This mass of testimony, all of it submitted under oath it should be remembered, contains the different charters and agreements under which the Standard Oil Trust has operated, many contracts and agreements with railroads, with refineries, with pipe-lines, and it contains the experiences in business from 1872 up to 1900 of multitudes of individuals. These experiences have exactly the quality of the personal reminiscences of actors in great events, with the additional value that they were given on the witness stand, and it is fair, therefore, to suppose that they are more cautious and exact in statements than many writers of memoirs are. These investigations, covering as they do all of the important steps in the development of the trust, include full accounts of the point of view of its officers in regard to that development, as well as their explanations of many of the operations over which controversy has arisen. Hundreds of pages of sworn testimony are found in these volumes from John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, Henry M. Flagler, H. H. Rogers, John D. Archbold, Daniel O’Day and other members of the concern. Aside from the great mass of sworn testimony accessible to the student there is a large pamphlet literature dealing with different phases of the subject, and there are files of the numerous daily newspapers and monthly reviews, supported by the Oil Regions, in the columns of which are to be found not only statistics but full reports of all controversies between oil men. No complete collection of this voluminous printed material has ever been made, but several small collections exist, and in one or another of these I have been able to find practically all of the important documents relating to the subject. Mrs. Roger Sherman of Titusville, Pennsylvania, owns the largest of these collections, and in it are to be found copies of the rarest pamphlets. Lewis Emery, Jr., of Bradford, the late E. G. Patterson of Titusville, the late Henry D. Lloyd, author of “Wealth _vs._ Commonwealth,” William Hasson of Oil City, and P. C. Boyle, the editor of the Oil City Derrick, have collections of value, and they have all been most generous in giving me access to their books.