Yet other means of favoring large shippers at the expense of small ones, are almost impossible to eradicate. Certain of these may be illustrated by recently discovered practices of the Standard Oil Company. They are fully described in a special report of the United States Commissioner of Corporations in 1905. Upon the basis of this evidence, extraordinary efforts were made by the Federal authorities to secure convictions and to impose heavy fines for violation of the Elkins law. But the company escaped heavy penalties, in the main, by reason of legal technicalities. The prosecutions of 1906-1909, however, cannot be regarded as valueless, merely because the company escaped the imposition of fines aggregating millions of dollars. The moral effect of it was thoroughly good; and it is now clear that laws can be so drawn as to apply in future. Nor can any student of the evidence doubt for a moment, that, whether strictly an infraction of the law or not, the net result of these practices was to confer an advantage upon this large shipper, not open to its smaller competitors. Certain of its advantages, such as the ownership of pipe lines from the wells to the seaboard refineries and the strategic location of its plants, are the fruit of great resources and keen business acumen. But other advantages, particularly the relative rates on refined oil from Standard Oil plants and from centres of independent refining, are, according to the report of the Bureau of Corporations, due to pressure brought to bear upon the carriers. Whether they are or not, the result is discriminatory just the same.