Congress was with the president in 1864 in his insistence on means for finishing the war, and in June a new tariff bill went to the Senate. It had been out of committee just eight days when it was adopted by the House and the debate on it lasted less than two days. The Senate was even more expeditious, for it was reported there on the 14th, taken up on the 16th, and passed on the 17th. That it was possible so to push the bill through was due to the wonderful generalship of the chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, a man whom Charles Sumner once declared to have been in the financial field what all our best generals were in arms. Fessenden was at this time about 58 years old, and he had been in the Senate for nearly ten years. Before the slavery question called him into public life, he had stood at the head of the Maine bar, a position his father had occupied for forty years before him. He was an untiring student, a clear thinker, and a forcible and convincing speaker. He had great dignity—“the dignity of a Cato,” one of his acquaintances has said, but he combined with it “the bitterness of a Junius.” Certain things were sure to arouse him—buncombe, misrepresentation, jobbery, and—_Charles Sumner_. His propensity to quarrel with Sumner was chronic. He seemed to take as a personal insult Sumner’s untiring fight in war times to keep a tariff off books, rags for paper making, magazines, philosophical apparatus for schools and works of art. Sumner never lost a chance to declare these tariffs “barbaric,” “taxes on knowledge.” “Why should not knowledge pay as well as everything else?” Fessenden would ask. This is war, and these tariffs are justified by the circumstances. Why should not rags pay? and he intimated that he knew well the gentleman in Boston who made paper and who had stirred Sumner up to make an attack on the rag duty. Besides, why should not American ragpickers be protected as well as American wool-growers? It was an industry to be cultivated.