In the Senate the bill suffered still further modification in the same direction. The burden of the Senate's amendments fell, however, on the wool- and hemp-growing and liquor-distilling West. It was for this reason that the House of Representatives refused to concur in {115} them. Recourse was then had to a conference committee, which arranged a compromise that gave a little less protection than the House had voted, and a little more than the Senate had voted. The tariff of May, 1824, was still only a moderately protective tariff. It was certainly in only one particular anything like prohibitory; it preserved the high tariff of 1816 on coarse cotton goods. In other respects it was not much more than a continuation of the reasonable duties already imposed. [Sidenote: The tariff of 1824 not yet considered sectional legislation.] So long as the tariff remained moderately protective, and was approved in Kentucky and Missouri, and disapproved in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and the city of New York, and so long as its burdens were generally believed to fall ultimately upon the consumers of the dutiable articles, it could not take on the form of a sectional issue, dominated by the question of slavery. Some of the Southerners had, indeed, discovered that slave labor could not be employed in the mills, and that, therefore, protection of manufactures would not secure the establishment of these industries in the South, and had begun to treat the tariff question in a manner to develop a party issue out of it. But this tendency had not advanced far enough in 1824 to produce a division of the all-comprehending Republican party. It needed another four years of personal differences among the leaders, another revision of the tariff in the direction of higher duties, and a more complete consolidation of the North for protection, before this result could be attained. [Sidenote: South Carolina and the tariff of 1824.] During the passage of the bill public meetings had been held throughout South Carolina protesting against it, and the year subsequent to its enactment the South Carolina legislature denounced it as unconstitutional, but the people {116} of the Commonwealth acquiesced, though with very bad temper, in the execution of the law. The other question of internal policy, to which certain of the historians refer as suffering under the baleful influences of the slavery interest immediately after 1820, was the question of national internal improvements. [Sidenote: The historical development of the doctrine of internal improvements.]