The Toledo public felt no doubt as to who were attacking it under the convenient anonymity of the two gas corporations. At a public conference, January 16, 1889, between the presidents of the private natural-gas companies and the people assembled in mass-meeting, the representative of the former said the only condition on which the members of the oil trust had been induced to interest themselves in natural-gas in Northwestern Ohio was that of absolute and unqualified control of the entire business through a majority of the stock of all the gas companies to be organized. "The trust is interested in companies engaged in supplying natural gas?" the president of the oil trust was asked by the New York Legislature about this time. "To a limited extent, yes." "Have they a majority interest in any of these companies?" "I think they have."[533] This was identically the arrangement by which the nine trustees owned as their private property the control of the oil business. At several later conferences with the city's trustees and the Common Council the gas companies were represented by one of the principal members of the oil combination, the ingenious gentleman who had managed the negotiations with the railroads by which, under the _alias_ of the American Transfer Company, the trust claimed and got a rebate of 20 to 35 cents a barrel,[534] not only on all oil it shipped, but on all shipped by its competitors. He was also its representative in the similar arrangement by which the Cleveland and Marietta Railroad agreed to carry its oil for 10 cents a barrel, to charge Rice 35 cents, and to pay it 25 out of every 35 cents Rice paid.[535] He had acted in the same interest throughout the gas field as well as in oil, and his pathway could be traced through one independent company after another, whose wrecks, like those in oil, are milestones. July 27, 1889, in an item originating in New York, in the _Tribune_, a friendly paper, and given an extensive circulation by news despatches sent to the leading papers in other cities, it was said that the representatives of the oil trust "in this city say emphatically that they will attack in the courts the right of the city to issue them"--the bonds. At the great meeting of the citizens, October 19, 1889, to organize a popular subscription to take the bonds killed in the money-market, the resolutions named the oil combination as the power responsible for the attacks on the city, and appealed to the people to observe that it, "no longer content with destroying individuals and associations which stand in the way of its moneyed interests, now rises to grapple with and destroy the rights of cities and states; we therefore ask all liberty-loving men to make common cause with us in the defence of the community against the aggression of colossal power."