The combinations to restrict competition among bituminous coal producers have been of a very different sort from those in force among the anthracite producers. The soft-coal fields are so widely scattered that it has never been possible to combine all the producers so as to control prices by a single authority. Local combinations, however, controlling all the fields of a single locality, have long been an important feature of the trade, and have been able to control prices pretty absolutely within their respective localities. The fact that the principal item in the cost of coal is transportation, enables a combination covering all the producers of a certain field to raise prices very notably before competitors can afford to ship from other coal-producing districts.
It would seem that our fuel is especially liable to be subjected to monopoly, for, as we have already seen in the preceding chapter, the control over the petroleum trade is held by the Standard Oil Trust. How much of the production of crude petroleum is in the hands of the trust it is hard to say. This much is certain, that there is a "Petroleum Producers' Association," which has a compact enough organization to be able