The new Congress, which was elected in the fall of 1894, first met in December, 1895. Mr. Reed was elected speaker of the House and Nelson Dingley, also of Maine, was appointed chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Mr. Dingley was a man over sixty years old, a hard-working, conscientious, experienced politician. He had been born and educated in Maine. He had been one of the state’s best newspaper editors and had filled, one after another, nearly all her offices, that of governor included. In 1881 Mr. Dingley was sent to Congress, where he had soon become invaluable because of his extraordinary fund of information on all sorts of subjects, particularly on all things relating to American history and American industry. He held the doctrine of protection in much the same pious regard as did Mr. McKinley. For him it was a settled dogma—the only question was the amount of a duty, and to the estimating of that he brought an amazing patience in calculation and in investigation. His colleague, Mr. Boutelle, once said that he had for years lived in the same hotel with Mr. Dingley and that he had never entered his room that he did not find him surrounded by documents, a pad on his knee, laboriously digesting them for his purposes. Facts alone stirred his mind. No man was ever witty enough or wise enough to impress Nelson Dingley, but no fact was too unimportant to receive his attention. It is obvious that any tariff bill he directed would be carefully made. The first business of the new Congress was to provide revenue. Mr. Cleveland’s administration had inherited, as already pointed out, a deficit of nearly $70,000,000. The tariff bill which had been revised to increase the revenue had failed. The sugar refiners, finding that a duty was to be put on raw sugar, had brought in enormous quantities, free, to hold for their needs. Thus, by their foresight, the treasury in Mr. Cleveland’s first year was despoiled of revenues it had a right to count on. Again, the income tax on which they depended for a large sum was declared unconstitutional. Something had to be done to bring in more money. The Republicans had decided to use their power to put back the tariff on wool and to increase that on a variety of manufactured articles, and on December 26, 1895, Mr. Dingley reported a bill providing for these increases. The bill was passed at once by the House. Its fate in the Senate shows how thoroughly the tariff had already been replaced by free silver. The Finance Committee did not report it, but recommended to the Senate that the needed revenue be raised not by the House bill, but by the free coinage of silver; and pathetically enough, poor Mr. Morrill, who for forty years had struggled for sound money, was obliged, as chairman of the committee, to report the measure.