Tin plate is another household necessity of which the price was sharply advanced after the Dingley Bill and the formation of the tin plate trust. Domestic tin plate which was sold for $3.43 per 100 pounds in 1896, sold in 1900, under the Dingley tariff, for $4.67. While in 1906 we were paying $3.86 for our tin plate in New York, the Englishman was getting his about a dollar cheaper. The Englishman and the Standard Oil Company! The Standard Oil Company has been, for many years, probably the largest single consumer of tin plate in the country—practically all of the oil it sends to the Orient being put into tin cans which it manufactures itself from imported plate. One of the many curious features of our tariff laws is the system of drawbacks by which the duty on imported materials made into goods for export is rebated. These rebates or drawbacks are paid on many things, but the amount is insignificant excepting in two or three cases. Out of drawbacks aggregating something like five and a quarter millions in 1900 and five and three-quarters in 1906 by far the largest item was tin plate—$1,848,792 in the former year, $2,252,381.82 in the latter. That is, the man who in 1906 manufactured tin cans to sell to his countrymen paid about 20 per cent more for his material than the Standard Oil Company paid for what it manufactured to sell to the foreigner. Of course the home consumer of tin pails and milk pans paid the higher cost. As a result of taxing ourselves we have a tin plate industry in the United States. In 1900, as a result of the high prices of the decade preceding, 57 tin plate establishments had grown up where ten years before there were none. These 57 establishments employed about 4000 people and turned out nearly $32,000,000 worth of goods. In 1905 the industry had grown to a product of something over $35,000,000, and employed about 5000 people. In order to build up this industry, secure this product, provide places for these workmen, it has been estimated that we taxed ourselves between 1890 and 1900 fully $90,000,000. Taxed ourselves $90,000,000 and let off our largest single consumer scot free. We also have been selling abroad the tin plate we manufacture here at considerably less price than at home. And now observe how in the case of tin plate the protected American manufacturer gets even on this lower price to the foreigner. He takes it out of the laborer—_that is the wages of tin plate workers are reduced 25 per cent on tin plate made for export_. The Standard Oil trust gets its duties rebated on export work and the tin plate workers get their wages cut!