The press and people were making it plain enough, indeed, that they did not trust the persuasive advocates of reform. On every street corner and on every railroad train men reckoned the percentage of interest the stockholders of the South Improvement Company would have in the new combination. It was too great. But what stirred the Oil Region most deeply was its conviction that the rebate system was regarded as the keystone of the new plan. “What are you going to do with the men who prefer to run their own business?” asked a representative of the Oil City Derrick of one of the advocates of the plan. “Go through them,” was reported to be his laconic reply. “But how?” “By the co-operation of transportation”—that is, by rebates. Now the Oil Region had been too recently convicted of the sin of the rebate, and had taken too firm a determination to uproot the iniquitous practice to be willing to ally itself with any combination which it suspected of accepting privileges which its neighbours could not get or would not take. At the very time the association of refiners was under consideration an attempt was made to win over the producers by offering, through their union, to buy all their oil at five dollars a barrel for five years. Oil was four dollars at the time. The producers refused. Such an agreement could only be kept, they said, by an association which was an absolute monopoly, fixing prices of refined to satisfy its own greed. All they wanted of the producer was to be a party to their conspiracy. When they had destroyed his moral force and completed their monopoly they would pay him what they pleased for oil, and the price would not be five dollars! What could he do then? He would be their slave, there would be no other buyer—could be none, since they would control the entire transportation system.