Many of the great human tragedies of the Oil Regions lie in the individual compromises which followed the public settlement of 1880; for then it was that man after man, from hopelessness, from disgust, from ambition, from love of money, gave up the fight for principle which he had waged for seven years. “The Union has surrendered,” they said; “why fight on?” This man took a position with the Standard and became henceforth active in its business; that man took a salary and dropped out of sight; this one went his independent way, but with closed lips; that one shook the dust of the Oil Regions from his feet and went out to seek “God’s country,” asking only that he should never again hear the word “oil.” The newspapers bowed to the victor. A sudden hush came over the region, the hush of defeat, of cowardice, of hopelessness. Only the “poor producer” grumbled. “You can’t satisfy the producer,” Mr. Rockefeller often has had occasion to remark benignantly and pitifully. The producer alone was not “convinced.” He still rehearsed the series of dramatic attacks and sieges which had wiped out independent effort. He taught his children that the cause had been sold, and he stigmatised the men who had gone over to the Standard as traitors. Scores of boys and girls grew up in the Oil Regions in those days with the same feeling of terrified curiosity toward those who had “sold to the Standard” that they had toward those who had “been in jail.” The Oil Regions as a whole was at heart as irreconcilable in 1880 as it had been after the South Improvement Company fight, and now it had added to its sense of outrage the humiliation of defeat. Its only immediate hope now was in the success of one of the transportation enterprises which had come into existence with the uprising of 1878 and to which it had been for two years giving what support it could. This enterprise was the seaboard pipe-line which, as we have seen, Messrs. Benson, McKelvy and Hopkins had undertaken. APPENDIX NUMBER 1 (See page 1007) PROFESSOR SILLIMAN’S REPORT ON PETROLEUM [From “The Early and Later History of Petroleum,” by J. T. Henry, pages 38–54.] MESSRS. EVELETH, BISSELL AND REED. _Gentlemen_:—I herewith offer you the results of my somewhat extended researches upon the rock-oil, or petroleum, from Venango County, Pennsylvania, which you have requested me to examine with reference to its value for economical purposes. Numerous localities, well known in different parts of the world, furnish an oily fluid exuding from the surface of the earth, sometimes alone in “tar springs,” as they are called in the Western United States; frequently it is found floating upon the surface of water in a thin film, with rainbow colours, or in dark globules, that may, by mechanical means, be separated from the fluid on which it swims.