tions urging us to insist upon the countervailing duty on petroleum on the ground that the very life of the independent petroleum-producing interests depends upon it. The argument is that the Standard Oil Company is a refining industry; that it is a purchaser of raw petroleum; that it produces only about 20 per cent. of the petroleum it uses and buys 80 per cent.; that it would really be to the advantage of the Standard Oil Company to be able to buy raw petroleum and import it into this country without any duty. I should like the opinion of the gentleman from Missouri upon the soundness of that argument from the standpoint of the independent petroleum producer.

MR. CLARK.-I think it is all a humbug. Year by year the Standard Oil Company produces less and less crude oil. It develops very few fields. It has too much sense. It permits the gentleman from Kansas and myself and the rest of us to go out hunting for oil fields, boring holes in the ground at our own expense, and when we have discovered a rich field it comes in and takes possession of it at its own figure. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

If I could be convinced that the revenue tariff on crude petroleum would help the producers of crude petroleum-that is, if they would get the benefit of it, at the same time raising revenue for the Government, and the Standard Oil Company would not get the benefit-I would vote for it. [Applause.]

The Standard Oil Company compels the producer to take its price, and then it compels the consumer of oil to pay its price; and I give it without any fear whatever that the Standard Oil Company is the greatest marauder that the sun ever looked down upon in six thousand years. [Applause.]

MR. SCOTT.-Would that condition be changed by eliminating this countervailing duty?

MR. CLARK.-Why, certainly. If they put up the price of refined oil too high, somebody else would ship refined oil in here. [Applause.] A straight revenue tariff of 15, 20, or 25 per cent., whatever the wisdom of the Congress thought, on petroleum would be an honest performance. But this countervailing duty is simply a dodge. [Applause.]

Now, one other thing. Under this drawback provision, a man that manufactures stuff out of foreign material gets back 99 per cent. of the tariff he has paid on that stuff when it is shipped out. The biggest user of tin plate in the United States, or in the world, is the Standard Oil Company. It does not use American tin plate. It uses foreign tin plate to make its cans for the foreign trade, and then gets 99 per cent. of the tariff

on that tin plate returned. [Loud applause.] Now, here you are in this bill giving it from 150 to 250 per cent. on oil, and then giving to it tin plate practically free. [Renewed applause.] I will not stand for any such performance. Remember that, while Standard Oil gets in its foreign tin plate for foreign export practically duty free, the rest of us have to pay a stiff tariff on all the tin plate which we use.

Of course, everybody stands around and asks what I think about zinc [a Missouri product]. I think the very same thing about zinc that I do about every other article of common consumption in the United States. If it turns out on investigation that a cent a pound is a good revenue tariff on zinc, I am going to vote for it; and if it turns out that it is a prohibitive tariff, or anywhere in the neighborhood of that, I am going to vote against it. [Applause.] I am in favor of a revenue tariff, and dead against a prohibitive tariff or anything approximating thereto.

I want to announce a general principle, and that is that I will not help any living human being oppress the great masses of the people of this country. [Loud applause.] I do not care a straw whether they come from Maine or from Missouri, all public plunderers look alike to me. [Loud applause.]

We are all tariff reformers. A few days ago there was a meeting at the White House, a conjunction, so the papers stated, of four stellar bodies of the first magnitude. Perhaps I ought to say one solar body and three stellar bodies-the President of the United States, Senator Aldrich, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. MacVeagh, and "my prophetic soul, my uncle," the Speaker of the House. [Laughter.] They met together as tariff reformers, so the papers said, to discuss what should be the Payne bill. When these four tariff reformers got together, if the angels did not weep it is because they were so completely dumfounded that they had completely lost all emotion whatsoever. [Laughter.]

JOSEPH G. CANNON [Ill.].-I do not recollect that the tariff was referred to or anything else except the general condition of the treasury, the desire for good administration, and so far as possible an organization and an administration of that great department that would tend to bring the expenditures of the Government within the revenues. [Applause.]

MR. CLARK.-Mr. Chairman, I do not propose to talk about all the schedules. But I cannot help remarking that the increase of 30 per cent. in the rates on hosiery is a cruel outrage on men, women, and children, for no man in his senses will

claim that hosiery is a luxury in this day and in this climate. These remarks apply with equal force to the increase of 75 per cent. on women's, misses', and children's gloves. In this connection it is well to remember that the women had much to do with overthrowing the Republican party on account of the extortions in the McKinley bill. It is to be hoped that history will repeat itself in this instance.

Here Mr. Clark discussed the rates on woolen manufactures, which, he said, were practically the same as those in the Dingley tariff. He characterized the continuation of these duties as "the most monstrous feature of the bill." To support his statement he read an editorial from the Kansas City Star, on "Tuberculosis and the Tariff," in which it was urged that cheap wool cloth.ing would do more to suppress the disease than all the means now employed for that purpose.

Mr. Clark continued:

Probably the worst "joker" in this bill is the one on lumber. Now, in plain language, the situation is this: If any province, State, or dependency of any foreign country shall place any tariff rate or restriction on the exportation of any forest product, then the old Dingley rates go into effect against all the forest products of that entire country. It happens to be a fact that Ontario has a restriction as to the exportation of forest products cut (by government permission) from her forest reserves. Being a province of Canada and a dependency of Great Britain, then, under the involved provisions of the Payne bill, all the forest products of Great Britain and her dependencies and provinces, on entering this country, have to pay the rates in the Dingley law, the very rates that are so odious to the users of lumber in this country at this time.

Now, Mr. Chairman, as far as conserving the forests is concerned, I am in favor of free lumber for that reason. [Applause.]

FRANCIS W. CUSHMAN [Wash.].-Is not Mr. Gifford Pinchot the greatest expert in this country on questions of forest conservation? He said:

If the tariff on lumber were to be removed, it would be done, I take it, for one or both of two purposes; either to reduce the price to the consumer, or to preserve our forests. In my judgment it would accomplish

neither.

That is his letter addressed to Hon. Sereno E. Payne, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

MR. CLARK.-No man in America did as much to build up the sentiment in favor of free lumber as that same man, Gifford Pinchot. [Applause.] But wait a minute. These smart lumber kings and their attorneys got hold of him down here and pumped into his head their ideas and he was converted. As a conservator of forests he seems to have fallen from grace. I do not charge any corrupt motives in the case. I believe he has been deceived.

Now, in conclusion, I want to give it as my deliberate opinion, with what study I have been able to devote to it, that this bill raises the Dingley rates. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

I do not believe that the American people voted to do that. I believe that when we get that maximum and minimum into operation that will place the tariff rates more than 20 per cent. higher than they are in the Dingley bill. I believe that the speech that the chairman quoted yesterday from President McKinley, at Buffalo, which may be taken as his farewell address to the American people, was the thing that set in operation this widespread movement for the reduction of the tariff. It is a revolution, and revolutions do not move backward. No matter what happens, the men who are in favor of a tariff revision downward this year will be in favor of tariff revision downward next year, especially if you make the tariff bill higher than it is Revolutions do not move backward; they move forward.

now.

Though beaten back in many a fray,
Yet freshening strength we'll borrow,
And where the vanguard halts to-day
The rear will camp to-morrow.

[Loud and long-continued applause on the Democratic side.]

On March 25 Oscar W. Underwood [Ala.] opposed the bill. On the question of free raw material Arthur L. Bates [Pa.] questioned him as follows:

The gentleman is opposed to free raw material?

MR. UNDERWOOD.-I am.

MR. BATES.-The gentleman is in favor, therefore, of reducing the tariff rate on manufactured goods?

MR. UNDERWOOD.-I am in favor of putting everything on a revenue rate.

MR. BATES.-Or, in the words the gentleman used a moment ago, reducing them to a competitive basis?

MR. UNDERWOOD.-Undoubtedly. They could not be at a revenue rate without their being on a competitive basis.

MR. BATES.-Precisely. Now, is the gentleman in favor of that, notwithstanding the fact that it would reduce the number of jobs for workmen in this country, or else reduce their wages? Is the gentleman in favor of reducing the wages of the American workman?

MR. UNDERWOOD.-No; I am not in favor of reducing the wages of the American workman, and if the industries of this country are put on a healthy competitive basis, when hard times come, when panics come, the workman of this country will hold his job, and foreign goods will cease to come in; but, when you build this protective tariff wall so high that the American people have got to buy every commodity and all they desire in times of great prosperity and great development alone from American manufacturers, you expand conditions, develop your business to such an extent that when hard times come there is no place to retrench or dispose of your surplus production, and you have got to shut up your factories at home. But if you build up the great industries of the country, not with an unhealthy, hothouse growth, but along conservative lines, recognizing fair competition and only revenue rates of duty all the time, while you might not build your industries as rapidly as under a forcing process, yet you would not have the present unhealthy growth, and, when hard times and panics come and it is necessary to reduce production, the foreign goods would be driven out; in most cases American mills would continue in operation. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

Morris Sheppard [Tex.] opposed the bill. In referring to the Republican platform of 1908 he said:

The tariff declaration in the Republican platform gives the protected interests a deed to the treasury of the United States. The wildest socialist could not have invented a more dangerous and alluring fallacy. The Payne bill completes the delivery of the treasury to the trusts, and the American people, unable to resist the appeals and promises of Republican leadership, a leadership buttressed with the oratory of Beveridge and Hughes, the perverted logic of Elihu Root, the fulminations of Roosevelt, and the imposing proportions of Mr. Taft, having indorsed the atrocious transaction at the polls, are now wit