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674 The Currency. The Cuban insurrection. [i 895-9 every contingency." He also announced that an extra session of Congress would be called to deal with the tariff, the revenue being, as he main- tained, inadequate to the expenses of the government. When Congress met on March 15, a tariff measure was introduced by Dingley. It was expected to produce an increase in revenue of from seventy to one hundred millions. Wood, lumber, and many other articles were transferred from the free to the dutiable list; and a general increase was made in existing rates of duty, exceeding, in some in- stances, the rates of 1890. In the House there were 206 Republicans, 122 Democrats, and 29 of other parties; and Reed was re-elected as Speaker. The bill passed the House on March 31, 1897, by a vote of 205 to 121. It was amended in the Senate, where the Silver Republicans and Populists still held the balance of power; and, after passing through a conference committee, it became law by the President's signature on July 24, 1897. As soon as the tariff was disposed of, the President presented the subject of the currency; but the special session adjourned without definitive action upon it. In his annual message of December 6, 1897, President McKinley gave the first place to the currency question. At the first session of the fifty-sixth Congress, which began December 4, 1899, an Act was passed for the preservation of the gold standard. The gold dollar was adopted as the unit of value, all other forms of money to be maintained at parity with it. A gold reserve of $150,000,000 was established, with power if necessary to issue bonds to maintain it. Provision was made for refunding the national debt in two per cent, bonds running thirty years. The national banking law was so amended as to allow national banks to be organised with a minimum capital of $25,000, with authority to issue notes to the par value of their United States bonds deposited in the Treasury. Meanwhile the country had entered, as the result of the war with Spain, on the course which has been distinctively called Expansion. In reality the history of the United States presents an almost continuous record of territorial extension ; but this extension had for the most part been confined to the North American continent. The decision to assume responsibilities beyond the seas was unpremeditated. The train of events, of which it was the result, began with the outbreak of the insurrection in Cuba, in February, 1895. With reference to this conflict the United States assumed an attitude of neutrality and non-intervention ; but, as time wore on, it became more and more difficult to maintain that position. During the previous insurrection, from 1868 to 1878, the government of the United States, in pursuing, even in the face of "untoward events," a neutral course, was aided by the admonitions which the people were daily receiving at home of the difficulties that might attend the re-establishment of order in a large and populous island where the process of emancipation was still going on. In 1895 the