In October (the 3d) Mr. Allison reported his bill to the Senate as a substitute for the Mills Bill. The latter was so bad, he said, that it could not be amended. There was nothing to do but prepare an entirely new measure. What this measure was, _not_ Mr. Allison, but Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island, explained. This report is the first important evidence we have of the powerful influence Mr. Aldrich had already come to exercise in the Senate on tariff matters. It is also a complete statement of the interpretation of protection which he had adopted and to which he has been ever since faithful. Mr. Aldrich had been in the Senate since 1881. In the making of the bill of 1883 his work for his wool, cotton, and sugar constituents had been marked by those who studied the debates and votes. From that time on business men interested in tariffs had come to count on him more and more. By 1888 he had indeed become more influential than either Sherman or Allison. The report he now made shows that he had none of their leanings towards moderation, none of their anxieties over the evils in protection which both had at one time or another admitted, none of their dislike of complicated schedules and classifications. Mr. Aldrich rejected every principle on which Mr. Mills had worked. He was particularly hard on the attempt to substitute ad valorem for specific duties. The most important work Congress had in hand after taking care of the surplus was stopping undervaluations, he declared; nothing but specific duties would accomplish this. No expert knowledge was required for the enforcement of specific duties by customs officials, “as the articles upon which they are levied have only to be counted, weighed, or measured”; an extraordinary statement when one remembers the scandals in those years over specific duties on sugar; extraordinary also when one finds that many of the schedules in the new bill, as in the law then in force, were subdivided according to the value of the articles, and that in addition to the specific duties on these classes were ad valorem duties. Thus Mr. Aldrich, after denouncing ad valorem duties, presented a bill filled with ad valorems laid on ad valorems! Sharp issue was of course taken with Mr. Mills’s free list. Mr. Aldrich declared it destructive. The Republicans had indeed pretty generally given up the idea of admitting free any raw materials which were produced in this country. The notion that if you gave to one you must to all had been steadily making converts since the early ’70’s, and it was laid down emphatically now by Mr. Aldrich as one of the tariff principles of the party. No free raw materials where there is competition, but a long free list. Mr. Aldrich called attention to the growth of the free list as a proof of the party’s generosity. In 1847, he said, 88 per cent of the articles imported were dutiable. This had been cut down in 1887 to 66 per cent.