalo Express, "as the Express has often demonstrated, we must say that this is a mighty queer excuse. Three-fourths of those citizens are in one way or another identified in interest with the oil trust, as the judge could readily have ascertained, and their names on that petition were entitled to no more moral weight in the consideration of this case than the names of the two guilty men should have had if they had seen fit to sign it."

The sentence raised a whirlwind of indignation. "As ridiculous as anything that could be imagined," said the Philadelphia Ledger. "It is high time," said the New York World, "that the lines were drawn between competition and conspiracy, between business and brigandage." Referring to the golden harvest of $300,000 dividends in one year on a capital of $100,000, representing an original investment of only $13,500, the World said: "The monopoly of this sort of business is a very seductive thing. It is calculated to make men of more boldness than morals blow up factories, or do almost anything else to control the field." "It can afford to blow up a rival refinery every day in the year at that price," said the Erie Dispatch. "There have been conspiracies," said the Oil City Blizzard (Pa.), "to injure the business of opposition concerns right here in Oil City, and the conspirators have never been punished." "It is—a light sentence," was the comment of the Buffalo Commercial. "Poor criminals," the Buffalo Express declared, "may well wonder why rich ones are let off so easily. It is equivalent to deciding that wealth may securely indulge in that inexpensive sort of amusement as a mere pastime. Who's afraid?" it asked. "What conspirator 'in restraint' of trade is afraid of a $250 fine?" "Certain it is that no wealthy criminals convicted of such a crime ever before received from a court such a mockery of justice," was the verdict of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican.

The facts of this case have not been carelessly examined or decided. Two grand-juries in succession passed upon the evidence and found it good enough for indictments. Two petit juries heard the evidence, both for and against, in the civil and criminal suits, and found it good enough—one jury for $20,000 damages, another for a verdict of criminally guilty. Seventy picked citizens have unanimously concurred in the decision "Guilty." And this scarlet letter the monopoly will always have to carry.

"So surely as Matthews lives, and so long as he lives," District Attorney Quinby said in the criminal prosecution, "he will never again make another dollar upon a barrel of oil he may manufacture. The word has gone forth, right in this court-room, that this man shall be crushed, and he can never again run his works successfully. That is going to be one of the results of this case." The fulfilment of this prediction came swiftly. This sentence of ruin upon Matthews was executed before sentence was even pronounced upon the conspirators against him. He had been left crippled by the flight and corruption of his partner, the only practical oil man in the enterprise. When he tried to obtain some one to take his place, he could not get word of any one not connected with the oil combination. He did not dare to advertise, and knew no one in Buffalo he could venture to speak to. He had made contracts before opening the works, and was unable to fill them. The pipes had been laid wrong; it took him a year trying one way and another, and making a great many mistakes, to set them right. His third partner was frightened back into the employ of the oil combination by threatening litigation.

Then came the suits to destroy, punctually as threatened.[502] "If one court does not sustain the patents, we will carry them up until you get enough of it," one of the trustees said to Matthews. One of the Rochester managers, in speaking of these suits, said: "I don't know as we will gain anything really, but we will embarrass them by bringing these suits, and, if it is necessary, we will bring them once a month; yes, we will bring them once a week." One, two, three, four, five suits came with injunctions. "Null and void" was the verdict of court after court on the worthless patents and pretended trade-marks on which he was sued.

Matthews had to keep pushing his pursuers to trial. What they wanted was not decisions but delays, to ruin him by the waste of time and money.[503] "It cost me one-third of my time, and $25,000 or more to defend these suits." These suits were used to scare away his customers. "I was instructed," said the Boston representative of the combination, "to tell the customers that the Buffalo company were using their patents."[504] The sole legal victory the combination won was the recovery of six cents damages on a technical point.

Matthews, on his side, took to the courts. He sued his persecutors as individuals and corporations. He pursued them civilly and criminally. He was successful in defending himself against their suits. All his suits were successful as far as he was able to carry them. One suit for damages produced a $20,000 verdict; another was for $250,000, on the still stronger evidence procured in the criminal trial. It took Matthews two years—from 1883 to 1885—to get his first case for damages for conspiracy to trial. All that time was consumed by his opponents in quibbles about procedure, technical objections, and motions for delay, appealing them from court to court. The judge, in taking from the jury afterwards the three trustees who had been brought to trial for conspiracy, declared that he could see no reason to believe that these suits had been brought without probable cause. But the jury before which the suit for damages was tried saw plenty of such reasons, and gave Matthews' company a verdict of $20,000 damages. The views of the judge and jury might have varied in the same way on the question of the guilt of the three members of the trust.

Matthews woke up one morning to discover, as he had been told he would, that there was no Atlas Company to get his oil from. Corporations may have no souls, but they can love each other. The Erie Railroad killed the pipe line of the Atlas Company for the oil combination.[505] The courts had been kept busy granting injunctions against it on the motion of the Erie. These were invariably dissolved by the courts, but an application for a new one would always follow. At one time the lawyers had fifteen injunctions all ready in their hands to be sued out, one after the other, as fast as needed. The pipe line was finally destroyed by force. Where it crossed under the Erie road in the bed of a stream grappling-irons were fastened to it, and with an immense hawser a locomotive guarded by two freight cars full of men pulled it to pieces. The Atlas line and refinery became the "property" of their enemy. Matthews' supply of crude oil was not cut off immediately. He was tapered off. One of the superintendents of the Atlas testified in the suit for damages Matthews brought against the Atlas after it passed into the hands of the combination, that by the order of the manager of the refinery he mixed refuse oil with the crude which they sold to the Buffalo Lubricating Oil Company. Finally the supply was shut off altogether.

Matthews turned to the railroads connecting Buffalo with the oil country. They all put up their rates. At the increased rates they would not bring him enough to keep him going; they would not give him cars enough, and told him they would not let him put his own cars on the road. Even the lake steamers raised their rates against him. The farmer-refiner was taking his lesson in the course which had driven his first employer to dig oil-wells because "there were restrictions in the shipments." Cut off from a supply by either pipe or rail at Buffalo, Matthews made an alliance with the Keystone Refinery in the oil regions. War was now made upon the Keystone. It was finally ruined.

Packs of lawyers were set upon Matthews, and they finally brought him down. An attorney appeared before a judge and made a motion that the property of Matthews' company be taken out of Matthews' hands and be placed in the charge of a receiver, as officer of the court, to secure a debt due a Buffalo bank. This done, the lawyer appeared before the judge who afterwards decided that $250 fine was punishment enough for criminal conspiracy, with an offer from the monopoly to pay $17,300 for the discontinuance of the suits for damages which Matthews had instituted, and $63,700 for all the other assets. The other creditors and all the stockholders opposed the motion, but the judge granted it. There were two suits. One had produced a verdict of $20,000, and the other one for $250,000 was brought on the new and much stronger evidence secured in the criminal trial. As to the value of the property, Matthews had brought his enterprise to the point where it was worth $20,000 a year. It was capable of producing many times that amount of profit. Had not Albert been enticed away, the new works would have yielded a profit of over $100,000 the first year. They had a capacity of 70 to 80 barrels a day of lubricating oil, and the profit was $5 to $6 a barrel at the time Matthews and Albert went into the business.[506] The judge, overruling a majority of the creditors, ordered the receiver to accept the offer. He gave as his reason for selling these damage suits that a criminal prosecution had already taken place for the same offences, and a person could not be punished twice for the same offence. As they had not yet been punished, this meant, if it meant anything, that the suits were to be sold out for this inconsiderable sum, and the guilty men were to get their punishment in the sentence he was to pass upon them in the criminal court.

Three months later, before the same judge, these convicted agents stood up to receive their criminal sentence. The judge gave them the lightest sentence in his power, "nominal punishment." He did so, he was reported by the Buffalo press to have said, because "it has come to the attention of the court that civil suits have been brought to recover damages sustained by reason of the same overt acts. Large punitive damages are demanded in those actions. It is fundamental that a person cannot be punished twice for the same offence."