et presented as a piece of legislation. It had
been a general scramble and everybody who scrambled hard enough had been
taken care of in the schedules resulting. It was an abominable thing to
the thoughtful men of that day, because no man guided it, shaped it, or
tried to make an equitable system out of it. That was bad enough, but at
least everybody had an open door through which to scramble for his
advantage. It was a go-as-you-please, free-for-all struggle, and anybody
who could get to Washington and say he represented an important business
interest could be heard by the Committee on Ways and Means.

We have a very different state of affairs now. The Committee on Ways and
Means and the Finance Committee of the Senate in these sophisticated days
have come to discriminate by long experience among the persons whose
counsel they are to take in respect of tariff legislation. There has been
substituted for the unschooled body of citizens that used to clamor at the
doors of the Finance Committee and the Committee on Ways and Means, one of
the most interesting and able bodies of expert lobbyists that has ever
been developed in the experience of any country,--men who know so much
about the matters they are talking of that you cannot put your knowledge
into competition with theirs. They so overwhelm you with their familiarity
with detail that you cannot discover wherein their scheme lies. They
suggest the change of an innocent fraction in a particular schedule and
explain it to you so plausibly that you cannot see that it means millions
of dollars additional from the consumers of this country. They propose,
for example, to put the carbon for electric lights in two-foot pieces
instead of one-foot pieces,--and you do not see where you are getting
sold, because you are not an expert. If you will get some expert to go
through the schedules of the present Payne-Aldrich tariff, you will find a
"nigger" concealed in almost every woodpile,--some little word, some
little clause, some unsuspected item, that draws thousands of dollars out
of the pockets of the consumer and yet does not seem to mean anything in
particular. They have calculated the whole thing beforehand; they have
analyzed the whole detail and consequence, each one in his specialty. With
the tariff specialist the average business man has no possibility of
competition. Instead of the old scramble, which was bad enough, we get the
present expert control of the tariff schedule