The House Committee was strong on both sides. The chairman was “Pig Iron” Kelley, who, in spite of twenty-five years’ experience with protection, still found it an “exquisite harmony.” He had as supporters the experienced Mr. Kasson of Iowa and the devoted young Mr. McKinley of Ohio, but it was on neither of them he was depending chiefly. There had been put on the Committee in the previous session a man from Kansas, Dudley C. Haskell, who was now to take about the same relation to Kelley as Kelley had taken to Thaddeus Stevens in the tariff debate of 1866 and 1867. The Democrats of the Committee were four of the strongest that Congress has seen since the war—Carlisle of Kentucky, Randall of Pennyslvania, Morrison of Illinois, and Tucker of Virginia. Here, then, were two able committees giving their entire time to tariff bills. They were under instructions from a Republican country and a Republican President to lower the duties, and they had as a guide a report of a Republican commission of their own creation advising its reduction. They had Republican majorities to back them. Their duty seemed plain. It seemed clear, too, that they should be free from outside pressure. All of those individuals whose interests were affected had had ample opportunities to lay their cases before a commission constituted for the purpose. To keep away from Washington would seem to be their obvious business. But they saw it differently. Indeed, the two committees had scarcely gone to work before a “third house” was in session—a house of lobbyists come to Washington for the express purpose of preventing the recommendations of the Tariff Commission from becoming law. The wool-growers, disgusted that Mr. Garland, representing them on the commission, had consented to nearly 20 per cent reduction, held public meetings in Ohio denouncing him, and sent down what scoffers called the “wool trinity”—Columbus Delano, one-time Secretary of the Interior under Grant, William Lawrence, afterward a Comptroller of the Treasury, and David Harpster—all wool-growers and all from Ohio.