In the midst of this general discouragement, February 17, Ezekiel Bacon brought in fourteen Resolutions embodying a scheme for raising money. Gallatin’s measures were expected to be harsh, but those proposed by Bacon seemed more severe than had been expected. The customs duties were to be doubled; twenty cents a bushel were laid on salt, fifty cents a gallon on the capacity of stills; licenses and stamps in proportion; and a direct tax of three million dollars was to be apportioned among the States. A loan bill for eleven millions at six per cent was easily passed, but all the force of the war feeling could not overcome the antipathy to taxation. The Resolution for doubling the customs duties met little resistance; but February 28 the House refused, by sixty to fifty-seven, to impose a duty on imported salt, and for the moment this vote threatened to ruin the whole scheme. The House adjourned for reflection; and on the following Monday a member from Virginia moved to reconsider the vote. “It now seems,” he said, “that if the article of salt is excluded, the whole system of taxation will be endangered. We are told in conversation, since the vote on the salt tax, that the system which has been presented by the Committee of Ways and Means is a system of compromise and concession, and that it must be taken altogether, the bad with the good; that if we pay the salt tax, the eastern and the western country will suffer peculiarly by an increase of the impost, and by the land tax.” In short, he thought it better to take the whole draught even if it were hemlock. This view of the case did not find easy acceptance. Nelson of Virginia exhorted the majority not under any circumstances to accept the impost on salt; and Wright of Maryland, a man best known for his extravagances, took the occasion to express against Gallatin the anger which the friends of the Smiths, Giles, and Duane had stored. Gallatin, he said, was trying to fix the odium of these taxes on Congress in order to disgust the people and chill the war spirit; he was treading in the muddy footsteps of his official predecessors, in attempting to strap around the necks of the people this odious system of taxation, for which the Federalists had been condemned and dismissed from power. The salt tax would destroy the present as it had destroyed the old Administration; the true course was to lay taxes directly on property. Probably most of the Republican members sympathized in private with the feelings of Wright, but Gallatin had at last gained the advantage of position; the House voted to reconsider, and by a majority of sixty-six to fifty-four accepted the duty of twenty cents on imported salt.