Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 February 1886 — TARIFF REVISION. [ARTICLE]

TARIFF REVISION.

The Ways and Means Committee Almost Ready to Report a Revenue Bill. [Washington special,] The Ways and Means Committee now hopes to be able to report a tariff bill much earlier than seemed probable a few days ago. A large part of the parliamentary work, including general information and computations, that was done two years ago is still available, and will largely reduce the labor of working out the details of a new bill. Two years ago Colonel Morrison started out with the assumption that the protectionists had devoted enough time and talent to the tariff bill to make it substantially symmetrical and properly adjusted in the relations of the different parts to each other. Consequently, he merely raised the question of high duties or low ones by the provision that with certain exceptions only eighty per cent, of the existing duties should be collected. Thereupon the protectionists set up a great clamor that it would be wholly unscientific to leave the different duties in the same ratio to each other. They discredited the work they had been doing for twentythree years, and which they had just revised with the help of a commission of professed experts, by declaring that Mr. Morrison’s bill was a mere botch and utterly untit for enactment, because it reduced duties not in tho same amounts but in the same ratios, whereas he ought to reduce some duties a great deal more than others if he were to make any reductions. These candid and straightforward critics of the horizontal bill will soon have the opportunity to make criticisms of a diametrically opposite character, and no consideration of consistency will prevent their doing it. The Ways and Means Committee hope to report a bill within the next two weeks, which will bring the bill forward so early in the session that there will be ample time to debate it.