"I am virtually ruined," he says still later in a statement of his condition in a circular to the public, urging them to petition Congress to make the imperfect Interstate Commerce law operative. He is virtually ruined, though he has won his cases before the Interstate Commerce Commission, and that Federal tribunal has ordered the roads to give him his rights on the highways; but it has been a barren victory. His circular is entitled "My Experience Very Briefly Told." Its opening sentences give us in a phrase the secret of the significance of Rice's story, and dignify his appeal to the public. They show how thoroughly adversity had driven home into this plain man's mind a great civic truth which his fellow-citizens have not yet learned, probably because they have not yet had adversity enough. His solitary and fruitless, although successful, struggle taught him that the citizens of industry can no more maintain their rights acting singly than the citizens of government. He had learned that "competition," "supply and demand," "eternal laws of trade," were catchwords as impotent in the markets to give individuals their rights, if unassociated, as the incantations of royalty and loyalty, and law and order, to save people from their king until they made themselves a People. Persons fail; only a People can get and keep freedom. This Rice had begun to learn from his failure to enforce single-handed rights which all the courts declared were his, but which no court could secure. In his card to the people, he said: "I am fighting for my rights and for my existence (which happens to be in the interest of all) single-handed and alone, at my own expense and time lost.... I am here ... to do what I can to get the Interstate Commerce Act amended at this present session of the Fiftieth Congress, to cure existing evils, and all I ask is that you will take hold and assist me by your signature and approval to the enclosed petition. You are subject to the same influences, and now is your time, my fellow-countrymen, to come forward and assist a little to stop this nefarious work."