The duty on thread was lowered in 1909, but there is no rational interpretation of the doctrine of protection which can defend that which it still carries. All that the suppliants pretend to ask is enough to cover the difference in wage cost here and abroad—enough to defend Mr. Barbour in the United States from Mr. Barbour in Ireland! According to the calculations of a practical independent thread man doing business in both countries, the actual difference in 1909 in the cost of production in Ireland and the United States in well-managed factories was not over six cents a pound. But the Payne Bill fixes the protection of the three linen threads most used in shoe-making at 15½ cents, 18¾ cents, and 20 cents. It is doubtful that this reduction is sufficient, now that the linen thread maker gets his raw material free, to produce any effect at all on the price to the trade. The duty is still grotesquely prohibitive. When one goes over less important but still essential articles of the household, he finds numbers of them where the price advanced in the first decade after the Dingley Bill through a tariff-supported trust. Take the item of starch. From whatever product made it carried under the bill of 1897 a duty of 1½ cents a pound. Starch and its related products made from corn are now largely controlled by the Glucose Trust, as it is called—the Corn Products Company. The Glucose Trust is popularly known as a Standard Oil concern. That company has, to be sure, issued “A Protest and a Warning” against the association of the name of the two concerns. But so long as the headquarters of the Corn Products Company are 26 Broadway, its president a director of the Standard Oil Company and four of its directors on the Board of Directors of the Standard Oil Company, the protest and warning will have little influence on a cynical public. In a statement presented at the recent tariff hearings a complainant said that since the formation of the Glucose Trust in 1902, in spite of many improvements, chemical and mechanical, corn starch which for years had sold at $1.00 to $1.50 per 100 pounds in New York sold in car-load lots at $2.65 per 100 pounds! Without the tariff, this combination could not last a day for both England and Germany could compete with them. Not only compete in price, but outstrip them in quality, for naturally enough concerns like the Glucose Trust controlling a market are indifferent to quality. Quality is a thing which men are driven to by the fear of a rival taking their market. Take this fear away and you get inferior goods—that is, the poor are not only obliged under the protective tariff to _pay_ more, but to _buy_ more. Our potato starch factories also do not pretend to compete in quality with the German concerns in spite of the higher prices they get. They are not obliged to make the best goods. Their market is secure without it.