To start with, it was evident that one claim of the high protectionists was a humbug—that is, given protection you had prosperity. Mr. Kelley, as we have seen, had become a high protectionist in 1859, because low tariff—he called it free trade—had not prevented a panic in 1857. But neither had a high tariff prevented the panic of 1873. “Where,” exclaimed the Parsee merchant, “was the Baal of protection all this time? Why did he not come to the relief of this distress? Alas, he was as lame, as impotent, and as false as the Baal in the Bible. The one was unable to strike a lucifer match in the plains of Judea three thousand years ago, and the other could not light a blast furnace in Pennsylvania.” The census showed, too, that the general growth between 1850 and 1860 was _greater_ than between 1870 and 1880. Capital had increased in the first decade about 90 per cent, in the second but 32 per cent; hands employed 37 per cent in the first, 33 per cent in the second; wages 60 per cent in the first, 22 per cent in the second; materials used 86 per cent in the first, 36 per cent in the second; products of manufacture 85 per cent in the first, 27 per cent in the second. The increase of the second decade over the first had been amazing in certain specific cases, as in iron and steel. In 1860 the iron production had been but 821,223 tons; in 1880 it was 3,835,191. In 1860 it was 60 pounds per capita; in 1880, 171 pounds. It was protection that had done this, said the Iron and Steel Association, but why had it not done as much for wool? As we have seen, the wool interests had secured the passage of a special bill in 1867 giving them the highest protection they had ever had, but in spite of it the industry had lagged. Evidently protection was not infallible. There were other elements in the problem of prosperity—what were they? Again, what about the prosperity it claimed to produce—that of iron and steel, for instance—was that prosperity equally divided? Was a high tariff as good a distributor as it was a generator? All of these questions had to be answered, but how was it to be done? Not by a Congress in which “tariff for revenue only” Democrats and “revenue-reform” Republicans were at large, decided the Industrial League. Their notion of revision was to have it done by their own representatives, and at once they began an active campaign for a commission, such as was hinted at in the petitions of 1877 and in Mr. Wharton’s Pittsburg speech in 1879, quoted above. In November, 1881, a great tariff convention was called in New York by the manufacturers, and this body committed itself to the idea of a Tariff Commission.