The Pennsylvania Railroad is the representative carrier in the oil traffic. It controls all the oil business that passes over its lines, no matter how far away it originates. The initial road which led the attack on the barrel shippers is subsidiary to the Pennsylvania in the oil business, and the Pennsylvania controls its rates and regulations.[280] The Pennsylvania has been the head and front of the railroad attack on these men, and has been the open nullifier of the law and the Commission in this matter. It was the principal defendant on trial, and its case was identical with that of the others, except that it was the most flagrant; but no order would the Commission issue against it for two years. Wendell Phillips says: "There is no power in one State to resist such a giant as the Pennsylvania road. We have thirty-eight one-horse legislatures in this country; and we have a man like Tom Scott with three hundred and fifty millions in his hands, and if he walks through the States they have no power. Why, he need not move at all; if he smokes, as Grant does, a puff of the waste smoke out of his mouth upsets the legislatures." When the Commission had ordered a change of rates on barrels in the South, the Pennsylvania did the Commission the double disrespect of declaring that that order was binding upon itself against the protest of the Commission, and of using an order to reduce rates as an excuse for raising them. But now when the Commission, September 5, 1890, made a decision on the same point in a case arising in the territory and traffic in which the Pennsylvania was the chief carrier--a case, too, of a bunch of cases in which the Pennsylvania was a defendant--that road ignored it. The Commission, in the Rice, Robinson and Witherop case, in 1890, promulgated the very rule which the Pennsylvania Railroad established, which it had been following for twenty years, and which its officers before the Commission swore was the correct one, but the Pennsylvania refused now to accept and follow it. The road which was now ordered to go back to the correct practice, and which had perforce done so, was the initial road. The Pennsylvania had followed its initiative in adopting a "false" and "misleading" and "unwarranted" practice, but would not follow it in changing to the good.