prevented independent refiners from shipping directly to the smaller markets in barrels, as they could not be inspected there, and if not inspected could not be sold.[395] All these manoeuvres of inspection helped to force the people to buy of only one dealer, to take what he supplied, and pay what he demanded. Why should an official appointed by the people, paid by them to protect them, thus use all his powers against them? Why? "State whether you had not in your employ the State inspector of oil and gave him a salary," the Louisville representative of the combination was asked by Congress. "Yes, sir."[396] Throughout the country the people of the States have been influenced to pass inspection laws to protect themselves, as they supposed, from bad oil, with its danger of explosion. But these inspection laws prove generally to be special legislation in disguise, operating directly to deprive the people of the benefit of that competition which would be a self-acting inspection. They are useful only as an additional illustration of the extent to which government is being used as an active partner by great business interests. Meanwhile any effort of the people to use their own forces through governments to better their condition, as by the ownership of municipal gas-works, street-railways, or national railroads and telegraphs, is sung to sleep with the lullaby about government best, government least. This second campaign had been a formidable affair--a worse was to follow; but it did not overcome the independent of Marietta. With all these odds against him, he made his way. Expelled from one place and another, like Memphis and Nashville, he found markets elsewhere. This was because the Southern people gave him market support along with their moral support. Co-operation of father and son and daughter made oil cheaper than the "sympathetical co-operation" opposing them, with its high salaries, idle refineries, and dead-heads. Rice had to pay no dividends on "trust" stock capitalized for fifteen times the value of the property. He did not, like every one of the trustees, demand for himself an income of millions a year from the consumer. He found margin enough for survival, and even something more than survival, between the cost of production and the market price. "In 1886 we were increasing our business very largely. Our rates were low enough so that we could compete in the general Southern market."[397]