"About 1879 or 1880 it was discovered that railways were inadequate to the task of getting oil to the seaboard as rapidly as needed. Combined capital and energy were equal to the emergency. No need to detail how it was done. To-day there reaches,"[204] etc., etc. It must have been on some such authority that this, from one of our leading religious journals, was founded: "Only by such union"--of the refiners--"could pipe lines have been laid from the oil wells to the tide-water, reducing to the smallest amount the cost of transportation."[205] An account of the pipe-line system in the New York _Sun_, of December 14, 1887, describing the operations of the great pumps that force the oil through the pipes, says: "Every time the piston of the engine passes forward and back a barrel of oil is sent seaward. A barrel of oil is forced on its way every seven seconds of every hour of the twenty-four. Every pulsation of the gigantic pumps that are throbbing ceaselessly day and night is known and numbered at headquarters in New York at the close of each day's business." This heart of a machine, beating at the headquarters in New York, and numbering its beats day and night, stands for thousands of hearts whose throbs of hope have been transmuted into this metallic substitute. This heart counts out a gold dollar for every drop of blood that used to run through the living breasts of the men who divined, projected, accomplished, and lost. CHAPTER X CHEAPENING TRANSPORTATION Through all the tangle of this piping and dancing one thread runs clear. The oil combination had up to this time been dependent on the railroads for transportation, but it emerged out of the fracas the principal transporter of oil, made so by the railroads. It now had two trunk pipe lines to the sea-coast--the one it had conquered and the one it had built--and the railroads had made it a present of both of them. The Tidewater--the first seaboard pipe line--had been built only because the Pennsylvania and other trunk lines had said "no" to every entreaty and demand of the oil regions for a road to the sea. That line the railroads had conquered for the combination, as they conquered for it the pipe lines of the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1877. The second seaboard pipe line was built by the combination with the railroads' money to take away the railroads' business, and best--or worst--of all, while the railroads were hard at work driving the Tidewater into its net. Such is the business genius of our "railroad kings." This campaign closed, the duty of the hour for the oil ring was to get rates advanced by rail as well as pipe.