I remember of hearing a debate in the Senate of the United States upon a proposed amendment to the tariff laws. The bill had been prepared and revised in a committee of Senators most experienced and acute in such matters, and it had been hammered over in long days of debate. Some one now asked what would be the exact duty collectible under this bill on the class of merchandise to which it related, and not a man in the Senate could tell. Last winter, when it was proposed in the House of Representatives to cut down the duties twenty per cent. all around (“horizontal reduction”), it was demonstrated by experts that the measure would work such confusion that it could _not_ be executed. To illustrate the nicety and intricacies that have grown around this business, take fabrics. The duty on silk goods and that on cotton goods are different. In the case of mixed, silk and cotton, it is, of course, different still. Then, whether the goods be silk or cotton, or mixed, the duty is calculated by a double standard—so much per square yard, and so much according to its fineness and weight. They count the threads of warp and woof in a square inch, and charge duty accordingly. If there are two hundred threads to the inch the fabric must pay a duty of, say, thirty-five per cent. _ad valorem_, if it cost over twenty-five cents per yard; while on another piece counting two hundred and one threads to the inch the duty shall be six and a half cents per square yard and fifteen per cent. of its cost. A single thread more or less may change the duty. Then there is all the complication of fixing the value of goods. I don’t suppose there is a farmer in the United States who can ascertain by any amount of figuring what it costs him to raise a pound of wool; yet the customs officers must fix the cost for all wool that is imported. So of all other products on which _ad valorem_ duty is levied. Congress two years ago made a change in the basis of valuation, by decreeing that the value of the package in which goods are imported, the fees of brokers and other middlemen in the country where the goods were bought, and the cost of transporting them from points inland abroad to the seaboard, should not be counted in the value of the goods. All these items had before to be included in the appraisement. The fine distinctions and the contested points in fixing duties are innumerable. If any of them seem absurd and needlessly exact, you must remember that every one of them has been fought over between government and importers, between foreign and American dealers, and between rival importers, and has been established by experience as the best adjustment of all conflicting interests. For the tariff system is the growth of centuries. We inherited its leading features from England’s protective system—what time that, instead of free trade, was her better policy—and have gradually modified and expanded it to suit the exigencies of our own national growth. Each