AMERICA REVISITED.

Otago Witness, Issue 2762, 20 February 1907, Page 70

AMERICA REVISITED.

(By T. P. O'Connor, M.P.)

11. THE OJL TYRANNY.

The corporation, I wrote last week, is the keynote of American politics. And when you begin to talk of the corporation you must inevitably come to the Standard Oil Company. Here is the corporation in its most gigantic, powerful, and unique manifestation. Of all the things which America has produced — and she has produced many strange portents — there is nothing so charecteristic of her in her present stage of development as the Stan : dard Oil Company. j Ido not propose to give here a history — not even an epitome of the history— of this remarkable institution. If my reader desires to know the whole story, he had better get a copy of Miss Ida Tarbell's book. It is in two large volumes, and it is published by Mr Heinemann. I may some day give the readers of T. P.'s Weekly an epitome of the book ; it would appear more appropriately there than in this journal. It is, as I have said, a bulky book. It consists of nothing but the details of a great business enterpiise ; but I do not believe I ever read a romance, however brilliant, that was more fascinating reading. But, as I have said, this is not the place for me to tell the whole story. My reader must be satisfied m ith just the barest outline of the story. The founder and chief of this remarkable industrial development is not the kind of man you would anticipate. If you heard the denunciations of the Standard Oil Company in conversation, and still more in the press and in the political discourse of America, you would expect to find at the head of this institution a set of coarse, heartless, reckless ruffians, enemies of God and man. The Standard Oil directors are constantly compared to the robber barons of the Rhine, who levied toll on every passing boat. The epithet "thieves" is used so constantly that it almost becomes a mild reproach, especially when it is set by the side of the other epithets which are hurled at the heads of these gentlemen. The charge of association with the Standard Oil organisation is in itself sufficient to damn any candidate for office with all the masses of the voters. Whether the candidate be Republican or Democrat, that is the very first thing he has to disown. Mr Hughes would not have been elected Governor of New York if he had not been supposed to be as great, and perhaps a more effective, opponent of the Standard Oil Company than his opponent, MiHearst. At this moment the company is face to face with the most formidable attack yet made upon it, and the leader of the attack is no less a personage than President Roosevelt, who, besides being President of all the United States, is the leader of the Republican party — that is to say, of the party of Protection. Even this does not complete the list of the enmities which the Standard Oil Company has created. It has been elevated to such a pitch of wickedness and unpopularity that there is no charge you can bring against it which does not find credence with the large masses of the American people. It has been charged with inciting to arson. A big trial once attracted the attention of all America, in which practically the issue at stake was whether or not the chiefs of the Standard Oil Company had incited one of their servants to set a rival factory on fire in order to destroy its competition. I have even heard it, stated that the Standard Oil Company would not stop at positive murder if murder helped it in its fight with competition. When one passes from this region of infuriated hate to the individuals who are the objects of it, there is a strange and bewildering sense of surprise and contrast. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the great organisation, is a type which is not uncommon in his personal characteristics and his ordinary, habits and religious beliefs — a type with which we are quite familiar in England. If I did .not wish to avoid an approach to want of politeness and consideration, I should speak of him as a Clapham Nonconformist — the kind of man that would be a deacon in the Tabernacle of the late Mr Spurgeon. He is a man of the simplest personal tastes and of ascetic habits. He is a lifelong teetotaler ; he lives a life of such seclusion as to be almost a hermit ; he is a regular attendant at the Dissenting chapel of which he has been a lifelong member : he subscribes largely to its funds ; he lectures at its teas — what we should call its tea-fights ; he has been an irreproachable husband and father. In spite of the tremendous fights in which he has been engaged and the sacrifices he has made of all competitors, his word has always been his bond. And everyone in his employ has been treated not merely with consideration, but given every opportunity to rise to the highest position his abilities and energies entitle him to reach. And of the second great figure in the Standard Oil Company, Mr H. H. Rogers, the testimony, though somewhat repiesent ing a different type, is equally plet'tsant. I have read that extraordinary woik, '"Frenzied Finance," by Mr Thomas W. Lawson, of Boston, a marvellous story, again surpassing in dramatic interest anything that fiction can evolve; and, as everybody who has read that work knows, the chief villain of that story is Mr Rogers, i And yet, when I had read the work ! through, I had the curious feeling that Mr Lawson had achieved somewhat the same literary result as Milton in "Paradise Lost" — he had started to make a villain, and he had so angelified and exalted his villain as to make him a subject of perhaps horrified admiration, but admiration all the same. For every now and then, in the very whirlwind of his denunciation, Mr Lawson pauses for a moment to take breath in order to say how genial, how frank, how straightforward, how goodhumoured and kindly Mr Rogers is. T have never seen Mr Rockefeller, but

I have seen Mr Rogers. On the very last night before I gave good-bye to New York I had the pleasure of dining with my old friend Mark Twain. Mr Clemens — to call him by his name in private life — is now, I regret to say, in such poorj delicate health that during the winter months he has to remain indoors most of the time — certainly after sunset. I was only too delighted to have an opportunity of meeting again a man whom I regard as one of the greatest literary figures of his time — as great in pathos as in humour, though the humorous side has overshadowed the pathetic. It was a small party of five, the host and myself included. Mr Clemens, when I entered, introduced me to a tall, slight gentleman with very white hair, i a white moustache, and a very kindly and gentle expression. He wore gold spectacles, and they added to "the look of green and ; venerable and kindly old age. He spoke 1 very little, was modest, self-effaced, unaffected — in short, I would have taken him for a solicitor who did a large family practice, or for a university professor. He made upon me an entirely favourable impression, and I said with perfect sincerity, as I bade him good-night, that I was very delighted to have had the opportunity of meeting him. My white-haired, softspoken, simple, kindly friend was Mr Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, and the central figure of Mr Lawson's remarkable and hot indictment. It is not, then, that /these men who have made the Standard Oil Company are embodied villains, or heartless villains, or conscious brigands. My reading of the problem is that they are the embodiment of the economic conditions of American life ; that they are at once the masters and the slaves of a false system ; and that the difference between them and 1 other men engaged in the gigantic conflicts of American industrial life is that they have brought to that cut -throat struggle more ability, more resolute purpose, and more efficiency than their c^npetitors. But I should add immediately that to my mind the system which makes such institutions as the Standard Oil Company possible is a system which is unsound to its very roots, and one which is menacing, if not destructive, to the industrial, social, and political life of the American people. This, in short, is what has happened : When oil was discovered, in the early sixties, in Western Pennsylvania, Mr Rockefeller was a small produce merchant in the city of Cleveland, already displaying that thrift, quick perception of industrial possibilities, keenness in making a bargain, and resolute and tenacious purpose which, on a small scale, were destined in due time, when given a greater arena, to make him the most dominating figure in all the world in the work of money. He went into the oilrefinery business, and in a short time had built up a big business — bigger than that of any of his rivals in the city. And then it was that there entered into his imagination — for he is a curious example of the great dreamer and the great realist, like so many of the world's conquerors, notabiy Napoleon — the fascinating and dazzling vision of controlling and mastering all the oil production of the vast Continent and the teeming millions of the mighty country into which he was born. I will not trace in detail the successive steps and the innumerable conflicts through which Mr Rockefeller and his associates had to pass before this vision — startlingly impossible when first contemplated, and only realisable by a man of supreme genius — before this vision was turned into a reality. It is sufficient in this place to say that the vision has been realised, and that to-day practically the whole oil industry of the United States is in the hands of the few men — not a dozen, all told — • who form the governing body of the Standard Oil Company, -every lamp in the United States, from the huge installation in a great factory to the tiny little lamp that lights up the daikness of the solitary cottage in the remote and desolate and still unpopulated regions where man is only now beginning the fight with Nature, is under the hand of Mr Rockefeller, Mr Rogers, and their associates. The Standard Oil Company not only owns the oil wells, but its owns the refinery ; it controls every railway which carries the oil overland, every boat that carries it oversea, every line which carries it from well to train or vessel. It rules, besides, every market — including that tremendous tigerpit, the Bourse, in Wall street — where men gamble in oil, sell oil, or gamble in oil shares. The mighty arm of this organisation even spreads across the Atlantic. It has its agents in every country in the world where oil is produced; it supplies the dweller in the English or Irish village as well as the American; and though its supremacy is questioned, and even beaten, by another mighty combination, which has all the wealth and the prestige of the great house of Rothschild and the oil wells of Russia behind it, still the Standard Oil Company has enough of business in the old countries to make it the greatest human industrial combination the world has evei- seen. But even yet I have not exhausted — I ] *iave sLcircely be^un to tell — the story of the potency of this extraordinary institution, I mii6t stop here for the moment.