Hearings on the tariff were at once begun. They perhaps were never less justifiable. The Committee had as a guide a great mass of recent testimony which further hearings could do little more than duplicate. But Mr. McKinley took the whole matter too devoutly to omit any of the ceremony. Hearings were a good Republican tradition, and hearings he would have. His was to be no “Dark Lantern bill,” as the opposition delighted in calling the Mills Bill. The Allison Bill was accepted as a foundation by Mr. McKinley for the new measure which was first reported on April 16. In reporting the bill Mr. McKinley gave notice that general debate would be limited to four days. “I have interpreted the victory to mean, and the majority in the House and Senate to mean,” he said, “that a revision of the tariff was not only demanded by the votes of the people but that such revision should be on the line and in full recognition of the principle and purposes of protection. The people have spoken and want their will registered and their decrees embodied in public legislation.” Mr. Mills and his colleagues were eloquent in their remonstrances against the limit on the debate, but the program was in too firm hands to be modified by arguments or tactics. The bill passed the House on May 21. The Senate Committee on Finance added hundreds of amendments to it, and the Senate spent some seven weeks debating it. On the 10th of September it passed the upper House and was referred to a Conference Committee. Both Houses agreed to the report of this Committee, and the President signed the bill and it became a law on October 1, 1890. The matter of first moment in the new bill was of course the method taken for reducing the surplus, which had been piling up in an alarming fashion throughout the three years’ struggle. When Mr. Cleveland made his demand in 1887 for general tariff reduction in order to bring this overtaxation down to a normal figure, the Republicans had offered as a counter proposition—“spend it.” Mr. Blaine started the cry in his letter from Paris suggesting one of the most dubious schemes for handling revenues ever proposed by an American public man of any weight. It was to appropriate the whiskey tax (the internal revenue tax on distilled spirits amounted in 1888 to over $69,000,000) to coast fortifications. If there was something over after this was done and the National government had no use for the money, he would divide it among the Federal Union, with the specific object of lightening the tax on real estate. Mr. Blaine evidently had forgotten for the moment that the Constitution in defining the taxing powers of Congress does not include that of “lightening the tax on real estate.”