130 Pen Pictures of Live Men

d is. George Evans fought the tariff battle of 1846 and lost. Nelson W. Aldrich fought the tariff battles of 1883, 1890, 1893, and 1897, and won. He never lost a trick. The Wilson-Gorman tariff was as much the handicraft of Aldrich as it was of any other man. He and Bill Chandler wrote the cotton schedule, and it was for protection only. He, Chandler, and Matt Quay wrote the iron and steel schedule, and it, too, was for protection only, as is attested by the fact that, three years later, Dingley adopted them with very little change, and no change whatever except in the costlier articles. Aldrich is no lawyer, no scholar. So far as his public utterances attest, he is densely ignorant of history, and one may well believe that he has contempt for general literature. Burke's magnificent political and moral philosophy, couched in that marvelous production, the speech on "The Nabob of Arcot's Debts," would bore the Senator from Rhode Island, while if the most ignorant and most illiterate employe of a Providence or Fall River cotton mill should accost him in the throng and say that he had a secret as to dye-stuffs that would save five cents on a bolt of calico or gingham, Aldrich would be spellbound by such eloquence, and run the thing down until he ascertained whether it were practical or Like the late venerable Justin S. Merrill, Senator Aldrich is a business man, but he could never bring to the discussion of an economic question the literary finish, the historical... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.