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NATIONAL PROHIBITION PLATFORM.

ADOPTED AT OMAHA, JUNE 30, 1892.

The Prohibition party in National Convention assembled, ac knowledging Almighty God as the source of true government and his law as the standard to which all human enactments must conform to secure the blessings of peace and prosperity, presents the following declaration of principles:

The liquor traffic is a foe to civilization, the arch enemy of popular government and a public nuisance. It is the citadel of the forces that corrupt politics, promote poverty and crime, degrade the nation's home life, thwart the will of the people and deliver our country into the hands of rapacious class interests. All laws that, under the guise of regulation, legalize and protect this traffic or make the Government share in its illgotten gains are "vicious in principle and powerless as a remedy.'

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We declare anew for the entire suppression of the manufacture, sale, importation, exportation and transportation of alcoholic liquors as a beverage by Federal and State legislation, and the full powers of the Government should be exerted to secure this result. Any party that fails to recognize the dominant nature of this issue in American politics is undeserving of the support of the people.

No citizen should be denied the right to vote on account of sex, and equal labor should receive equal wages without regard to

sex.

The money of the country should be issued by the general Gov. ernment only, and in sufficient quantities to meet the demands of business and give full opportunity for the employment of labor. To this end an increase in the volume of money is demanded, and no individual or corporation should be allowed to make any profit through its issue. It should be made a legal tender for the payment of all debts, public and private. Its volume should be fixed at a definite sum per capita and made to increase with our increase in population.

Tariff should be levied only as a defense against foreign governments which levy tariff upon or bar out our products from their markets, revenue being incidental. The residue of means necessary to an economical administration of the Government should be raised by levying a burden upon what the people possess instead of upon what we consume.

Railroad, telegraph and other public corporations should be controlled by the Government in the interest of the people, and no higher charges allowed than necessary to give fair interest on the capital actually invested.

Foreign immigration has become a burden upon industry, one

of the factors in depressing wages and causing discontent, therefore our immigration laws should be revised and strictly enforced. The time of residence for naturalization should be extended, and no naturalized person should be allowed to vote until one year after he becomes a citizen.

Non-resident aliens should not be allowed to acquire land in this country, and we favor the limitation of individual and corporate ownership of land. All unearned grants of land to railroad companies or other corporations should be reclaimed.

Years of inaction and treachery on the part of the Republican and Democratic parties have resulted in the present reign of mob law, and we demand that every citizen be protected in the right of trial by constitutional tribunals.

All men should be protected by the law in their right to one day's rest in seven.

Arbitration is the wisest and most economical and humane method of settling National differences.

Speculation in margins, the cornering of grain, money and products and the formation of pools, trusts and combinations for the arbitrary advancement of prices should be suppressed.

We pledge that the Prohibition party, if elected to power, will ever grant just pensions to disabled veterans of the Union Army and Navy, their widows and orphans.

We stand unequivocally for the American public schools and opposed to any appropriation of public moneys for sectarian schools. We declare that only by united support of such common schools, taught in the English language, can we hope to become and remain an homogeneous and harmonious people.

We arraign the Republican and Democratic parties as false to the standards reared by their founders, as faithless to the principles of the illustrious leaders of the past to whom they do homage with the lips; as recreant to the "higher law" which is inflexible in political affairs as in personal life, and as no longer embodying the aspirations of the American people or inviting the confidence of enlightened progressive patriotism. Their protest against the admission of "moral issues" into politics is a confession of their own moral degeneracy.

The declaration of an eminent authority that municipal misrule is "the one conspicuous failure of American politics," follows as a natural consequence of such degeneracy, and is true alike of cities under Republican and Democratic control. Each accuses the other of extravagance in Congressional appropriations, and both are alike guilty, each protests when out of power against the infraction of the civil service laws, and each when in power violates those laws in letter and spirit, each professes fealty to the interests of the toiling masses, but both covertly truckle to the money power on their administration of public affairs.

Even the tariff issues as represented in the Democratic Mills

bill and the Republican McKinley bill is no longer treated by them as an issue upon great and divergent principles of government, but is a mere catering to different sectional and class interests.

The attempt in many States to wrest the Australian ballot system from its true purpose, and to so deform it as to render it extremely difficult for new parties to exercise the rights of suffrage, is an outrage upon popular government. The competition of both the parties for the vote of the slums, and their assiduous courting of the liquor power, and subserviency to the money power, has resulted in placing those powers in the position of practical arbiters of the destiny of the nation.

We renew our protest against these perilous tendencies, and invite all citizens to join us in the upbuilding of a party that, as shown in five national campaigns, prefers temporary defeat to an abandonment of the claims of justice, sobriety, personal rights and the protection of American homes.

THE PEOPLE'S PARTY PLATFORM.

ADOPTED AT OMAHA, JULY 4, 1892.

Assembled upon the one hundred and sixteenth aniversary of the Declaration of Independence the People's party of America, in their first National Convention, invoking upon their action the blessing of Almighty God, puts forth, in the name and on behalf of the people of this country, the following preamble and delaration of principles.

The conditions which surround us best justify our coöperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized; most of the States have been compelled to isolate the voters at the polling places to prevent universal intimidation or bribery. The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled; public opinion silenced; business prostrated; our homes covered with mortgages; labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of the capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organization for selfprotection; imported pauperized labor beats down their wages; a hireling standing army, unrecognized by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly degenerating into European conditions. The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of the governmental injustice we breed the two great classes— tramps and millionaries.

The national power to create money is appropriated to enrich bondholders; a vast public debt, payable in legal tender currency, has beer. funded into gold-bearing bonds, thereby adding millions to the burdens of the people.

Silver, which has been accepted as coin since the dawn of history, has been demonetized to add to the purchasing power of gold by decreasing the value of all forms of property as well as human labor, and the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurpers, bankrupt enterprises, and enslave industry.

A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents, and it is rapidly taking possession of the world. If not met and overthrown at once, it forebodes terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.

We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder,

while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering poor. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful conditions to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. They have agreed together to ignore, in the coming campaign, every issue but one. They propose to drown the outcries of a plundered people with the uproar of a sham battle over the tariff, so that capitalists, corporations, national banks, rings, trusts, watered stock, the demonetization of silver, and the oppressions of the usurers may be all lost sight of. They propose to sacrifice our homes, lives, and children on the altar of Mammon; to destroy the multitude in order to secure corrupt funds from the millionaires.

Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand generation who established our independence, we seek to restore the Government of the republic to the hands of "the plain people," with which class it originated.

We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the national Constitution-to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common de. fence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.

We declare that this republic can only endure as a free government while built upon the love of the whole people for each other and for the nation; it cannot be pinned together by bayonets; that the civil war is over, and that every passion and resentment which grew out of it must die with it, and that we must be in fact, as we are in name, the United Brotherhood of Freemen.

Our country finds itself confronted by conditions for which there is no precedent in the history of the world; our annual agricultural productions amount to billions of dollars in value, which must within a few weeks or months be exchanged for billions of dollars of commodities consumed in their production; the existing currency supply is wholly inadequate to make this exchange; the results are falling prices, the formation of combines and rings, and the impoverishment of the producing class. We pledge ourselves that if given power we will labor to correct these evils by wise and reasonable legislation, in accordance with the terms of our platform.

We believe that the powers of Government-in other words, of the people-should be expended (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end that oppression, injustice and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.

While our sympathies as a party of reform are naturally upon

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