According to the funeral notices given out by the railroad officials and the members of the South Improvement Company this concern was dead, but in the quaint phrase of the producers it was really alive and hard at work, but "with a new suit of clothes and no name." These interviews between the independent refiners and the railroad officials of the three trunk lines form one of the most extraordinary scenes which have taken place between a government and its subjects since the era of modern democratic liberty. The railway officials are, in the world of the highway, the government. They hold their supreme power to tax commerce, and to open and close the highways, solely and altogether by grant of the State, and under the law of the common carrier. It is only by the exercise of the sovereign power of eminent domain to take the property of a private individual by force, without his consent, for public use--never for any other than public use--and only by the grant of the right to cross city streets and country roads that the railroads come into existence at all. This says nothing of the actual cash given to the railroad projectors by the government, which, in New York State alone, amounts to upwards of $40,000,000.[161] The independent refiners represent the people, claiming of the highway department of their government those equal rights which all citizens have as a birthright, and the government informs these citizens that their rights on the highways have been given as a private estate to certain friends of the ruling administration, much as William the Conqueror would give this rich abbey or that fertile manor to one of his pets. "We have no franchise that is not open to all," say the "trustees." "It is a free open market." "There is nothing peculiar to our companies." "It is as free as air." In truth they have had no less a franchise than, as in 1872, the excluding possession of all the great trunk-lines out of the oil country, and all their connections east and west, and this franchise has since widened until, in 1893, it reaches from ocean to ocean, and from gulf to gulf. Their franchise was meant to be as exclusive as if they had had from the government letters-patent in the old royal fashion of close monopolies in East Indian trade, or salt, or tobacco at home, giving them by name the sole right to use the roads, and forbidding all others, under pain of business death, from setting their foot on the highway. But with this difference: the exclusive franchise in the latter case would exist by law; but in this case it was created in defiance of law, exists in contempt of the law, and in its living the law dies daily.