mind into a withdrawal of that vaster machinery of credit by which ninety-five per cent. of all business transactions are performed a system open, public, and inspiring general confidence, would from the day of its adoption bring healing on its wings to all our harassed industries, set in motion the wheels of commerce, manufactures, and the mechanic arts, restore employment to labor, and renew in all its natural sources the prosperity of the people.

REFORM IS NECESSARY in the sum and modes of federal taxation, to the end that capital may be set free from distrust and labor lightly burdened.

We denounce the present tariff, levied upon nearly four thousand articles, as a masterpiece of injustice, inequality, and false pretence.

It yields a dwindling, not a yearly rising, revenue.

It has impoverished many industries to subsidize a few.

It prohibits imports that might purchase the products of American labor.

It has degraded American commerce from the first to an inferior rank on the high seas.

It has cut down the sales of American manufactures at home and abroad, and depleted the returns of American agriculture – an industry followed by half our people.

It costs the people five times more than it produces to the treasury, obstructs the processes of production, and wastes the fruits of labor.

It promotes fraud, fosters smuggling, enriches dishonest officials, and bankrupts honest merchants.

We demand that all custom-house taxation shall be only for

revenue.

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 two hundred millions of acres upon railroads alone, and out of more than thrice that aggregate has disposed 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 the revival of the cooly trade in Mongolian women imported for immoral purposes, and Mongolian men, hired to perform servile labor contracts, and demand such a modification of the treaty with the Chinese empire, or such legislation by Congress within constitutional limitations, as shall prevent the 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 belong 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 contributions 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;

A minister to England censured 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 misde

meanors;

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 the abuses, wrongs, and crimes, the product of sixteen years' ascendancy of the Republican party, create a necessity for

reform confessed by 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 eighty thousand office-holders, its leaders and guides.

Reform can only be had by a peaceful civil 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.