“Sir, for the last twenty years I have been so in the habit of laughing, at least in my sleeve, when hearing gentlemen reproduce that admirable novelty that I could not help doing so when the chairman of my committee startled me by reciting it. I have it before me as uttered by the gentleman, then from Ohio, but who was carpet-bagged to New York, and who is sometimes known by the _sobriquet_ of ‘Sunset,’ as he delivered it in 1864.... It was quoted the other evening by the gentleman from Mississippi.... Subsequently I heard it from my friend, the late James Brooks. Then from our friend, S. S. Marshall, of Illinois, and there has never been a tariff bill under discussion that I have not heard it three or four times; and I repeat I could not help laughing when the chairman of the committee got it off with such solemnity.” The Wood Bill never got out of the House, but it was not because interest in the tariff was abating. There was a deep unrest in the country on the subject, and it was stirred by a band of tariff-reformers of great ability. It is doubtful, indeed, if we have ever had as able a group of teachers as those who kept up their hammering in the ’80’s, undismayed by the disaster of ’72. To Perry and Wells and Horace White, whom we have already met, should be added two in particular, William G. Sumner and Joseph S. Moore. Mr. Sumner, who since 1872 had held the chair of history and economics in Yale University, was a young man educated at Geneva, Göttingen, and Oxford. He had begun his career as a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, but had left it for academic work. A few years ago at a dinner in New York, Mr. Sumner explained how he became interested in the tariff question: “Thirty-five or forty years ago,” he said, “I became a free trader for two great reasons as far as I can now remember. One was because as a student of political economy my whole mind revolted against the notion of magic that is involved in the notion of a protective tariff.... The other reason was because it seemed to me that the protective tariff system nourished erroneous ideas of success in business and produced immoral results in the minds and hopes of the people.” Mr. Sumner did not add at this time another interesting fact—that he was first aroused to active public efforts against protection by Grant’s suspension of the office of Special Commissioner of Revenue in order to get rid of the reports of David A. Wells. It was a very good illustration of the effect of trying to silence honest speech on a question of public interest. The high protectionists, in ridding themselves of Wells in Congress, turned him into the public forum, where he was immediately reënforced by Mr. Sumner. Two voices were raised where there had been one.