This matter was also passed upon by the Select Committee of the United States Senate on Interstate Commerce. "No comment," the committee say, "is needed upon this most impudent and outrageous proposition"--by the oil company to the railroad.[378] "Are you going to deny that story?" a great American statesman of the latter-day type was asked by one of his friends. "Not I," was the reply. "The story's false. When you find me taking the trouble to deny a thing, you can bet it's true!" This "agreement for the transportation of oil" had its calculated effect. It put a stop to the transportation of oil from the Ohio field by Rice over the railroad, just as the destruction by the same hands of the pipe line to the Alleghany had cut him off from access to the Pennsylvania oil-fields. He then built his own pipe line to the Ohio field. To lay this pipe it was necessary to cross the pipe line of his great rival. Rice had the pluck to do this without asking for a consent which would never have been given. His intrepidity carried its point, for, as he foresaw, they dared not cut his pipe for fear of reprisals. In turning to the South, after his expulsion from the Ohio and Western markets, the Marietta independent did but get out of one hornet's nest to sit down in another. His opponent was selling its oil there through a representative who, as he afterwards told Congress, "was very fortunate in competing." He thought it was "cheaper in the long-run to make the price cheap and be done with it, than to fritter away the time with a competitor in a little competition. I put the price down to the bone."[379] Rice, in the South, ran into the embrace of this gentleman who had the "exclusive control" of that territory, and whose method of calling the attention of trespassers to his right was to cut them "to the bone." The people and the dealers everywhere in the South were glad to see Rice. He found a deep discontent among consumers and merchants alike. They perhaps felt more clearly than they knew that business feudalism was not better, but worse, because newer, than military feudalism. This representative of the combination assured Congress that "99.9 of all the first-class merchants of the South were in close sympathetical co-operation with us in our whole history"--that is, out of every hundred "first-class merchants" only one-tenth of one merchant was not with them. This is a picturesque percentage.