The United States excise law was enacted in March, 1791. While the bill was before Congress, the subject was taken up by the Pennsylvania Legislature, then in session, and resolutions were passed in strong terms against the law, and requesting the senators and representatives, by a vote of thirty-six to eleven, to oppose its passage; the minority voting on the principle that it was improper to interfere with the action of the Federal Government, and not from approval of the measure. The law imposed a tax of from nine to twenty-five cents per gallon, according to strength, upon spirits distilled from grain. To secure the collection of the duties, suitable regulations were made. Inspection districts were established, one or more in each State, with an inspector for each. Distillers were to furnish at the nearest inspection office full descriptions of their buildings, which were always subject to examination by a person appointed for that purpose, who was to gauge and brand the casks; duties to be paid before removal. But to save trouble to small distillers, not in any town or village, they were allowed to pay an annual tax of sixty cents per gallon on the capacity of the still. Such a measure could not fail to be intensely unpopular, especially among the small farmers to whom the whiskey derived from their grain was the principal source of income and support. To the large distillers the tax was not altogether odious, as they comprehended that the new law would add greatly to their trade by cutting off their lesser rivals, and securing the manufacture of spirits to the well-to-do and well-established few. On the same ground distillers to-day are very generally opposed to the removal of the internal revenue tax on spirits. But popular clamor carried all before it, and it would have been unsafe for any one to openly avow himself in favor of the excise. At a meeting held in Pittsburg, on the seventh of September, 1791, resolutions were adopted denouncing the tax as "operating on a domestic manufacture--a manufacture not equal through the States. It is insulting to the feelings of the people to have their vessels marked, houses painted and ransacked, to be subject to informers gaining by the occasional delinquency of others. It is a bad precedent, tending to introduce the excise laws of Great Britain and of countries where the liberty, property and even the morals of the people are sported with to gratify particular men in their ambitious and interested measures." The duties were likewise denounced as injurious to agricultural interests.