It was October when the commission terminated its public hearings and settled down to prepare its reports. The scrappiness of the testimony, the evident absorption of the majority of the witnesses in their own interests and not those of the country, the little attention given to commerce and the consumer, the failure to get anything like exact statistics, created the impression that nothing important would result. A bad impression was made on the public, too, by the flock of individuals which everywhere hovered around the commission apparently to say to it privately what they did not care to say on the witness stand. These persons beset the members as they dined, walked, rode across country in their special train. They invited them to dinner and to the theatres—a horde of hungry duty-hunters who did more to demonstrate to the fair-minded members of the commission the peculiar evils inherent in any protective system than reams of the ablest theoretical teaching could have done. The report was submitted to Congress in December, and its publication was a surprise all around. It was far more intelligent, far-reaching, and disinterested than a cynical public had expected. Poor Mr. Henry Carey Baird, the quinine-makers, the whole band of duty-grabbers, were in dismay. They had been betrayed, they said, and it was young Mr. Porter who had done it. He was an Englishman. It was evident he was an emissary of British free traders, sent over by them as a boy to be educated for the task of undermining American prosperity. No tariff reformer indeed could have asked a better platform than that on which the Commissioners claimed they had worked. Early in their deliberations, they said, they had come to the conclusion that a substantial reduction was demanded—that it was necessary for general industrial prosperity. “_No rates of defensive duties_,” declared the commission, “_except for the establishment of new industries which more than equalize the conditions of labor and capital with those of foreign competitors, can be justified._ Excessive duties, or those above such standard of equalization, are positively injurious to the interest which they are supposed to benefit.” They encourage “rash and unskilled speculation” to go into business, they “discredit our whole national economic system,” they cause “uncertainty,” destroy the “sense of stability required for extended undertakings.” No such “extraordinary stimulus” as the war taxes gave was now necessary. The great improvements in machinery and processes made in twenty years “would permit our manufacturers to compete with their foreign rivals under a substantial reduction of existing duties.” Twenty per cent was the general reduction which they had decided manufacturing could support, and they estimated that the changes they proposed would produce a reduction of fully 25 per cent.