Upon the only occasion when the "Trustees" seemed in real danger of being brought in person and on specific charges to trial, criminally, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania saved them. In the Clarion County cases it took the unprecedented step of interfering with the criminal jurisdiction of the lower courts. It was in reference to this that Mr. Gowen said before the Committee of Commerce of Congress in 1880: "I was a member of the Constitutional Convention of Pennsylvania, and I know that if that convention did anything effectively it was when it declared that the Supreme Court should not have original jurisdiction in criminal cases, and yet I have seen three judges of the Supreme Court lay their hands upon an indictment in a county court and hang it up." The effect of this interposition of the Supreme Court is summed up as follows in the history of the contest between the Producers' Union and their powerful antagonists: "This practically terminated the last legal proceeding conducted by the general council of the producers of petroleum." "It was the greatest violation of law," said Mr. Gowen before the Pennsylvania Legislative Committee, "ever committed in the Commonwealth."[340] That some such action might have been expected could be inferred from the remark in _Leading Cases Simplified_, by John D. Lawson, warning the student of the law of carriers "not to pay much heed to the decisions of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania--at least, during the past ten or fifteen years. The Pennsylvania Railroad appears to run that tribunal with the same success that it does its own trains."[341] Some time after these events the purchaser of this peace gave some money to a hospital for cancers, and, in recognition of his philanthropy, was made its president. This hospital was for cancers of the body--not for moral cancers of the kind propagated for money by men who corrupt the Commonwealth. It would have been full expiation in the good old times of the priest and the baron Ruskin describes to donate to the cure of an evil a fraction of the profits of the culture of it. The newspapers in May, 1891, chronicled the opening of another pavilion of this hospital, and the delivery of "an interesting address" by the new president. One of the journals remarks that "this interest, combined with his well-known liberality in Church and humane matters generally, suggests a thought concerning the peculiar development on this line of many of our very rich men." But what the "thought" was the journalist did not go on to state. CHAPTER XIV "I WANT TO MAKE OIL"