enough of them at least, to pass the bill, seem to have disappeared. The bounty provision gave a fine opportunity to Mr. Mills. According to his way of thinking it was a “bribe,” an “extortion,” a violation of the Constitution, and where might it not lead? Why should not everybody have it? Why should not the “people who are raising corn, cotton, wheat, oats, hogs, and beeves, all slip up the counter and say ‘we will take sugar in ours, too.’” It is difficult to believe that the sugar bounty could have survived a test before the Supreme Court. The Constitution is quite clear in the definition of the taxing powers it gives to Congress. It is for the “general welfare.” If this means anything, it means that the tax shall be for a public purpose; or, as Richard Olney has defined it, “It is the power to raise money from the public for the public.” No stretch of the Constitution could include in this definition the power of raising money to help a few farmers raise sugar beets and sorghum, any more than it could to pension an artist while he learned to paint. The duty fixed on refined sugar in the McKinley Bill was intended as an attack on the monopolistic powers of the so-called “Sugar Trust.” The official name of the sugar trust in 1890 was the Sugar Refineries Company. It had been formed in 1887, but the operations of the leading concerns which organized it had long been a scandal. In those years, as now, these beneficiaries of the nation’s tariff policy had worked in every conceivable way to avoid paying the duty on their imported raw sugar. False weighing, under-classification, over rebate duties for drawbacks on exports, adulterations, were methods they practised boldly and repeatedly in the ’70’s and ’80’s in their effort to cheat the government. The sugar schedule had lent itself admirably to the manipulation. The aim of the trust was, of course, to keep out all sugar which was eatable, _i.e._ they aimed to supply the country. Now the line between refined and unrefined sugar is difficult to draw strictly. There are high grade clean raw sugars, and partially refined sugars which may be used without further treatment. These sugars are of course cheap and bought by the poor. The refiners aim to keep the duty on this class of sugars, known in the schedule as Nos. 13 to 16, Dutch Standard (the Dutch Standard is a color test) so high that it will not pay to put them on the market. In the bill of 1883 they had succeeded in doing this. The sugar refiners had not only manipulated the duty on this class of sugar until it was too dear to eat, but they had practised some of their most successful frauds in this region of the sugar schedule. A sample of their operations had been presented to the Senate only a short time before by Secretary Fairchild. It related to a cargo of sugar brought into San Francisco by the American Sugar Refinery (the Spreckles concern). In this case the enterprising importers caused the sugar to be