This campaign has lasted from 1885 until the present writing, 1894. In it the pipe lines, the oil combination, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and all the other great carriers between the independents and their markets in New England, Europe, and Asia, have been mobilized into a fighting corps for the annihilation of the independents. This case illustrates nearly every phase of the story of our great monopoly: dearness instead of cheapness; willingness of the managers of transportation to deny transportation to whole trades and sections; administration of great properties like the Pennsylvania Railroad in direct opposition to the interests of the owners--to their great loss--for the benefit of favorites of the officials; great wealth thereby procured by destruction, as if by physical force, of wealth of others, not at all by creation of new wealth to be added to the general store; impossibility of survival in modern business of men who are merely honest, hard-working, competent, even though they have skill, capital, and customers; subjection of the majority of citizens and dollars to a small minority in numbers and riches; subservience of rulers of the people to a faction; last and most disheartening, the impotence of the special tribunal created to enforce the rights of the people on their highways. This secret contract of 1885 was thus described by the counsel of the refiners before the Interstate Commerce Commission: "It is a contract," he said, "so vicious and illegal that the Pennsylvania Railroad refuses to bring it into court for fear a disclosure of its terms might subject it to a criminal prosecution." The courts have never been allowed to see it, but its provisions are known. Some of them were admitted before the Interstate Commerce Commission to be what was charged, and others were described on the trial by the counsel of the independents from personal knowledge. By this contract the railroad and the oil combination bound themselves to advance rates, and to keep them the same by pipe and rail. In return for this pledge by the railroad not to compete it was guaranteed one-quarter--26 per cent.--of the oil business to the seaboard. The Pennsylvania Railroad made no attempt to deny that it had made this contract. It admitted that it had an arrangement "substantially the same as stated."[212] The combination was the largest shipper of oil, and yet it wanted freight rates advanced. It had pipe lines which could easily take to the seaboard all the oil that went thither, and yet it gave up a large part of the business to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Pennsylvania Railroad knew that the pipe line was a competitor for the carriage of oil, and yet allowed it to dictate an arrangement by which the railroad got only one-quarter of the business, and signed away its rights to win a larger share if it could.