As a matter of fact, Mr. McKinley’s answer to Mr. Mills had been a trick. Mr. Mills had not said that a man could not buy a suit of clothes for $10.00 in the United States; he said that if a tariff of 100 per cent was put on a suit which could be sold for $10.00 without the tariff, a man would pay $20.00 for his suit. Mr. McKinley had diverted attention from the real point simply by holding up a ten-dollar suit in the Halls of Congress. It was characteristic of the way in which the taxation element of the tariff was beginning to be handled that after Mr. Mills’s answer the suit disappeared entirely from the debate; that is, there began at this time a concerted effort on the part of supporters of protection to evade or deny the fact that the tariff was a tax the effect of which was to increase the cost of living. In all the early years this point was met with fairness. The tariff was a tax consented to by a majority of the people because of what they believed to be good and sufficient reasons. Henry Clay called it a tax,—the protectionists who advocated raising the duties in the Civil War called them taxes. The Republican party as a whole admitted them to be taxes in 1872. The tariff Commission of 1883, made up of protectionists, approved by a Republican administration, called them taxes—taxes which had become largely unnecessary for the purposes for which they were laid and therefore unjust. All through the Great Debate the necessity of stopping the use of the word grew on the Republicans. They sought to replace the obnoxious term which was unquestionably influencing the country by something alluring. The tariff a tax, they cried; why, the tariff is the _cause_ of prosperity; and they set out to force the argument away from the practical questions which Mr. Cleveland’s message had raised,—the question of who, after all, got the profit, the question of the relation of high duties to panics and trusts, to depressions and high prices. “We have now spent twenty days in the discussion of the Mills Bill,” said Mr. Reed, when he made his leading speech. “Have you noticed what has been the most utterly insignificant thing in the discussion? The most utterly insignificant thing in the discussion has been the Mills Bill.” It was true, and Mr. Reed’s party was responsible. It was engaged in a shrewd struggle to divert attention from damaging evidence and to establish a superstitious reverence for the doctrine of protection which would put it out of the reach of attack by facts and logic.