STANDARD OIL.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LIV, Issue 13750, 12 September 1908, Page 3

STANDARD OIL.

THE FINE OF £6,000,000.

WHY IT WAS QUASHED.

The Standard Oil Company scored a great victory on July 22 when the United States Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judgment of Judge Landis, of Chicago, fining the Indiana Company < the enormous sum of £5,800,000. The "j facts of the original- case are familiar, j The Indiana Company is subsidiary to j the mammoth Oil Trust, and* the case embodies the whole anti-trust campaign, The company was charged with accepting unlawful rebates from the Chicago and Alton Railway on oil shipments from the Standard Oil Company's refinery at Whiting, in Indiana. The lawful rate was 18 cents per hundred pounds, but the defendants claimed j that the rate was six cents, or at least that that was the rate issued to the ' Standard Oil Company. There were 1662 counts in the indictment, representing the number of waggon loads of oil transported at a rate less than that named in' the railway tariff schedule as required. The Court of Appeal differed from the lower Court on three vital points, holding that Judge Landis excluded (evidence |or the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, the defendant company, which should have been admitted in order to show proper intent; that he erred in considering each waggon load as a separate offence ; and that in imposing a maximum fine for a first offence he abused the discretion vested in his Court. "It is a strange doctrine," says the Court of Appeal in. its findings, "under which a million dollar corporation such as the defendant may .be fined twenty-nine times the amount of its capital stock in order to ' punish a defendant not even under indictment." This referred, of course, to the parent company, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. The decision of the Appeal Court was unanimous. TPhe case will now, it seems, go to the Federal Supreme Court, and it is believed that the finding of the Appeal Court will materially influence the ultimate verdict. In a British country comment on the case Would still be .impossible, but the American newspapers have managed to use £ne judgment widely in the manufacture of political capital. The Democratic comment is that the present turn of the case disposes of the Republican claim to sincerity in the campaign against the trustsi