But why should the materials which are used in our cheap clothing be unsatisfactory—why can we not get durable cheap goods, as it is certain we once could? The answer is not contained in a word. There is always more than one reason for sweeping changes in standard articles like woollen goods. However, the chief reason, the one which is more powerful than all the rest, is to be found in the complicated wool schedule which has been in operation in this country since 1867, the three years of the Wilson tariff excepted. This schedule rests upon two arbitrary and utterly unjust duties. The first of these is that on wool “in the grease,” as wool is called when it is sheared from the sheep. To prepare this wool for manufacturing it is first scoured until clean, an operation which causes a shrinkage of from twenty to eighty per cent in the weight of the wool. In turning this clean wool into cloth there is a still further shrinkage. Indeed, the total shrinkage from wool to cloth is such that it sometimes requires as much as five or six pounds to make a pound of cloth; and again it requires as little as two pounds. Of course the value of the wool varies according to the shrinkage, _i.e._ according to the amount of cloth a manufacturer can get from a given lot. It also varies according to the _kind_ of cloth the wool will make, _i.e._ whether it will make a fine or coarse cloth. Now all imported “grease wool,” suited for clothing regardless of its value, of the amount of dirt and grease there is in it, the amount it shrinks, the amount and quality of cloth you can get from it, has to pay a duty of eleven or twelve cents a pound. If the American wool-growers who secured this duty, to begin with, on the supposition that they would soon be able to produce enough wool to supply the home demand had been able to keep their promises, it would not have been necessary to import wool, and competition might have kept the home prices down. But the wool-growers have not for many years, if ever, produced even half of what we use. It is customary to figure the amount as much larger. “Seventy per cent of the wool we use is produced at home,” the wool boomers cry, but they do their figuring on grease wool and omit altogether the wool which comes in manufactured! There is only one fair way to estimate the amount we grow, and that is to find out what we get from it after it is cleaned of grease and dirt and compare it with the clean wool, raw and manufactured, we import. Do this and we find that we really produce nearer 40 per cent than 70 per cent of what we use. In 1890—in 1895—in 1900—this was the approximate proportion. One of the leading wool authorities of the country makes the relative proportion the same in 1906, _i.e._ 40 per cent domestic to 60 per cent foreign. For 1909, he figured it 37 per cent domestic to 63 per cent foreign.