Under free conditions prices of manufactured articles would decline faster than prices of farm products. Cost of production can be lowered faster in machine or factory products than in farm products. Under the influence of trusts the natural order is not only reversed, but prices of farm products have declined more than twice as fast as prices of factory or trust products. Trust influence is conspicuous in the cases of sugar and coal. The price of raw sugar, in which there is no trust, has declined 5 per cent. since June 30, 1891. The price of granulated has advanced 4 per cent. The president of the trust admitted to Congress in 1894 that it had advanced the price 3/8 of a cent a pound. Cost of refining has declined since 1891. There being no well-defined trust in bituminous coal, its price has declined 30 per cent. since 1891. The price of anthracite coal has advanced 2 per cent. in the same time, because the producers have "regulated" production. CHAPTER XXXI ALL THE WORLD UNDER ONE HAT "This business belongs to us." This was the reply the president of the oil combination made to a neighbor who was begging to be allowed to continue the refinery which he had successfully established before his tardier but more fortunate competitors had left their produce stores, lumber-yards, and book-keepers' stools. He could remember, the neighbor told the New York Legislature, before there was any such company as theirs, and when the president of the poor man's light was still in the commission business opposite him and his refinery. He described how the president left this commission business, and "commenced to build a refinery there of a small capacity.... He used to say to me, 'What is a good time to sell?' and 'What is a good time to hold?' as he said he thought I knew." The day came when the neighbor who had been first found that the last was to be first. He was making $21,000 to $22,000 a year, but he had "to sell or squeeze." He had several conversations with the new-comer who had been so successful in learning when it was "a good time to hold." To save his livelihood, "I did almost condescend to tease him," he testifies. But the only reply he could get was: We have freighting facilities no one else can get.[625] This business belongs to us. Any concern that starts in this business we have sufficient money to lay aside a fund to wipe it out. "They went on just as if it did belong to them, and there were others started before he did in it which I thought it belonged to quite as much as it did to him.... I am wiped out and made a poor man.... I think they are making a profit out of my ruin."