Reform is necessary in the scale of public expense—federal, state, and municipal. Our federal taxation has swollen from sixty millions gold, in 1860, to four hundred and fifty millions currency, in 1870; our aggregate taxation from one hundred and fifty-four millions gold, in 1860, to seven hundred and thirty millions currency, in 1870—or, in one decade, from less than five dollars per head to more than eighteen dollars per head. Since the peace, the people have paid to their tax-gatherers more than thrice the sum of the national debt, and more than twice that sum for the Federal government alone. We demand a rigorous frugality in every department and from every officer of the government.
Reform is necessary to put a stop to the profligate waste of public lands, and their diversion from actual settlers, by the party in power, which has squandered 200,000,000 of acres upon railroads alone, and, out of more than thrice that aggregate, has of less than a sixth directly to tillers of the soil.
Reform is necessary to correct the omissions of a Republican Congress, and the errors of our treaties and our diplomacy which have stripped our fellow-citizens of foreign birth and kindred race, recrossing the Atlantic, of the shield of American citizenship, and have exposed our brethren of the Pacific coast to the incursions of a race not sprung from the same great parent stock, and in fact now, by law, denied citizenship through naturalization, as being neither accustomed to the traditions of a progressive civilization nor exercised in liberty under equal laws. We denounce the policy which thus discards the liberty-loving German and tolerates a revival of the coolie trade in Mongolian women, imported for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men, held to perform servile labor contracts, and demand such modification of the treaty with the Chinese Empire, or such legislation within constitutional limitations, as shall prevent further importation or immigration of the Mongolian race.
Reform is necessary, and can never be effected but by making it the controlling issue of the elections, and lifting it above the two false issues with which the office-holding class and the party in power seek to smother it:
1. The false issue with which they would enkindle sectarian strife in respect to the public schools, of which the establishment and support belongs exclusively to the several states, and which the Democratic party has cherished from their foundation, and is resolved to maintain, without prejudice or preference for any class, sect, or creed, and without largesses from the treasury to any.
2. The false issue by which they seek to light anew the dying embers of sectional hate between kindred peoples once estranged, but now reunited in one indivisible republic and a common destiny.
Reform is necessary in the civil service. Experience proves that efficient, economical conduct of the governmental business is not possible if its civil service be subject to change at every election, be a prize fought for at the ballot-box, be a brief reward of party zeal, instead of posts of honor assigned for proved competency, and held for fidelity in the public employ; that the dispensing of patronage should neither be a tax upon the time of all our public men, nor the instrument of their ambition. Here, again, promises, falsified in the performance, attest that the party in power can work out no practical or salutary reform.
Reform is necessary, even more, in the higher grades of the public service. President, Vice-President, Judges, Senators, Representatives, Cabinet officers—these, and all others in authority—are the people’s servants. Their offices are not a private perquisite; they are a public trust. When the annals of this Republic show the disgrace and censure of a Vice-President; a late Speaker of the House of Representatives marketing his rulings as a presiding officer; three Senators profiting secretly by their votes as law-makers; five chairmen of the leading committees of the late House of Representatives exposed in jobbery; a late Secretary of the Treasury forcing balances in the public accounts; a late Attorney-General misappropriating public funds; a Secretary of the Navy enriched, or enriching friends, by percentages levied off the profits of contractors with his department; an Ambassador to England concerned in a dishonorable speculation; the President’s private secretary barely escaping conviction upon trial for guilty complicity in frauds upon the revenue; a Secretary of War impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors—the demonstration is complete, that the first step in reform must be the people’s choice of honest men from another party, lest the disease of one political organization infect the body politic, and lest by making no change of men or parties we get no change of measures and no real reform.
All these abuses, wrongs, and crimes—the product of sixteen years’ ascendency of the Republican party—create a necessity for reform, confessed by the Republicans themselves; but their reformers are voted down in convention and displaced from the cabinet. The party’s mass of honest voters is powerless to resist the 80,000 office-holders, its leaders and guides.
Reform can only be had by a peaceful civic revolution. We demand a change of system, a change of administration, a change of parties, that we may have a change of measures and of men.
Resolved, That this convention, representing the Democratic party of the United States, do cordially indorse the action of the present House of Representatives, in reducing and curtailing the expenses of the Federal government, in cutting down salaries and extravagant appropriations, and in abolishing useless offices and places not required by the public necessities; and we shall trust to the firmness of the Democratic members of the House that no committee of conference and no misinterpretation of the rules will be allowed to defeat these wholesome measures of by the country.
Resolved, That the soldiers and sailors of the Republic, and the widows and orphans of those who have fallen in battle, have a just claim upon the care, protection, and gratitude of their fellow-citizens.
1878.
National Platform, Toledo, Ohio, February 22.
Whereas, Throughout our entire country the value of real estate is depreciated, industry paralyzed, trade depressed, business incomes and wages reduced, unparalleled distress inflicted upon the poorer and middle ranks of our people, the land filled with fraud, embezzlement, bankruptcy, crime, suffering, pauperism, and starvation; and
