Mr. Payne reported a schedule then which not only raised duties on many kinds of cotton goods, but multiplied the opportunities for fraud and added seriously to the work of appraising. Mr. Payne claimed to have been entirely misled about what the new rates would do—at least about the changes in counting threads—for when the schedule came up he rose in the House and asked that the old methods of counting be restored, and he said with an emphasis which showed his disgust at the way he felt he had been tricked: “The committee has not sought to increase the duty by that method. If they wanted to increase the duty, they _would go in the open to do it_.” The cotton schedule came to Mr. Aldrich, therefore, under suspicion—suspicion of having been cleverly and slyly revised upwards by the advice of one of his strongest and most generous political supporters, the man who had the credit of managing his last senatorial campaign and collecting the large sums of money which it required to reëlect him. Naturally the curiosity was keen about what Mr. Aldrich would report. What he reported was, with one exception, just what Mr. Lippitt and Mr. MacColl had asked for. He did not stand for the new definition of thread which they had invented, but he did provide that the number of threads and the color should no longer depend on the body of a cloth, but should be estimated by the figure wrought into it. He practically asked that if a single colored thread was woven in or applied to a piece of shirting, it should take the added duty which was given to colored goods. He also stood by the clause which put an additional cent on all which had even one mercerized thread in them, and by the complicated specific duties which had been invented for all goods costing over 12½ cents per square yard.