lit by a pair of large dark eyes of amazing fire and softness. Speak of Sam Randall to-day to one of his old colleagues and it will not be long before he will tell you with softened voice of “those wonderful eyes,” “that classic face.” Randall’s force and charm were such that they overcame a lack of studious habits, of reflection, and of broad views. But as has been said, Randall was a protectionist, and he put now at the head of the Ways and Means Committee a man of moderate protectionist leanings, an old-time shipping merchant of New York City, Fernando Wood. Wood was a picturesque character, who had made a name for himself politically as the mayor of New York from 1854 to 1858, when the town needed reform quite as badly as it ever has since. He succeeded in getting himself reëlected mayor again in 1861, when he stirred up the ire of the North by proposing seriously that New York City secede and set up as a free town! Wood at once went to work on a tariff bill, but he took few of his party into his confidence, and he ignored those who, like Wells, were considered experts. Indeed, he went his way so arrogantly that the opposing wing of his party broke out in expostulation in December, 1877, Roger Q. Mills introducing the following resolution: “That the Committee of Ways and Means be instructed so to revise the tariff as to make it purely a tariff for revenue, and not for protecting one class of citizens by plundering another.” The resolution stirred up Mr. Wood considerably. It was “nonsense,” he said. The Committee of Ways and Means would discharge its duty faithfully, irrespective of the resolution. It would in due time report the results of its deliberations to the House, and in the meantime it required no instructions of any kind in the matter. A more menacing sign of unrest over the Wood Bill than Mr. Mills’s resolution, came about the same time—a flood of petitions against any revision of the tariff not made by its friends. By actual count 177 petitions were introduced. They came from twenty-nine different States: from New York 22, from Pennsylvania 28, from Massachusetts 17, from Maine 15. That they originated with a protective steering committee somewhere in the background—that is, that they were not spontaneous outbreaks—was evident from the fact that the phrasing of the whole 177 was practically identical. Whether they came from Alabama or Maine, Pennsylvania or Kansas, whether they pleaded for iron, or lumber, or cotton, or copper, or paper, or silk, they nearly all plead in identical terms that Congress would take no action concerning a revision of tariff duties “until after it shall have ascertained by an official inquiry the condition of the industries of the country and the nature of such tariff legislation _as in the opinion of practical business men_ would best promote the restoration of general prosperity.”