There were conservatives in the field to whom competition was as distasteful as to the socialists. To "overcome such competition," and to insure them "a full and regular" and "remunerative business" in pipe lines, in the language of the South Improvement Company contract, all that was needed was to put into operation the machinery of that contract which no longer existed--in name. The decease of the name was not an insuperable obstacle. In exact reproduction of the plan of 1872, the railroads, in October, 1874, advanced rates to the general ruin, but to the pool of lines owned by their old friends of the South Improvement Company they paid back a large rebate. That those who had such a railroad Lord Bountiful to fill their pockets should grow rich fast was a matter of course.[125] Getting this refund they got all the business. Oil, like other things, follows the line of least resistance, and will not flow through pipes where it has to pay when it can run free and get something to boot. Nobody could afford to buy oil except those who were in this deal. They could go into the market, and out of these bonuses could bid higher than any one else. They "could overbid in the producing regions, and undersell in the markets of the world."[126] This was not all. In the circular which announced the bounty to the pet pipes there was another surprise. It showed that the roads had agreed to carry crude oil to their friends' refineries at Pittsburg and Cleveland without charge from the wells, and to charge them no more for carrying back refined oil to the seaboard for export than was charged to refineries next door to the wells and hundreds of miles nearer the market. "Outside" refiners who had put themselves near the wells and the seaboard were to be denied the benefit of their business sagacity. The Cleveland refiners, whose location was superior only for the Western trade, were to be forced into a position of unnatural equality in the foreign trade. In short, the railroads undertook to pay, instead of being paid, for what they carried for these friends, and force them into an equality with manufacturers who had builded better than they. Evidently they who had contrived all this had their despondent moments, when they feared that its full beneficence would not be understood by a public unfamiliar with the "science of transportation." To the new rules was attached an explanation which asserted the right of the railroads to prevent persons and localities from enjoying the advantage of any facility they may possess, no matter how "real." "You will observe that under this system the rate is even and fair to all parties, preventing one locality taking advantage of its neighbor by reason of some alleged or real facility it may possess."[127] Meanwhile good society was shuddering at its reformers, and declaring that they meant to stop competition and "divide up property."