The announcement of the Central Association put an altogether new feature on oil transportation. If this organisation succeeded, and the refiners in it claimed nine-tenths of the capacity of the country—it gave Mr. Rockefeller “irrevocable authority” to negotiate freights. The Pennsylvania road immediately felt the pressure. The oil they had carried for big firms like those of Charles Lockhart in Pittsburg and of Warden, Frew and Company in Philadelphia was in the hands of the Standard Oil Company, and Mr. Rockefeller asked a rebate of ten per cent. on open rates. The road demurred. Colonel Potts objected strenuously. Three years later in a paper discussing this rebate and its consequences he said: “The rebate was a modest one, as was its recipient. Yet the railway Cassandras prophesied from it a multitude of evils—a gradual destruction of all other refiners and a gradual absorption of their property by the favourite, who, with this additional armament, would rapidly progress towards a control of all cars, all pipes, all production, and finally of the roads themselves. Their prophecies met but little faith or consideration. The Standard leaders themselves were especially active in discouraging any such radical purpose. Their little rebate was enough for them. Everybody else should prosper, as would be shortly seen. They needed no more refineries; they had already more than they could employ—why should they hunger after greater burdens? It was the railroads they chiefly cared for, and next in their affections stood the 100 rival refineries. Such beneficent longings as still remained (and their bosoms overflowed with them) spread out their steady waves toward the poor producers whom, not to be impious, they had always been ready to gather under their wings, yet they would not. “This unselfish language soothed all alarm into quiet slumbering. It resembles the gentle fanning of the vampire’s wings, and it had the same end in view—the undisturbed abstraction of the victim’s blood.” Colonel Potts’s argument against the rebate—doubtless clothed in much less picturesque language in 1875 than his feelings stirred him to in 1878, for a good enough reason, too, as we shall see—failed to convince the Pennsylvania officials. They decided to yield to the Standard. Mr. Cassatt, then third vice-president of the road, in charge of transportation, said in 1879 that the rebate was given because they found the Standard was getting very strong, that they had the backing of the other roads, and that if the Pennsylvania wanted to retain its full share of business and at fair rates they must make arrangements to protect themselves.