On the morning of February 26, 1872, the oil men read in their morning papers that the rise which had been threatening had come; moreover, that all members of the South Improvement Company were exempt from the advance. At the news all oildom rushed into the streets. Nobody waited to find out his neighbour’s opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was “conspiracy.” In the vernacular of the region, it was evident that “a torpedo was filling for that scheme.” In twenty-four hours after the announcement of the increase in freight rates a mass-meeting of 3,000 excited, gesticulating oil men was gathered in the opera house at Titusville. Producers, brokers, refiners, drillers, pumpers were in the crowd. Their temper was shown by the mottoes on the banners which they carried: “Down with the conspirators”—“No compromise”—“Don’t give up the ship!” Three days later as large a meeting was held at Oil City, its temper more warlike if possible; and so it went. They organised a Petroleum Producers’ Union,[18] pledged themselves to reduce their production by starting no new wells for sixty days and by shutting down on Sundays, to sell no oil to any person known to be in the South Improvement Company, but to support the creek refiners and those elsewhere who had refused to go into the combination, to boycott the offending railroads, and to build lines which they would own and control themselves. They sent a committee to the Legislature asking that the charter of the South Improvement Company be repealed, and another to Congress demanding an investigation of the whole business on the ground that it was an interference with trade. They ordered that a history of the conspiracy, giving the names of the conspirators and the designs of the company, should be prepared, and 30,000 copies sent to “judges of all courts, senators of the United States, members of Congress and of State Legislatures, and to all railroad men and prominent business men of the country, _to the end that enemies of the freedom of trade may be known and shunned by all honest men_.”