Prices were frequently put higher after the war than before. In the debate in the Canadian Parliament last year on the proposal to reduce the Canadian tariff, supported by a strong lobby from the American oil trust, it was shown by affidavits that at Selma, Alabama, oil was reduced during the "war" against outside refiners to 8 from 15 cents. After "competition was overcome," in the language of the South Improvement Company contract, the price was put up, not to 15 cents where it had been, but to 25 cents. In the same debate a large number of affidavits were exhibited showing how the price charged by the oil trust in America varied in places near each other in arbitrary and extraordinary ways, as 7 cents a gallon at Port Huron, Michigan, and 14-1/2 cents at Bay City, only a few miles distant. Under the rule of the trust prices are on a mechanical basis everywhere, from the retail markets to the seaboard, where the refined, the manufactured article, is quoted at a lower price than the crude, its raw material.[618] In the report of the tenth United States census in 1886, on the necessaries of life, the retail price of kerosene is given for thirty-five places. At a few of these there was competition; there the price was 12-1/2 to 15 cents a gallon. At all other points it ranged from 20 to 25 cents. Such a tax on the 400,000,000 gallons of oil consumed in this country is the only kind of income-tax that is "American." Application was made in May, 1894, by the Central Labor Union of New York City to the Attorney-General of the State to vacate the charter of the principal corporation in the oil trust. In the argument to support it, it was shown that New York consumers were then paying twice as much for their lamp-oil as the people of Philadelphia, and three times as much as the foreign consumer buying in New York for export.