The debate upon the recommendation of the committee not to investigate was impassioned. Senator Hoar said: "The adoption of this majority report ... will be the most unfortunate fact in the history of the Senate." When the vote of the Senate not to investigate was announced, Senator Edmunds turned to his neighbor in the Senate and summed up the verdict of posterity in these words: "This is a day of infamy for the Senate of the United States." The same Legislature which sent Senator Payne to the Senate defeated the bill to allow the Cleveland independent refiners to build a pipe line to furnish themselves with oil. The defeat of the bill was accomplished by a lobby whose work was so openly shameless that it was characterized by the Ohio press "as an indelible disgrace to the State." The bill was one of many attempts which have been made by the people of Ohio and Pennsylvania, without success, to get from their Legislature the right to build pipe lines. It has been tried to get laws to regulate the charges of the existing lines, but without success. The history of the pipe-line bills in these legislatures for the past ten years has been a monotonous record of an unavailing struggle of a majority of millions to apply legal and constitutional restraints to a minority of a few dozens. The means employed in the Ohio Legislature of 1885 to defeat a bill giving equality in pipe-line transportation to refiners in competition with the oil trust, which owned the existing pipe-lines, were of such a sort that that body has gone into the history of the State as the "Coal-oil Legislature." It is stated by Hudson, in his _Railways and the Republic_, that the Democratic agent of the bribery openly threatened to publish the list he had of the members of the Legislature he had purchased, and that in consequence of this threat proceedings which had been begun against him for outraging the House by appearing on the floor in a state of gross intoxication were abandoned.[573] In a debate about combinations in trade and industry--trusts--in the United States Senate in 1888, the sore scandal of this senatorial election of 1884 was disinterred. "If there be such a trust," said Senator Hoar, referring to the oil trust, "is it represented in the cabinet at this moment? Is it represented in the Senate? I want to know the facts about these five or six great trusts which are sufficient in their power to overthrow any government in Europe, if they existed in those nations, that should set itself against them--the coal, the sugar, the whiskey, the cotton, the fruit, the railroad transportation of this country, controlled by these giant chieftains."