By utilizing the extra session, the Ways and Means Committee had a bill ready for the regular session which began in December, 1893. The chairman now at the head of the Committee was James Lyne Wilson of West Virginia. His appointment to succeed Mr. Springer, who had engineered the “pop-gun” bills, had been particularly satisfactory to the tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. Mr. Wilson was a man of fifty, an educated gentleman, who had been, in turn, a Confederate soldier, a practising lawyer, and a college president. Through it all he had kept alive a disposition to politics. He had written and spoken on whatever public question was uppermost. He had attended conventions, and served as a delegate, a “scholar in politics.” Finally, this interest and activity took him to Congress, where his sound economic ideas and his skill in presenting them had recommended him to the best element in his party, Cleveland, Carlisle, and Mills. In 1884 he aided Carlisle in his fight against the Randall faction. In 1888 he was put on the Ways and Means Committee, where he served Mr. Mills excellently. It has been customary to speak of Mr. Wilson as impractical and academic, but the bill he brought in in December, 1893, far from being a schoolmaster’s application of his own theories, was distinctly practical. The bill was not what he had hoped to make it. Mr. Wilson said in his report: “With the tariff, as with every other long-standing abuse that has interwoven itself with our social and industrial system, the legislator must always remember that in the beginning temperate reform is safest, having in itself the principle of growth.” The first step he had had in mind was to take taxes from the materials of industry. In Mr. Wilson’s judgment it was the higher cost of raw materials rather than higher wages which hampered American manufacturers. Therefore the Wilson Bill made wool, coal, iron-ore, hemp, and flax free. To “help the farmers” duties were taken from agricultural machinery, from cotton bagging, from salt, and from binding twine. An effort was made to do away with all specific duties. On manufactured goods there was no severe reduction: from one-third to one-half on window glass; 25 per cent on steel rails; lower rates on what Mr. Wilson called the “bogus industry” of making American tin plate; one-fourth cent per pound on refined sugar instead of one-half.