At all events, the work to which Mr. McKinley called Congress in extra session immediately after his inauguration, on March 4, 1897, was not establishing sound money; it was raising more revenue by duties “so levied upon foreign products as to preserve the home market as far as possible to our producers; to revive and increase manufacturers; to relieve and encourage agriculture; to increase our domestic and foreign commerce; to aid and develop mining and building; and to render labor in every field of useful occupation the liberal wages and adequate rewards to which skill and industry are justly entitled.” Why Mr. McKinley expected a new bill to do what his own had not been able to do, he did not explain. The new bill was almost ready to report when the extra session was called, for Mr. Dingley and his committee had been at work all of the preceding winter preparing it. A sincere effort was made to give a good bill according to Republican lights. “We expect,” Mr. Dingley wrote Colonel George C. Tichenor, who was assisting him, “to cut nearly all our duties considerably below those of the act of 1890.” In not a few cases, Mr. Dingley accepted the Wilson rates practically as they stood. This was true of the metal and cotton schedules. He felt safe in doing this, because, as he said, they were “really made by the manufacturers.” Throughout the schedules the committee aimed to replace the Wilson specifics by ad valorems and, of course, this caused more or less uncertainty as to whether or not by the change those rates had not been raised more than the committee acknowledged. The Democrats charged that they had, but the fact seems to be that Mr. Dingley sincerely aimed to keep duties nearer, if possible, to the Wilson Bill than to the McKinley Bill. The committee particularly desired to escape the charge of fixing prohibitive duties. This had been done in 1894, professedly to cut down the revenue, and the mischief it had worked the party was not yet forgotten. In spite of the repeated assurances of Mr. Dingley that the extremes of the bill of 1890 were to be avoided, the committee did report many rates as high and a few even higher; for instance, the duties on flax and linen were advanced. A number of the unimportant articles which the old bill had put on the free list were put back in the dutiable list, as were nearly all the important articles made free by the Wilson Bill,—wool, salt, lumber, cotton bagging, cotton-ties, and burlaps.