promised the entire freight business of the Company, each to have an assured proportion of the traffic, with freedom from rate-cutting competition. All this was the common railroad practice of the times. But another portion of the contract was not so common. It provided that the roads should give the South Improvement Company rebates on all oil shipped by its competitors and furnish it with full way-bills of all such shipments each day. In other words, the Company was to know exactly the amount of the business of its competitors and with whom it was being done. The contract allowed the roads to make similar rebates with anybody offering an equal amount of traffic, but the likelihood of such an outcome was slender in the extreme. Armed with this powerful weapon, Rockefeller entered upon a campaign to eliminate competition by offering to buy out independent refiners either with cash or with Standard Oil stock, at his estimate of the value of their property. Those who objected to selling were shown that the alliance between the South Improvement Company and the railroads was so strong that they faced the alternative of giving way or being crushed. Of the twenty-six refineries in Cleveland, at least twenty-one yielded. The capacity of the Standard leaped from 1,500 to 10,000 barrels a day and it controlled a fifth of the refining business of the country. When these facts came to be known in the oil country, the bitter Oil War of 1872 began. Independent producers joined to fight for existence, and at length the railroads gave way and agreed to abandon the contract with the South Improvement Company, and the legislature of Pennsylvania annulled its charter, although in one way or another rebates continued and the absorption of rivals went on. In 1882 the entire combination--thirty-nine refiners, controlling ninety to ninety-five per cent. of the product--was organized as the Standard Oil Trust. All stock-holders in the combining companies surrendered their certificates and received in return receipts or "trust-certificates," which showed the amount of the owner's interest in the trust. In order to secure unity of purpose and management, the affairs of the combination were put into the hands of nine trustees, with Rockefeller at the head.