But good as the bill may have been when it came from the committee, it was soon assaulted right and left by those who had something to protect or those who were affected by what it protected. Much of the pressure, Mr. Morrill found, was impossible to resist. What can you do when a Senator of the United States, one so famous as Charles Sumner, “calls your attention” to letting cocoa in free (though according to the principle on which you are working it should pay a slight duty) because his friend, the head of an “eminent house” (the friend was Henry L. Pierce and the “eminent house” was his chocolate factory), wants his cocoa free? What are you to do when Pennsylvania iron men and Rhode Island manufacturers, who according to your theory of protection are established and whose duties should gradually be lowered, come down on you for higher rates, and your party colleagues tell you that if you refuse their requests the election may be lost and the cause of human freedom be retarded? Amendment after amendment was tacked on the bill, many of them in direct contradiction of Mr. Morrill’s principles. They destroyed the justice and the consistency of the measure, and he became so disgusted that he was ready to abandon it. Inconsistency was less troublesome to Mr. Sherman, however. He was a “practical politician,” something Mr. Morrill never was. He believed more revenue to be necessary; he believed in protection; he believed in winning votes for the party wherever and however he could. This bill contributed to all these ends, and he himself undertook to engineer it through the House. Mr. Sherman’s task was made the easier because in May, when the Republicans had met in Chicago to nominate their candidate for president, they had put into their platform a plank which pledged the party to support protection, though they did not have the courage to use the word. This plank was plainly a bid for the vote of communities which could be held to the party only by protection, preëminently the state of Pennsylvania. The great leaders of the party, Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Chase, and Mr. Seward, did not believe that the tariff should be taken up at all at this time. Indeed, only a few days before he was nominated as president Mr. Lincoln wrote to a correspondent that “the tariff question ought not to be agitated in the Chicago Convention.” Mr. Chase had always stood with the Democrats on the matter, and Seward had expressed his view in the Senate in 1857 when the tariff bill was up: “It is not wise, it is not just, to draw from the pockets of the people into the Treasury of the country an amount of money greater than the current expenses of the Treasury require.”