The very essence of all this opposition to free or freer exchange on the part of the manufacturers was the fear of lower prices and cheaper goods. They held as a part of their narrow economic philosophy, the theory that the cheap coat makes a cheap man, that prosperity means limited production and high prices. At bottom, the manufacturer eliminates from his calculations all consideration of the consumer. But the consumer exists, and finally, in spite of the enormous prosperity of the country, the consumer was heard from. The Dingley Bill about 1900 began to hit the rocks for which it had from the start been headed. CHAPTER XI WHERE EVERY PENNY COUNTS The last man to be heard from in the making of the Dingley Bill, as indeed of its predecessors, was the man who was to buy the goods. In 1896, when the tariff hearings were going on, Mr. Louis Brandeis of Boston, at that time unknown outside of his own professional circle, appeared “for the consumers” as he told the Committee. He was laughed at for his pains. “What’s the use?” was Mr. Dalzell’s protest; “Oh, let him run down,” his sneer, when Mr. Brandeis insisted that it was his right to say what he thought about duties which made his necessaries dearer. A recurring note in the hearings held in Washington, before the Payne-Aldrich Bill, was contempt for the suggestion that this or that duty made an article cost a cent or two more at retail. What was a cent to a consumer! This was particularly noticeable in the argument of the wool interests. What if the tariff did make the cloth for a suit of clothes a few cents dearer a yard—it did not add a large amount to the price of the cheap suit. It was not worth considering. What is a cent to a consumer? Are there a considerable number of people in this country living on incomes so small that a rise of a cent or two in the price of necessary articles of food and clothing can make a material difference to them? To most Americans “the poor” in the United States are a negligible quantity. We think of them as the frayed and falling fringe on our great fabric of “comfortable off” population—largely what they are by their own indolence or inefficiency. But is this true? Is it not true, on the contrary, that the great majority of the inhabitants of the country, the great mass of hard-working, industrious men and women are poor? The statistics of the distribution of wealth should be often set before those hopeful souls, who, prosperous themselves, love to insist that, in this country at least, “all is for the best in the best possible of worlds.”