In spite of ample proof of gross unfairness and trickery in the Dingley wool schedule, Mr. Payne reported it practically unchanged. As it passed the House it still gave to Mr. Whitman a prohibitive duty on his tops. The Finance Committee was equally complaisant, for, as Mr. Aldrich, its chairman, said later, the schedule as he reported it to the Senate “followed precisely the act of 1897 in every word.” But when the wool schedule reached the Senate for debate, its smooth passage was over, for there on May 5, 1909, it was treated to one of the most searching analyses of duties which has ever been made in Congress. The significant fact was that it came from a Republican who had been for twenty years in Congress, and who had served on the Dingley Ways and Means Committee,—Senator Dolliver of Iowa, one of a group who, when they had discovered by the character of the bill reported from the House and by the attitude of the majority of the party in the Senate towards it that there was no intention of treating seriously the campaign promises of revising the tariff downward, had revolted: insurgents, they were called. These men all believed in the doctrine of protection, and most of them had been all their political lives under the spell of the notion that it had created American prosperity. But they were honest men, and slowly they had awakened to a consciousness that the sacred dogma had been stretched and twisted in the last fifty years until it had been made literally to cover a multitude of sins. They saw how its meaning had been manipulated to justify unscrupulous duties whose only contribution to prosperity was turning the profits of labor and natural wealth into some private pocket. They all seem to have taken without reserve the latest strain put upon the protective formula in order that it might cover whatever a manufacturer wanted, the form in which it had appeared in the Republican platform of 1908, insuring the person lucky enough to have a business which could be protected that he should have a duty which would not only cover the difference in the cost of his production, but insure him a profit. The insurgents did not object to this interpretation, but they saw at once that Mr. Aldrich in reporting his bill had no intention, in cases where duties had been advanced, of giving the Senate evidence that the difference in the cost of production here and abroad made an advance necessary, that the facts he had he refused to make public. I asked Senator Bristow of Kansas, whom I knew to be a strong and convinced protectionist, what started his revolt against the bill? “Red paint,” he replied promptly. “I was interested in that. We paint our barns with it in Kansas. I saw them putting up duties which I believed would affect its cost. I wanted to know why. I could find no reason—no proof that it was necessary. I insisted, and I soon made up my mind that they had no intention of considering the difference