The contrast in results to the consumer between putting on and taking off a duty are strikingly illustrated by a comparison of the tin plate experiment with the quinine experiment. In 1879 the duty of 40 per cent on this favorite American medicine was removed by a special act of Congress. The extortion practised under the duty had been outrageous, quinine selling in 1878 as high as $4.75 an ounce. Five years after the quinine bill passed the price had fallen to $1.23 an ounce, ten years after to 35 cents, and in 1906 to 16½ cents! Far from destroying the quinine industry in this country as the manufacturer tearfully declared it would, the business goes on prosperously. Whether gains or losses come to the manufacturer the people share with him. He cannot gobble the lion’s share of the one or shift the lion’s share of the other as the thread and starch and tin plate and dozens of other manufacturers can. Where prices increase faster than incomes, as they did with the great majority in the period we have under consideration, one of two things must happen,—the amount and quality of necessaries are cut, or substitutes are found. Both have happened in a rather startling way in the last twenty years in one of the materials most essential to human health and comfort, woollens. Wool, the world over, has always been accepted as the poor man’s special friend. It protects against cold and damp. It wears well; it looks well. The tradition of woollen garments as a lasting household possession, one of the things which belongs to the outfit of even the humblest, is very strong in every country. “All wool” is the housewife’s boast of her blankets and shawl, the young girl of her winter coat and gown, the laborer of his shirt. It is the assurance on which salesmen depend for winning customers. It is a standard material of clothing as general and as necessary in our climate as wheat is an article of food. But for twenty years this valuable standard material has been every day receding farther from the reach of the great mass of Americans. Many housewives the country over have ceased buying woollen blankets, substituting the cotton-filled puff or “comfort.” Settlement workers and district nurses say that they rarely see a woollen blanket in the houses they visit. Knit cotton undergarments and heavy knit cotton stockings are generally substituted for wool. Many thousands know they cannot think of wool, and dismiss the idea. But so strong is the tradition of wool among the people of cool climates, among Russians, Germans, etc., that a salesman in the shops of the tenement house district declares his slimsiest imitations “all wool.”