As was to be expected, Mr. Carlisle and Mr. Morrison returned to the charge as soon as Congress opened. Four months were spent in preparing a new bill and on it the very best brains of the party were engaged. Abram Hewitt, who had in the previous session presented a bill embodying his ideas, now went to work with Morrison. David Wells and J. S. Moore, the “Parsee Merchant,” came to Washington to give their help. The greatest care was taken to meet the just objections to the previous measure, and when the bill was reported in April, 1886, it was found to be more moderate than its predecessor. The objectionable horizontal levelling had been given up. Duties had been studied in relation to labor cost. The free list was larger, including coal, salt, and iron, copper and lead ores. It was a bill for which both Republicans and Democrats might have voted without violating party platforms, but there was no hope for it. The Randall faction again joined the Republicans when Mr. Morrison asked the House to go into a Committee of the Whole to consider his bill, and voted him down by a vote of 157 to 140. Four Republicans voted with Morrison, 35 Democrats against him. Mr. Morrison might be defeated, but tariff revision could not be. Indeed, the situation was becoming more complicated every day. For four years a serious business depression had harassed the country. Mr. Carroll D. Wright, who, as commissioner of labor, investigated the condition and reported a little later, found that in the year ending July, 1885, there had been fully 1,000,000 persons out of employment. He estimated that year of idleness meant a loss of $300,000,000 to the country. Strikes were incessant, and in 1884 and 1885 over 20,000 failures had occurred, many of them being in highly protected industries. Indeed, some of the chief advocates of the system had gone down in the general distress, among them John Roach, whose panegyric on protection as the source of prosperity was one of the choice pieces collected by the Tariff Commission of 1882, and Henry Oliver, the representative on the Commission of the iron and steel industries. The piling up of the surplus, too, was causing more and more uneasiness. In the year ending just after Mr. Morrison’s second bill was denied consideration, the surplus was found to be nearly ninety-four million dollars, with no profitable provision for spending. Even Mr. Randall was willing to admit that this was serious, and to remedy it he now prepared a bill. The gist of it was the reduction of the surplus by _increasing_ the duties; that is, making them prohibitory. If nothing was imported, nothing would be collected. Of course, there was no hope for Mr. Randall’s proposition, though the Ways and Means Committee gave prominence to it by an adverse report and it was discussed fully in the public press, particularly in the New York _Times_, where the “Parsee Merchant” dissected it mercilessly.