When Mr. Aldrich reported the bill of 1909 to the Senate on April 12, there was lively curiosity in many quarters about what the cotton schedule would contain. Rumors were general that it had been cleverly manipulated in its passage through the Ways and Means Committee. It was said that Mr. Payne had declared “in language somewhat exaggerated by impiety,” as Senator Dolliver afterward put it, that he had been _fooled_ by the gentleman who had presented the needs of the schedule to him. It was known that he was so certain of the odium of a certain paragraph which he had reported that he had risen in the House and withdrawn it. It was certain that the first publication of the schedule had drawn down an avalanche of criticism and charges of bad faith, many of them from the most respectable and best informed trade sources. So vigorous and authoritative had the attack been that many believed that Mr. Aldrich would not venture to report the schedule which the House had sent him. Schedule I, as the cotton schedule is known, is one of first importance. In 1905 there were over six hundred and thirteen million dollars invested in cotton manufactures in this country. The product was something over four hundred and forty-two million dollars—a big proposition from every point of view, not one to be lightly or dogmatically treated. A question of humanity, too, as well as of economics, for there were over 310,000 persons employed, 125,000 of whom were women, and 40,000 children under sixteen years of age. It was not against the entire schedule that charges had been brought, but against that which concerns itself with woven goods—that is, sheetings, shirtings, muslins, calicoes. A very large proportion of the product in cottons comes under this head. Fully three hundred and eight of the four hundred and forty-two millions of dollars of cotton products produced in 1905 was in woven goods. Now all woven goods have been protected for many years, and so well protected that the importations in 1905 were only about eight millions of dollars—or about 2⅔ per cent of the product. These importations were not scattered over the whole group of cotton goods—they were concentrated on the higher grades. Of the cheaper cotton goods there is almost no importation; on the contrary, we exported over forty million dollars’ worth of them in 1905. What that means, of course, is that we have come to a point in making the cheap grades of cottons where we do not need much, if any, protection, since we can afford to export and sell them in competition with English-made goods.