As it happened the demands for a higher protection were made on a Congress under the dictatorship of a man for whom no tariff could ever be too high—that was Thaddeus Stevens. When the first tariff bill was presented to the House in June, 1866, by Mr. Morrill, everybody knew Stevens was near his end, but emaciated, white, and suffering as he was, his nerve was still superb. Too weak to walk up the Capitol steps, two stalwart negroes carried him. “Who will carry me when you are dead, boys?” he said to them one day with a chuckle. The fight between Congress and President Johnson over Reconstruction had developed, and Johnson had already singled out Stevens as his chief enemy. He was soon to begin to ask as he “swung around the circle,” “Why not hang Thad Stevens?” Johnson was not mistaken in placing the responsibility. Stevens had always disliked him. “Can’t you find a candidate for vice-president of the United States without going down to one of those damned rebel provinces to pick up one?” he had asked Colonel McClure in 1864. His dislike had grown to open opposition, and he was now leading the Congressional fight with spirit, ability, and bitterness. Yet weak as he was, and absorbed as he was in the undoing of the sullen suffering man at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, no measure escaped his dictation, least of all a measure which touched a doctrine so dear to his heart as the protection of American industry. The bill was not in before it was evident Stevens was dissatisfied with it. It was, he declared vehemently, a free-trade measure. As a matter of fact no bill the United States Congress had seen up to this date had less consolation for the free-trader in it than the one Mr. Morrill now introduced. Although just before the bill was reported $75,000,000 had been taken from the internal revenue taxes, no compensating reduction had been made in the tariff. Not only did it preserve the average of 47 per cent, which the bill of 1864 imposed, but it increased many duties, notably those on copper, iron, steel rails, wool and woollen goods, salt, all articles which touched the mass of consumers. Many purely protective duties which could yield no revenue were added—such were the duties proposed on grindstones and on nickel. So inconsistent was the bill with the former professions of the party, so evident was it that it was going to make the price of many essential articles higher, that Mr. Morrill, candid gentleman that he was, apologized rather pathetically for it. He had hoped, he said in course of debate, that at the close of the war the tariff had reached its maximum, and that the earliest business of Congress after taking off internal taxes on manufactures would be to reduce duties by the full compensating amount. That this could not be done with safety was due in his mind entirely to the failure of Congress to redeem the currency. As long as there was $917,000,000 of paper money in circulation Mr. Morrill thought the