It would seem difficult to add anything to this complication, but Mr. Payne’s bill did it. It began by upsetting an established definition in the cotton trade—a definition accepted the world over as to what the word “thread” means in appraising cloth. A thread has been a thread, regardless of how many filaments or ply were twisted together to make it. This was no longer to be so. The poor appraiser could no longer apply his magnifying glass to a square inch of cotton cloth and count the threads: he must untwist a thread and compute the number of ply! Of course this immediately threw the fabric into a higher classification than under the old law, and increased the duty on it. A cloth which counted fifty threads carried under the old law a duty of say one cent per square yard, but if these threads were three ply—and each ply must be counted by the new paragraph—then it was at once boosted into the one hundred and fifty thread class, where the duty is one and one-half cents per square yard! This was the first of Mr. Lippitt’s “very minor points.” But this did not end the counting business. There is a great variety of cotton cloths which have figures worked on to the body. The swisses and curtain madras are common examples of these. These figures, of course, increase the value of the goods, and the Dingley Bill provided for them by giving them an extra one or two cents per square yard, according as they cost seven or over seven cents a square yard. But Mr. Payne’s bill went this duty one better by arranging that when the threads of a cloth were counted not the threads in the body alone should be considered, but also the _threads in the figure worked on the body_. Here again the number of threads in a square inch would be so increased as to throw the fabric into a higher class and so raise the duty. Another increase came in the matter of color. Heretofore the body of the cloth had been all that was considered in estimating color, but the new law proposed that cloth into which colored figures or threads had been introduced should be called colored. A single colored thread introduced into a white piece was enough to throw it into the colored class. One entirely new duty was added, and that was a cent a yard for cloth which had been mercerized—and a single mercerized thread was enough to put a piece into this class. Besides all this reclassification, the duties which in the Dingley Bill had been added for the value of the cloth were increased and complicated in a most irritating fashion—by dividing the values into several classes. There was one duty for cloths worth 12½ to 15 cents, another for those worth 15 to 17½, another for those worth from 17½ to 20. But who was to fix the value when the margins were so narrow? It was a temptation to fraud,—the importer naturally trying to prove that the cloth worth 13 cents was worth but 12½; his opponent, the domestic manufacturer, trying to prove that the cloth really worth 12½ was worth 13.