As for the lobby, the President had his own method of dealing with that. On May 26 he issued a public statement calling attention to the "extraordinary exertions" of lobbyists in connection with the tariff. "The newspapers are being filled," he said, "with paid advertisements calculated to mislead not only the judgment of the public men, but also the public opinion of the country itself. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to maintain this lobby.... It is of serious interest to the country that the people at large should have no lobby and be voiceless in these matters, while the great bodies of astute men seek to create an artificial opinion and to overcome the interests of the public for their private profit." The outraged dignity of Senators and Representatives, not to mention lobbyists, rose to protest against this declaration. A Republican Senator even declared that the President, who had been actively urging his views on legislators just as he had done in New Jersey, was himself the chief lobbyist in connection with the Tariff Bill. A Senate Committee was appointed to find out if there had been any lobbying, and discovered that there had. Meanwhile the bill was being argued out in the Senate, and the President stood firm against any substantial modification. It was finally passed on Oct. 3. It was a vindication of the platform promise and a fulfillment of the duty with which the party had been charged in the last election, and it was a notable triumph for the personal policy of the President-Premier, who more than anybody else had literally forced the bill through Congress. The tariff had taken such a prominent place in the fight against business influence in the Government that the passage of a bill which made a material reduction in rates was a moral victory for progressivism at large, and for President Wilson in particular. The actual effect of the tariff, or rather the actual effect that it might have had, is something impossible to estimate at this time. Before it had been in operation a year, before the country had had a chance to study the new conditions brought in by the legislation of the first year of the Wilson Administration, the war broke out in Europe. The conditions which had prevailed through half a century of tariff making had ceased to exist. They have not yet returned. A subsidiary feature of the Underwood-Simmons Act, however, was to attain enormous importance in the course of the Wilson Administrations. To supply the deficiency in revenue which the lowered duties might be expected to produce there was added an income tax law, which had recently been permitted by constitutional amendment. Even the light duties of the first year, with their $3,000 exemption, were denounced by conservatives as a rich man's tax; but within four years more the exemption was to be lowered to $1,000, and the peak of the tax raised to tenfold its original height.