It is a case where it is just as well not to know too much. Moreover, it takes an amount of hard time-taking study to master a schedule, which only an occasional man has the will to give. Senator Dolliver knew that neither he nor any other insurgent understood enough of wool-growing and wool manufacturing to cope with the schedule. Later in the course of the debate he illustrated the difficulties he encountered in spite of his twenty years in Congress. He was told that a certain paragraph was worded to conceal a trick. “I had to read it four or five times before I could see the point where the proposition emerged,” Senator Dolliver said. “I handed it to intelligent men and asked them if they saw any distinction in that language between clothing wools and combing wools, and, one after another, bright men said, ‘I cannot see any distinction.’ If you will get the paragraph and read it yourself, you will notice with what delicacy of phrase, worthy of poets and artists, this distinction has been wrought into the very foundation of the wool tariff.” Now it was this aggregation of tricks, evasions, and discriminations that Senator Dolliver determined to master, and master it he did, by months of the severest night-work. He poured over statistics and technical treatises. He visited mills and importing houses and retail shops. He sought the aid of experts, and in the end he knew his subject so well that he went on to the floor of the Senate without a manuscript and literally played with Schedule K, and incidentally also with Senator Aldrich and several other stand-patters whose long experience in juggling with untruths had destroyed their agility in handling truths. When he had finished his clean, competent dissection, Schedule K lay before the Senate a law without principles or morals; and yet, just as it was, the Senate of the United States passed it, and the President of the United States signed it, and it went on the statute books, even to Mr. Whitman’s prohibitive duty on tops. What made Mr. Whitman so powerful? Probably we shall not go far astray if we assert that the real reason is that for many years he and his worsted friends have been one of the main financial reserves of the high protective wing of the Republican party in New England, and that in return they have got what they asked for. That is political ethics—or etiquette. Ever since 1888 it has been a settled and openly expressed principle in political circles that your protection shall be in proportion to your campaign contribution. In that year it was laid down officially that as the manufacturers of the United States got “practically the sole benefit of the tariff” and in prosperous years “made millions” out of it, therefore it was entirely justifiable that those who granted the tariff should, when their time of need came, put these manufacturers “over the fire” and “fry the fat out of them.”