The nose for news of the American press scented out the novelty of a whole community acting as one man in successful resistance to those who had till then found nowhere any cohesive brotherliness to make a stand against them. The newspapers of the county took the matter up. It was absolutely the first time any method had been found that could prevail against the tactics of divide and conquer, which had been elsewhere irresistible. Public attention was fascinated by the revelation that a brotherhood to ravage the people turned impotent when the people were roused to meet it with their brotherhood of the commonwealth. There was in the spectacle a moral illumination--the light that never fails. Instead of becoming, as had been planned, a warning to all the people of the dire destruction to be visited upon any who dared to disobey, the encounter between the one-man power of united Columbus and the one-man power of hundreds of millions of dollars became every day more brilliantly a sign in the sky, showing all the people how the invasion of their industrial liberties could be changed into a ruin more complete than the retreat from Moscow. Scores of such assaults on the people had been won before. "What was being done at Columbus," said one of the papers, "is but what they have done before at Aberdeen, and at hundreds of other places North and South." But as despoilers always have to fear, one defeat may undo a lifetime of conquest. The success of the people of Columbus was teaching the people of the whole country, and of all markets, that their real enemy was not the oil trust, but the lack of trust in each other. The people were learning there was a magic in association more potent than the trick of combinations. The _Index_ proposed to the people of the South to join the citizens of Columbus, and make the fight general. "There is this about it: if there was concentrated action among the smaller cities and towns throughout even this section of the State, we would have no fear of the result. The oil trust may be too strong for a single small locality, but if a combination of a certain number of localities handling oil were effected, they would soon be forced to retire. Such a combination can be and should be brought about at once." The struggle at Columbus lasted three years. It had seemed unequal enough--a few thousands of dollars against hundreds of millions. But three years of this commercial warfare failed to break the spirit or resources of the brave--and wise because brave--people. The community never broke rank. They laughed when they were tempted with cheap coffee, flour, sugar, to join in the attempt to bankrupt their home merchants. They could see that the gift of forced cheapness, used to destroy natural cheapness, was a Trojan horse bearing within itself the deadliest form of dearness. Defeated, the oil lords gave up the contest, closed their store in Columbus, and left the people of that place free.