The owner of the apparatus destroyed, it was stated by the press, had been repeatedly requested to join the shut-down, but had refused. There were several such occurrences, recalling the affairs at the Buffalo refinery in 1885.[290] When the people in Pennsylvania saw apostles of the gospel of making oil cheap enter into a bargain with them to make it scarce, it is not surprising that they should have become bewildered to the point of thinking that the noise of nitro-glycerine was "good talk," and should have sunk into the depression, monetary and moral, that alone could make such haggard faces rise among an honest laborious people. We have seen how the refiners who pass under the control of the trust are compelled to make monthly reports. The same perfectness of discipline appears at once among the producers in this shut-down. Every one of them had to make monthly reports of how much oil he had taken out of the earth. If the mobilization of industry goes on at the rate of recent years, it will not be long--not later, perhaps, than the end of the nineteenth century--before all producers, and all makers, will be sending monthly reports to New York of grain, cattle, iron, wool, lumber, leather, and the manufactures of them to trustees, whose "pleasure it is to try to make them"--the men as well as the commodities--"cheap." The supervision by means of these monthly reports was so close that over-production, however minute, was immediately known. If the owner of a well over-produced only the one-hundredth of a barrel, he got a notice to go slower.[291] To the producers engaged in it the result of the shut-down was that when their representatives at the end of it called on the oil combination in New York for the profits on the 5,000,000 barrels of oil set apart for them, as agreed, they were given a check for a sum between $200,000 and $250,000.[292] This was divided among those who had co-operated--nearly one thousand--in proportion to their share in the good work of making the supply of the light of the people so much "less per day." The drama of industry has not many scenes more striking than this of these men--the principal producers of the oil country, which had yielded in the thirty years up to this time more than 300,000,000 barrels of oil--going to the great syndicate in New York to buy the privilege of restricting the production of their own wells, thankfully accepting the scanty profits on a speculative deal in the oil exchange of 5,000,000 barrels, receiving with emotions of enthusiasm a check for a couple of hundred thousand dollars for a year's "co-operation" from the men who had made out of their product hundreds of millions.