Senator Payne defended the oil trust and himself. "Even at this date," he said, "it seems that that company is represented as being guilty of all sorts of unlawful and improper things. Such allegations without proof to sustain them I regard as unworthy of an honorable man or an honorable senator.... The Standard Oil Company," he continued, "is a very remarkable and wonderful institution. It has accomplished within the last twenty years, as a commercial enterprise, what no other company or association of modern times has accomplished." He went on to declare that he "never had a dollar's interest in the company." But the charge which he and it would never allow to be investigated was that the company had a great many dollars' interest in him. "The majority of the stockholders are very liberal in their philanthropic contributions to charity and benevolent works," he pleaded; "but it contributed," he said, "not one dollar or one cent directly or indirectly to my election to this body." During the demand for investigation he uttered no such denial to be taken as a challenge. The senator made what Senator Hoar properly called a "very remarkable admission" concerning the part taken in elections by the oil combination. "When a candidate for the other House in 1871," Senator Payne said, "no association, no combination in my district did more to bring about my defeat, and went to so large an expense in money to accomplish it, as the Standard Oil Company." The oil trust, then, does take part in elections, and as a company spends larger sums of money than any other "institution, association, combination ... to accomplish the defeat" of candidates for Congress! Then Mr. Payne said: "There never has been a national election at which those two gentlemen--one of them was my own son--have not contributed very liberally." He named the two men who were, as Senator Hoar showed, among the most influential and important managers of his election to the Senate. Senator Hoar closed the debate with these unanswered and unanswerable words: "A senator who, when the governor of his State, when both branches of the Legislature of his State, complained to us that a seat in the United States Senate had been bought; when the other senator from the State rose and told us that that was the belief of a very large majority of the people of Ohio, without distinction of party, failed to rise in his place and ask for the investigation which would have put an end to those charges, if they had been unfounded, sheltering himself behind the technicalities which were found by some gentlemen on both sides of this chamber, that the investigation ought not to be made, but who could have had it by the slightest request on his part, and then remained dumb, I think should forever after hold his peace."[574]