CHAPTER XXIV A REPUBLICAN PLATFORM
I have had occasion several times to prepare the Republican platform for the State Convention. The last time I undertook the duty was in 1894. I was quite busy. I shrunk from the task and put it off until the time approached for the Convention, and it would not do to wait any longer. So I got up one morning and resolved that I would shut myself up in my library and not leave it until the platform was written. Accordingly I sat down after breakfast, with the door shut, and taking a pencil made a list of topics about which I thought there should be a declaration in the platform.
I wrote each at the top of a separate page on a scratch- block, intending to fill them out in the usual somewhat grandiloquent fashion which seems to belong to that kind of literature. I supposed I had a day's work before me.
It suddenly occurred to me: Why not take these headings just as they are, and make a platform of them, leaving the Convention and the public to amplify as they may think fit afterward. Accordingly I tore out the leaves from the scratch- block, and handed them to a secretary to be put into type. The whole proceeding did not take fifteen minutes.
The sense of infinite relief that the Convention had when, after listening a moment of two, they found I was getting over what they expected as a rather tedious job, with great rapidity, was delightful to behold. I do not believe there was ever a political platform received in this country with such approval, certainly by men who listened to it, as that:
PLATFORM
"The principles of the Republicans of Massachusetts are as well known as the Commonwealth itself; well known as the Republic; well known as Liberty; well known as Justice.
Chief among them are:
An equal share in Government for every citizen.
Best possible wages for every workman.
The American market for American labor.
Every dollar paid by the Government, both the gold and the silver dollars of the Constitution, and their paper representatives, honest and unchanging in value and equal to every other.
Better immigration laws.
Better naturalization laws.
No tramp, Anarchist, criminal or pauper to be let in, so that citizenship shall not be stained or polluted.
Sympathy with Liberty and Republican government at home and abroad.
Americanism everywhere.
The flag never lowered or dishonored.
No surrender in Samoa.
No barbarous Queen beheading men in Hawaii.
No lynching.
No punishment without trial.
Faith kept with the pensioner.
No deserving old soldier in the poorhouse.
The suppression of dram drinking and dram selling.
A school at the public charge open to all the children, and free from partisan or sectarian control.
No distinction of birth or religious creed in the rights of
American citizenship.
Devotion paramount and supreme to the country and to the flag.
Clean politics.
Pure administration.
No lobby.
Reform of old abuses.
Leadership along loftier paths.
Minds ever open to the sunlight and the morning, ever open to new truth and new duty as the new years bring their lessons."
I ought to explain one phrase in this platform, which I have since much regretted. That is the phrase, "No barbarous Queen beheading men in Hawaii." It was currently reported in the press that the Queen of Hawaii, Liliuokalani, was a semi- barbarous person, and that when Mr. Blount, Mr. Cleveland's Commissioner, proposed to restore her government and said that amnesty should be extended to all persons who had taken part in the revolution, she had said with great indignation, "What, is no one to be beheaded?" and that upon that answer Mr. Blount and Mr. Cleveland had abandoned any further purpose of using the power of the United States to bring the monarchy back again. That, so far as I knew, had never been contradicted and had obtained general belief.
I ought not to have accepted the story without investigation. I learned afterward, from undoubted authority, that the Queen is an excellent Christian woman; that she has done her best to reconcile her subjects of her own race to the new order of things; that she thinks it is better for them to be under the power of the United States than under that of any other country, and that they could not have escaped being subjected to some other country if we had not taken them; and that she expended her scanty income in educating and caring for the children of the persons who were about her court who had lost their own resources by the revolution. I have taken occasion, more than once, to express, in the Senate, my respect for her, and my regret for this mistake.