Author: U. S. Committee on Manufactures

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-11-02

Total Pages: 1186

ISBN-13: 9780260181503

Excerpt from Investigation of Certain Trusts: Report in Relation to the Sugar Trust and Standard Oil Trust by the Committee on Manufacturers, House of Representatives, Fiftieth Congress, First Session The care with which the trustees avoid making any agreement relat ing to commodities appears from the testimony as to the arrangement made with the Oil Producers' Association in the fall Of 1887. The od'i cers of the Producers' Association testified that an arrangement was then made with the Standard Oil Trust by which barrels of Oil belonging to the Standard Oil Trust were set apart for the benefit of the association, upon its agreeing to curtail the production Of crude oil at least barrels per diem. These witnesses undoubtedly under stand that their arrangement was with the trustees of the Standard Oil Trust. But the written agreement produced, and now in evidence, shows that it was made with and is signed by the Standard Oil Com pany of New York, one of the companies whose stock is held by the trustees, and that the Standard Oil Trust or the trustees thereof, as such, are not parties to it, nor is either of them responsible for the car tying out of that agreement. This form of combination was obviously devised for the purpose of relieving the trusts and trustees from the charge of any breach of the conspiracy laws of the various States, or of being a combination to reg ulate or control the price or production of any commodity', hence they assert that the corporations themselves, which control and regulate the price Of commodities and the extent of production and have tangible property, remain with their organization intact and distinct, and not in combination with each other that the stockholders, who owned only the stock, and by well-settled legal rules had no legal title in the prop erty Of the corporations, entered into the agreements and sold their stock in the corporations and accepted in payment trust certificates, and that the trustees receive and hold only the stock Of corporations, and have no legal title to any of the property Of the corporations, and neither buy nor sell anything nor combine with any one to fix prices or regulate production of any commodity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.