"Do you do that in any business except oil?" the most distinguished railroad man of that day was asked. "Do you carry a raw product to a place 150 miles distant and back again to another point like that without charge, so as to put them on an equality?" To which he replied--it was he who could not remember that he had ever seen the South Improvement Company contract he signed in 1872--"I don't know."[128] "Could any more flagrant violation of every principle of railroad economy and natural justice be imagined than this?" the report of the New York Legislature asks.[129] An expert introduced by the railroads defended this arrangement. He insisted that all pipe lines had a chance to enter the pool and get the same refund.[130] But a witness from the pipe-line country, who was brought to New York to testify to the relations of the railroads and the oil combination, let out the truth. "Why didn't they go into the pool?" he was asked, in reference to one of the most important pipe lines. "Because they were not allowed to. They wanted to freeze them out. They were shut out from the market practically."[131] For these enterprises, as they failed one after the other, there was but one buyer--the group of gentlemen who called themselves the South Improvement Company in 1872, but now in the field of pipe-line activity had taken the name of United Pipe Line, since known as the National Transit Company, and then and now a part of the oil trust. "The United Pipe Line bought up the pipes as they became bankrupt one after another," testified the same friendly witness.[132] Then came a great railroad war in 1877. A fierce onslaught was made on the Pennsylvania Railroad by all the other trunk lines. In this affair, as in all dynastic wars, the public knew really nothing about what was being done or why. The newspapers were filled with the smoke of the battles of the railroad kings; but the newspapers did not tell, for they did not then know, that the railroads were but tools of conquest in the hands of greater men. The cause of the trouble was that the managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad had begun to reach out for the control of the oil trade. They had joined in the agreement in 1872 to give it to the oil combination, but now they wanted it for themselves. Through a mistletoe corporation--the Empire Transportation Company--they set to work building up a great business in oil cars, pipe lines, refineries.