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When the bill was finally passed, the Congressman succeeded in adding half a cent a pound to the duty on two of these products and in preventing any reduction on the others. A year later, when the popular clamor against the bill had become acute, the same association that had asked him to vote for increases wrote to the Congressman denouncing the bill as “the most iniquitous measure ever enacted by Congress” and requesting him to explain by letter why he had voted with “the Reactionaries” to pass the bill. When it was pointed out to the association that it had urged the Congressman to obtain an increase of duty on the products in which it was interested, it dropped its demand for an explanation. An influential newspaper published in his district editorially commended him while the bill was under debate for his “intelligent efforts” to increase the duty on manufactured articles in which the district was interested, and a year later the same newspaper in the same editorial column denounced him as one of “the legislative banditti responsible for the Payne-Aldrich measure.”