When the Finance Committee had believed the House rates extreme, Mr. Aldrich said that they had lowered them. A comparison of the bills shows that this was the fact in the case of the chemical, the earthen ware, and the glass and metal schedules. There were also reductions on certain parts of the wool schedule. While the Senate amendments, on the whole, aimed at lowering rates, they also aimed, like the House bill, to protect everything which asked protection. The sugar schedule had undergone material changes and mysterious ones. The rates on all but the lowest raw sugars were higher than they were in the Dingley Bill, and there was a gap between sugars of 87° and 88° polariscope test much wider than between any other two grades. This exceptional differential was effected by such indirection that there was an immediate cry that Mr. Aldrich was trying to play into the hands of the sugar trust. The schedule was twice changed in the Senate, but when the bill came into conference Mr. Dingley succeeded in having the House rates restored. The political make-up in the Senate in 1897 was such that it created for the Republicans a situation not unlike that of the Democrats in 1894. Their Republican majority was considerable, but there was a group of this majority interested in free silver and not in the tariff, and it could not be counted on. If they supported the bill, it would be in return for concessions which they might ask. Almost at once it developed that this group was going to use its power to raise the duties on all grades of wool higher than the House or Senate had proposed to do. Wool had been free under the Wilson Bill. To cut a duty on an important product like wool 11 and 12 cents a pound without giving time for adjustment, of course causes a severe strain on a business even in prosperous times; to do it at a moment when all business is depressed and when the particular product, as in the case of wool in 1894, has been suffering ups and downs for many years, is to increase the strain dangerously near the breaking point. Free wool did intensify an existing distress but that the sheep growers would not have rallied from it and adjusted themselves in a very few years, no disinterested person can for a moment believe. If they had been willing to do this, there is no doubt that the business of wool-growing would be on a more solid basis to-day than it has ever been in this country. It would be conducted according to those laws of supply and demand which govern trade, and not be subjected, as it is now, to periodical excitations and depressions as public opinion forces duties up or down. The wool-growers had no thought, however, of accepting the situation as long as they had political power. Judge William Lawrence, the president of the National Wool-Growers Association, kept up a clamor throughout the campaign, and when the new bill was under consideration, demanded rates higher than wool had ever received.