The bill was a grave disappointment to the tariff-for-revenue only Democrats. It did not go far enough, complained Mr. Mills in an article in the _North American Review_ for February, 1894. It was only “a Sabbath Day’s journey on the way to reform.” He would have put every item in the chemical schedule on the free list. He would not only have made ores free, but pigs, bars, bloomers, slabs, ingots, sheets, and plates, that is, all materials which had been advanced to a first or second stage towards manufacture. On the same principle he would have made not only wool and hemp free, but yarns and fibres. Mr. Mills was particularly disturbed because Mr. Wilson had not equalized the import duty and the internal taxes on beer, whiskey, and tobacco. He believed these three should bear the brunt of taxation. As it was then, the internal tax was low and the duties very high. The brewers, distillers, and cigar-makers paid low taxes, and, cut off from foreign competition by high duties, kept up prices. Colonel Mills reckoned that under the McKinley Bill the duty on imported cigars amounted to $70.44 a thousand, the internal tax was $3.00 per thousand. He wished to make each $6.00. This would give revenue and cheaper cigars at once. At the same time it would check the tendency to combine. A more severe critic than Colonel Mills was Mr. Watterson. In a speech in Louisville in January, he said: “I have read with exceeding care and great concern, the reports accompanying the newly-introduced measure, of Tariff revision. The Democratic report begins by a masterly declaration of Tariff-for-revenue only logic, to end in an actual exposition of Protectionist practice. For the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee I entertain the very greatest respect. He is an able, conscientious, patriotic Democrat. He has encountered difficulties and made sacrifices, and endured disappointments, which should earn him the sympathy, rather than the criticism, of his party associates. But, with submission, I think he has been forced by pressure, and not by his own consent, to bring in a measure that strikes a blow at the cause of genuine Tariff Reform, and may set the policy of revenue only back for many years to come. It is far, very far, from a measure that can be truthfully described as embodying the idea of ‘a Tariff-for-revenue only.’ It is merely better than the McKinley Bill in degree, not in kind, and if Protectionism is ever to be dislodged, I doubt the Trojan-horse stratagem to which it seems to incline. We live in the age of Carnegies and Goulds, not in that of Priam and Æneas.” But the bill Mr. Wilson reported was better from a Democratic point of view than the one sent to the Senate early in February. The chief difficulty encountered in the passage through the House he hinted at in an anecdote he told just before the bill was voted on.