The way in which this revenue was given and got shows what a simple and easy thing modern business really is--not in any way the brain-racker political economists have persuaded themselves and us. The representative of the oil combination writes a bright, cheery letter; the representative of the Pennsylvania answers it, and there you are; 22-1/2 cents a barrel on millions of barrels flows out of the cash-box of the railroad into the cash-box of the combination. In one year, 1878, this tribute, at the rate of 22-1/2 cents on the 13,750,000 barrels of oil shipped by the three trunk-lines, must have amounted to $3,093,750. The American Transfer Company had a little capital of $100,000, and its receipts from this rebate in this one year would amount to dividends of 3093 per cent. annually; the capital of the oil combination which owned this Transfer Company was at this time $3,500,000. There are reasons to believe that some of the very railroad men who turned the money of the railroads over to the American Transfer Company were among its members. But if all the profit went to the combination, and none of it was for the railway officials through whom they got it, their revenue from that source alone would have paid in 1878 a dividend nearly equal to this capital of $3,500,000. In this device of the American Transfer Company we again see reappear in 1878, in high working vitality, the supposed corpse of the South Improvement Company of 1872. The American Transfer Company was ostensibly a pipe line, and the railroad officials met the exposure of their "nothing peculiar" dealings with it by asserting that the payment to it of 22-1/2 cents a barrel and more was for its service in collecting oil and delivering it to them; but the Third Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad admits that his road paid the money on oil which the American Transfer Company never handled. "This 22-1/2 cents (a barrel) paid the American Transfer Company is not restricted to oil that passed through their lines?" "No, sir; it is paid on all oil received and transported by us."[165] The American Transfer Company was not even a pipe line. By the Pennsylvania laws all incorporated pipe lines must report their operations and condition monthly to the State. But the publisher of the petroleum trade reports, and organizer of a bureau of information about petroleum, with offices in Oil City, London, and New York, issuing daily reports, testified that the American Transfer Company was not known in the oil regions at all as a pipe line. It published none of the statements required by law. "They do not," he said, "make any runs from the oil-wells." It had once been a pipe line, but "years ago it was merged in with other lines," and consolidated into the United Pipe Line, owned and operated by the combination.[166]