In the Kansas case there are other reasons more direct and powerful perhaps than any traffic arrangement. The Standard people have acquired a large interest in the Santa Fe. One of their strongest and most unscrupulous men, H. H. Rogers, has taken a place on the board of directors. John D. Rockefeller and Wm. Rockefeller are directors of the Missouri, Kansas and Texas, and the Missouri Pacific is one of the principal lines of the Gould-Rockefeller system. There are other indications of the grip the Standard has upon the Kansas railroads. For example, the Colorado Fuel Company that was so greatly favored by the Santa Fe is largely owned and managed by the Standard Oil crowd, and the Standard uses the Santa Fe’s right of way for its pipe lines in Kansas, and for almost the entire distance from Kansas City to Whiting. Kansas has risen in revolt against the Oil Trust, and the Legislature last year (1905) lowered the freight rates on oil and passed a bill for the establishment of a State refinery to compete with the Standard and give the oil producers of the State a chance to escape from the “commercial tyranny” they are now subjected to in consequence of the fact that there is practically only one buyer in the market. The State Supreme Court, however, has decided that the State refinery act is unconstitutional. The independents might, however, establish a co-operative refinery of their own and do a good business, if they could get equal freight rates and sufficient support from public sentiment to withstand the boycott to which the Standard would be likely to resort. Only the Standard, it is said, can get rates that encourage the shipment of oil from Kansas wells at present. And the Standard custom of putting prices very low where there is competition, keeping prices high in other regions where there is no competition, making the people in non-competitive localities pay the cost of killing competition in other places, is exceedingly effective, as is also its diabolical habit of ruining merchants who buy independent oil, by establishing competing houses close to them and underselling them on the whole line of goods they handle, the Trust’s wide business enabling it to stand such losses easily, as the total is only an insignificant fraction of the profits made in regions where no such fight is in progress. CHAPTER XXVII. THE LONG-HAUL ANOMALY.