The two committees which at opposite ends of the Capitol now began to sit daily over the tariff were remarkable bodies. At the head of the Senate committee was Mr. Morrill, who twenty-three years before had introduced into the House of Representatives the bill with which this narrative opened. Since 1867 he had been a member of the Senate, giving the bulk of his time to revenue questions. He was seventy-two years old now, and in spite of over twenty years’ labor on tariff schedules was still dignified and courteous!
John Sherman was next to Morrill on the Committee—a place he held with bad grace. Sherman had lost his rank on the Committee of Finance, of which he had formerly been chairman, by his appointment to Mr. Hayes’s cabinet in 1876, it being an invariable rule that a member returning to the Senate after an interregnum should go to the foot of his party colleagues on committee. When Sherman returned in 1881 he thought he should be an exception to the rule. He had up to this time outranked Mr. Morrill in both House and Senate. His services as Secretary of the Treasury had given him special skill in dealing with revenue questions. But Mr. Morrill declined to yield. It looked as if Mr. Sherman would sit at the foot of the table, when Mr. Allison, who was a member of the Committee, appreciating the strain, quietly suggested to his Republican colleagues that Mr. Sherman be moved up next to Morrill. This was done, but from the beginning of the work on the bill the effect of his defeat was most noticeable on Sherman’s temper and attitude. He was arrogant in committee and out. He says in his “Recollections” that he was “piqued” by Morrill’s failure to yield to him. The word is mild.
It began to be noticed soon after the Committee went to work that Mr. Sherman was getting much help from the member at the foot—a new Senator, the Senator from Rhode Island—Nelson W. Aldrich. People who watched the hearings said he seemed to have at his tongue’s end all the facts which bore on the high tariff side. It was said on the inside, too, that he was the man who had written the cotton schedule for the report of the Tariff Commission. He had certainly done well for his constituents. He had secured an increase on that class of cotton goods which was chiefly imported, and a decrease on those of which little or nothing could be imported.