Election of 1892 Democratic National Committee: Chairman, WM. F. HARRITY, of Pennsylvania. There was a prolonged struggle at this convention over the tariff plank of the platform as reported by the Committee on Resolutions, and the one printed herein was substituted, and finally adopted. After the adoption of the platform, the convention proceeded to nominate a candidate for President, and Grover Cleveland, of New York, was nominated on the first ballot. The following table gives the result of the vote: But one ballot was taken for a candidate for Vice-President, which resulted as follows: A motion was then made and adopted that Adlai E. Stevenson, of Illinois, be the candidate for Vice-President. The platform adopted by the convention follows: DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM. SECTION 1. The representatives of the Democratic party of the United States, in national convention assembled, do reaffirm their allegiance to the principles of the party as formulated by Jefferson and exemplified by the long and illustrious line of his successors in Democratic leadership, from Madison to Cleveland; we believe the public welfare demands that these principles be applied to the conduct of the federal government, through the accession to power of the party that advocates them; and we solemnly declare that the need of a return to these fundamental principles of a free popular government, based on home rule and individual liberty, was never more urgent than now, when the tendency to centralize all power at the federal capital has become a menace to the reserved rights of the states that strikes at the very roots of our government, under the Constitution, as framed by the fathers of the republic. FEDERAL CONTROL OF ELECTIONS. SECTION 2. We warn the people of our common country, jealous for the preservation of their free institutions, that the policy of federal control of elections, to which the Republican party has committed itself, is fraught with the gravest dangers, scarcely less momentous than would result from a revolution practically establishing monarchy on the ruins of the republic. It strikes at the North as well as at the South, and injures the colored citizens even more than the white. It means a horde of deputy marshals at every polling place, armed with federal power; returning boards appointed and controlled by federal authority; the outrage of the electoral rights of the people in the several states; the subjugation of the colored people to the control of the party in power, and the reviving of race antagonisms now happily abated, of the utmost peril to the safety and happiness of all-a measure deliberately and justly described by a leading Republican senator as "the most infamous bill that ever crossed the threshold of the Senate." Such a policy, if sanctioned by law, would mean the dominance of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of office-holders, and the party first intrusted with its machinery could be dislodged from power only by an appeal to the reserved rights of the people to resist oppression, which is inherent in all self-governing communities. Two years ago this revolutionary policy was emphatically condemned by the people at the polls; but, in contempt of that verdict, the Republican party has defiantly declared, in its latest authoritative utterance, that its success in the coming elections will mean the enactment of the Force Bill and the usurpation of despotic control over elections in all the states. Believing that the preservation of republican government in the United States is dependent upon the defeat of this policy of legalized force and fraud, we invite the support of all citizens who desire to see the Constitution maintained in its integrity, with the laws pursuant thereto, which have given our country a hundred years of unexampled prosperity; and we pledge the Democratic party, if it be intrusted with power, not only to the defeat of the Force Bill, but also to relentless opposition to the Republican policy of profligate expenditure, which, in the short space of two years, has squandered an enormous surplus and emptied an overflowing treasury, after piling new burdens of taxation upon the already overtaxed labor of the country. TARIFF LEGISLATION. SECTION 3. We denounce Republican protection as a frauda robbery of the great majority of the American people for the benefit of the few. We declare it to be a fundamental principle of the Democratic party that the federal government has no constitutional power to impose and collect tariff duties, except for the purposes of revenue only, and we demand that the collection of such taxes shall be limited to the necessities of the government when honestly and economically administered. We denounce the McKinley tariff law enacted by the Fiftyfirst Congress as the culminating atrocity of class-legislation; we indorse the efforts made by the Democrats of the present Congress to modify its most oppressive features in the direction of free raw materials and cheaper manufactured goods that enter into general consumption, and we promise its repeal as one of the beneficent results that will follow the action of the people in intrusting power to the Democratic party. Since the McKinley tariff went into operation there have been ten reductions of the wages of the laboring man to one increase. We deny that there has been any increase of prosperity to the country since that tariff went into operation, and we point to the dullness and distress, to the wage-reductions and strikes in the iron trade, as the best possible evidence that no such prosperity has resulted from the McKinley Act. We call the attention of thoughtful Americans to the fact that, after thirty years of restrictive taxes against the importation of foreign wealth in exchange for our agricultural surplus, the homes and farms of the country have become burdened with a real estate mortgage debt of over two thousand five hundred million dollars, exclusive of all other forms of indebtedness; that in one of the chief agricultural states of the West there appears a real estate mortgage debt averaging $165 per capita of the total population, and that similar conditions and tendencies are shown to exist in the other agricultural-exporting states. We denounce a policy which fosters no industry so much as it does that of the sheriff. RECIPROCITY. SECTION 4. Trade-interchange on the basis of reciprocal advantages to the countries participating is a time-honored doctrine of the Democratic faith, but we denounce the sham reciprocity which juggles with the people's desire for enlarged foreign markets and freer exchanges, by pretending to establish closer trade relations for a country whose articles of export are almost exclusively agricultural products, with other countries that are also agricultural, while erecting a customhouse barrier of prohibitive tariff taxes against the richest countries of the world, that stand ready to take our entire surplus of products, and to exchange therefor commodities which are necessaries and comforts of life among our own people. TRUSTS AND COMBINATIONS. SECTION 5. We recognize in the trusts and combinations, which are designed to enable capital to secure more than its just share of the joint product of capital and labor, a natural consequence of the prohibitive taxes which prevent the free competition which is the life of honest trade; but we believe their worst evils can be abated by law, and we demand the rigid enforcement of the laws made to prevent and control them, together with such further legislation in restraint of their abuses as experience may show to be necessary. PUBLIC LAND. SECTION 6. The Republican party, while professing a policy of reserving the public land for small holdings by actual settlers, has given away the people's heritage, till now a few railroads and non-resident aliens, individual and corporate, possess a larger area than that of all our farms between the two seas. The last Democratic administration reversed the improvident and unwise policy of the Republican party touching the public domain, and reclaimed from corporations and syndicates, alien and domestic, and restored to the people, nearly 100,000,000 acres of valuable land, to be sacredly held as homesteads for our citizens, and we pledge ourselves to continue this policy until every acre of land so unlawfully held shall be reclaimed and restored to the people. GOLD AND SILVER. SECTION 7. We denounce the Republican legislation known as the Sherman Act of 1890 as a cowardly makeshift, fraught |