To anybody reading the provisions of this bill it would appear very clearly that one of the great special interests were the manufacturers of perforated music rolls. Proceed a little further and it will be very apparent that the manufacturers of automatic piano-playing instruments, which can not be operated without music rolls, had a very special interest in this bill. It would be the easiest thing in creation to notify the manufacturers of music rolls and the manufacturers of automatic piano players of these conferences. Take up any directory of manufacturers in the United States and you would find them by the dozen. The CHAIRMAN. Let me interrupt you for a moment, Mr. O'Connell, to say that so far as I myself am concerned it does not seem necessary to continue longer upon that line, for the reason that the committees of the Senate and House are now giving you a hearing, and you shall have an ample opportunity to present your side of the case. Mr. O'CONNELL. I simply wanted to make it clear to the whole committee, as I explained it to the chairman yesterday, that it was only last Saturday that we knew what the situation was and knew what the provisions of this bill were. I might say at the outset that the companies which I represent are not members of that class which Mr. Putnam so delicately denominated as pirates. We are here to protect industries in which there are invested millions of dollars. It has also been said by some of these special interests which are appearing in favor of the bill, in elegant language, that we were "butters-in" at the eleventh hour, and that we are here for the purpose of a hold-up. If protecting our business makes us butters-in and hold-up artists, then we come under that definition. I want to say furthermore, at the outset, that we have no particular controversy or quarrel with those very eminent gentlemen, Mr. Herbert and Mr. Sousa. It is perfectly proper for them to seek to get all they possibly can from the products of their genius, but we are all a great deal too sentimentally inclined toward them and their possessions because of the many hours of delight they have given to every one of us. Here is our position, and I will try to outline it as briefly as I possibly can: A number of years ago in the city of New York, within the last decade, a number of gentlemen interested in a manufacturing concern, one of the pioneers in the piano-playing industry, had the foresight to realize that the industry was destined to become one in which there were millions of dollars of profit, followed the conclusion that they would like to get for themselves all of the millions in that particular industry. The question was how to achieve and attain that result. Naturally they turned to the patent laws, to get monopolies under patents covering not only the machines themselves, but also the music rolls, without which the machines could not be operated, and machinery for cutting such music rolls.