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That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking about the same fundamentals that we are today.

My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of the mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in 1872, had grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over 90 per cent of the oil industry outside of the production of the raw crude. The region was divided into two hostile camps—the Independent Producers and Refiners, and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers and strategy kept town and country in a constant state of excitement, of suspicion, of hope, and of despair.

There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men worn out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security for themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.

In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for the latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the fighting independents. Those were the days when the freeing of transportation, the privilege which had more to do with the making of the monopoly than anything else, more even than the great ability of its management, was the aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had worked for an interstate commerce law which would make rate discrimination a crime. To me such a law had come to have a kind of sanctity. It was the new freedom, and when it was passed in 1887 I felt an uplift such as nothing in public life, unless I except Mr. Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever given me.