Now, as said above, all of the wool imported must pay a duty of eleven or twelve cents a pound when it is “in the grease.” The American wool-grower in normal and prosperous times can charge more for his wool because of this duty. He may not be able to add the full amount to his price—in fact, it is probable that he rarely does, but he certainly gets considerably more than he could if he were not protected. The way the duty works is clearly illustrated by a personal experience in wool-buying related by Robert Bleakie, of Boston, a manufacturer who has been making woollen goods in this country _continuously_ since 1848. Mr. Bleakie’s account is of a purchase of wool he made in 1897 just before the Dingley Bill went into effect, that is, when we had free wool. He had bought in Africa 223,684 pounds of wool at 9-9/10 cents a pound. By the time he got it to Boston it cost him 13-2/10 cents a pound ($29,565.83 for the lot). Now, let us suppose Mr. Bleakie’s wool had not reached Boston until _after_ the Dingley Bill had gone into effect, that is, until after the eleven cents a pound had been placed on grease wool. To get his wool out of the custom-house Mr. Bleakie would have had to pay the tidy sum of $24,605.22; _i.e._ eleven cents on each pound. This would have made the wool cost him, instead of twenty-nine thousand dollars, over fifty-four thousand dollars. But it was fine wool, shrinking heavily in cleaning. As a matter of fact, he got out of the 223,684 pounds he imported only 85,000 pounds which he could use. But note that he would have had to pay duty on the _entire_ lot, that is, to pay it on 138,684 pounds of grease and dirt as well as on the 85,000 pounds of clean wool! Of course the duty simply shut him off from importing heavy-shrinking wool, and at the same time made domestic wool of this kind too dear to buy. Now, there are two classes of wool manufacturers, known as carded woollen and worsted. The former, to which class Mr. Bleakie belongs, finds a large proportion of the wool they need to be heavy-shrinking—the latter use mainly the light-shrinking wool. It is the carded woollen manufacturer who makes our heavy woollen clothes—flannels and blankets, the warm and durable “all wool” goods of the poor man. Mr. Bleakie’s experience just quoted shows what the eleven-cent duty on grease wool does to his business. It takes the raw material away from it—“starves” it, as the manufacturers say. At the same time it gives his competitor—the worsted maker—a decisive advantage, for he uses mainly light-shrinking wool. It is obvious that if two manufacturers each import one hundred pounds of wool in the grease, and each pay $11.00 duty on his lot, the one which gets the larger number of pounds of clean wool will have the other at a disadvantage. Yet each will pay the same duty, $11.00 on a hundred-pound lot.