Senator Hoar, who claimed that he was the author of the Sherman anti-trust law, says, however, that the act was not directed against _all_ combinations in business. "It was expected," he says, "that the court in administering that law would confine its operations to cases which are contrary to the policy of the law, treating the words 'agreements in restraint of trade' as having a technical meaning, such as they are supposed to have in England. The Supreme Court of the United States went in this particular farther than was expected.[32] ... It has not been carried to its full extent since, and I think will never be held to prohibit those lawful and harmless combinations which have been permitted in this country and in England without complaint, like contracts of partnership, which are usually considered harmless." The immediate effects of the Sherman anti-trust law were wholly negligible. Seven of the eight judicial decisions under the law during Harrison's administration were against the government, and no indictment of offenders against the law went so far as a trial. During Cleveland's second term the law was a dead letter. Meanwhile trusts and combinations continued to multiply. _The Income Tax Law of 1894_ In the debates over tariff reduction, silver, and paper money, evidences of group and class conflicts were almost constantly apparent, but it was not until the enactment of the income tax provision of 1894 that political leaders of national standing frankly avowed a class purpose--the shifting of a portion of the burden of national taxes from the commodities consumed by the poor to the incomes of the rich. The movement for an income tax found its support especially among the farmers of the West and South and the working classes of the great cities. The demand for it had been appearing for some time in the platforms of the agrarian and labor parties. The National or Greenback party, in its platform of 1884, demanded "a graduated income tax" and "a wise revision of the tariff laws with a view to raising revenues from luxury rather than necessity." The Anti-monopoly party, in the same year, demanded, "a graduated income tax and a tariff, which is a tax upon the people, that shall be so levied as to bear as lightly as possible upon necessaries. We denounce the present tariff as being largely in the interest of monopolies and demand that it be speedily and radically reformed in the interest of labor instead of capital." The Union Labor convention at Cincinnati in 1888 declared in its platform: "A graduated income tax is the most equitable system of taxation, placing the burden of government upon those who can best afford to pay, instead of laying it upon the farmers and producers and exempting millionaire bondholders and corporations."