Sistersville daily oil review. [volume] (Sistersville, W. Va.) 1902-1905, 1904-07-27
How Kansas Pro-
poses Dealing With
the Standard Oil Co.

For months the Oil eQlCOr OIL
the Kansas Daily Reporter has
been looking at everything
through Standard spectacles and
defending and excusing every
thing the great oil monopoly has
done in that field; but the last
cut seems to have been a little too
much for him. He is now vigor-
ously advocating a producers as
ISOLATION to protect the interests
of the oil men, which he sees to be
entirely at the mercy of the big
monopoly. This is right and SEN
sible.
If The people are ever to be
free from the tyranny Of the
trust, however, they will have to
60 farther than the organization
of producers associations or even
the building of pipe lines to the
seaboard from this field. There
is just one way to successfully
fight a monopoly that robs the
consumer on one hand and skins
the producer on the other. That
is to invoke the power of the
State. Nor do we mean any half
way measures, either. We
wouldn't give a rap for laws to
regulate the monopolies, or die
tate the prices they shall charge.
You, of course, see how absurd
and impossible it would be to at
tempt to legislate as to the prices
they shall pay for oil.
The way for the people of the
State to fight the Oil trust is the
same way they fought the Bind
ing Irvine trust. Take the bull
by the horns, if you intend to
throw him Let the State estab-
lish a refinery and 60 into the
market and buy the oil itself. And
then let it sell the refined pro-
duct to every citizen, at uniform
price of say ten cents a gallon.
The retailer can handle it for one
or two cents, the oil producer can
get his dollar a barrel, and the
State can still make money at the
business. Two cents gallon for
the crude, and two or three cents
more for freight and commission
for selling, would certainly leave
enough margin to pay all the nee
essary excuses of refining and
something over-though perhaps
not enough to satisfy the people
who want to build all the
churches and colleges and buy all
the elections.
The sentiment in favor of a
State oil refinery has found ex-
preston in party platforms here
tofore, but it is now beginning to
be agitated among the people OF
the oil section, and to be looked
upon as the only hope of relief
from the intolerable condition in
which there is only one market
for oil and one purchaser, which
can fix the price at any figure it
pleases and impoverish the men
who have developed the field by
the stroke of a pen. !
The interests of the Kansas oil
fields are too great to be permit
ted to remain the plaything of a
single corporation, even if that
corporation is the greatest in the
world. We have here native
wealth in quantities which we |,
have hardly begun to realize.
Freed from the control of a mo-
nopoly, our oil production would
make this section one of the rich
est and most prosperous to be !
found anywhere on the globe. !
The question is whether we shall
sit down and tamely permit some
Eastern crab-alls to pocket the
riches Nature has rendered Access
sible. or whether we shall insist
on keeping some of it for our
selves.
Rockefeller was fought for
years by the people of sober,
staid old Pennsylvania. before
they would submit to the mo-
nopoly he was trying to build up
in the refining and sale of oil: but
he is 50 much more powerful now
that he seems to imagine that all
he has to do out in Kansas
Is to NAV the game to suit him