But it takes something besides leather to make shoes. For one thing it takes thread—and thread, linen thread particularly, so advanced in price that it added perceptibly to the cost of making a pair of shoes. But why had thread advanced? It is a pretty study of combined tariff and trust manipulation. To begin with, we do not and never have raised in this country any flax suitable for making linen thread. In spite of this fact the Dingley Bill put a duty of $22.40 a ton on flax not dressed, and of $67.20 per ton on that which had been dressed. These were the rates of the McKinley Bill. Of course the avowed purpose of this duty was to protect the “infant industry” of raising flax for use in manufacturing. We have a good flax acreage in this country—though it has decreased by over 1,000,000 acres since 1902. But this flax is grown not for the fibre, but for the seed, being used for making linseed oil. It is the custom not to harvest it until the seeds are fully ripe, and when that time comes the straw is too old for fibre. It is true that in the Northwest a few tons of flax are used annually for making twine, upholstering tow, and insulating boards, but practically none of this is fit for making thread,—that is, _in spite of the fact that we have been steadily paying from $20.00 to $22.00 a ton on undressed flax for many years, we have scarcely ever produced a ton fit for thread_. Of course the thread itself is protected, and this protection has worked in the linen thread industry very much as that on cotton thread. Seeing the tariff trend here, the great linen thread manufacturers of Great Britain followed the example of the Coats’s and Clarke’s cotton thread makers, and came here many years ago to produce under the protection of the tariff the thread they had been exporting. This went on until the Barbours of Lisburn, Ireland, had a branch at Paterson, New Jersey; the Finlaysons of Johnstone, Scotland, at Grafton, Massachusetts; the Dunbar Co. of Gilford, Ireland, at Greenwich, New York; the Marshals of Leeds, England, at Newark, New Jersey—all of the great British companies were here to preserve the market for themselves. Most efficient masters of their business—the Barbours were a century-old house—they grew rapidly under the high protection they enjoyed. The logic of their privilege was of course what it has been in all our highly protected industries—a trust. This came about a few years ago—the Linen Thread Company of which the president is Mr. William Barbour, and the vice-president A. R. Turner. The formation of the trust did wonders for the linen thread business. They were able to make large economies. Instead of separate mills making all the products each mill was assigned to do the work it could best do. At the same time the marketing expenses were reduced. In one of the communications to the tariff hearings of 1908–1909, a writer familiar with the industry says of these economies: