That there was discrimination possible against your white fellow-man in applying a protective tariff, Stevens seems never to have understood. Duties were never too high for him, particularly on iron, for he was an iron manufacturer as well as a lawyer, and it was often said in Pennsylvania that the duties he advocated in no way represented the large iron interests of the state, but were hoisted to cover the needs of his own small and badly managed works. He was as unsound on all financial matters as he was on protection. He wanted to pay the war debt in greenbacks, had a horror of gold going out of the country, and once proposed a law forbidding it to be bought and sold. But taken all in all, Thaddeus Stevens was probably what the House needed in the crisis, a prejudiced, violent dictator, with a holy passion for the Union cause. Such men get things done if the after-cost of their work is heavy. Stevens soon sent the tax and tariff bills to the Senate, where, if not greatly improved, they were passed with promptness. Considerable suspicion was popularly attached to many of the Senate changes in the excise bill, particularly because of the close connection with it of Senator Simmons of Rhode Island. The Senator’s connection with the Morrill Bill which had won him the sobriquet of “Wood-Screw” Simmons has been referred to above. It was fresh in public mind then. He still further distinguished himself at the time he was engineering the tax bill by a gun contract so unsavory that it had to be investigated. It was shown beyond quibble that he had been promised $50,000 for getting a contract for one of his constituents and that he had already received some thousands of the money. The Senator did not pretend to deny the fact, but he declared his transaction to be “strictly legal.” The committee was severe on him. He had no more right to sell his influence, they said, than his vote, both were “the property of the country”; but they intimated that as he was really no worse than many of his colleagues, it was better to let him off, and let off he was, though he soon resigned. The affair did not raise the tax bill in the estimation of the public, nor increase public confidence in the merits of the compensating tariffs which accompanied it.