Seven months after Mr. Cleveland’s message, July 21, the House passed the Mills Bill—passed it by a very decent majority—162 to 114. Mr. Randall’s followers, who in May, 1884, had been 41 strong against Mr. Morrison’s original bill, and in June, 1886, 35 strong against his second bill, had dwindled to three or four. They had not given up without a fight. Randall had prepared a second bill to introduce, but even the most devoted of his followers realized the hopelessness at that moment of any bill which advocated reduction as his did by free tobacco and free whiskey and prohibitory tariffs. Randall, too, was away from the House much of the spring of 1888, suffering from the disease which two years later was to end his life; and his group, left without the stimulus of his magnetic presence, subject to the pressure of the majority and to the rising popular approval of Mr. Cleveland, dwindled away one by one. They left him with heavy hearts. Indeed, for more than one of them the most painful experience of his political life was “going back on Sam Randall,”—not, let it be noted, on the doctrine of protection. Four days after the House bill was passed it was turned over to a sub-committee of the Senate Finance Committee, appointed two months before to prepare for its reception. The chairman of this sub-committee was Senator William B. Allison of Iowa. It could not have been a better man. Allison was at the time nearly sixty years old and he had been in Congress constantly for over twenty-five years. Most of the time he had served on the House or Senate Committees in charge of the tariff. He had begun his career as a very moderate protectionist of the Garfield type. In all of the early years of the Republican struggle to keep the war-time promises as to high duties, _i.e._ to reduce them as the internal taxes came off, Allison had been a leader. In March of 1870, when the Schenck Bill was under consideration, he made one of the ablest tariff reform speeches of the period; a speech which dogged his later life. But Allison was a strong party man. As the tariff became gradually a matter of politics rather than of principle he adapted his views to the needs of the campaigns, striving diligently for duties which would win the most supporters and do the least harm to consumers. By temperament he was admirably adapted to compromise. They used to say in Iowa that he could walk on eggs from Des Moines to Washington and not break one. Senator Dolliver admirably characterized Senator Allison’s gift of getting on with men in his eulogy delivered in the Senate in 1905: “He avoided dogmatism even in its most attractive forms and made room in the expression of his opinion for those differences which he knew would be encountered sooner or later, giving leeway for composing those disagreements which he knew must be composed before anything could be actually done.” Senator Allison was peculiarly ready for making a