8. We insist upon a constitutional amendment reducing the terms of United States Senators.
9. We demand such rules for the government of Congress as shall place all representatives of the people upon an equal footing, and take away from committees a veto power greater than that of the President.
10. The question as to the amount of duties to be levied upon various articles of import has been agitated and quarrelled over, and has divided communities, for nearly a hundred years. It is not now, and never will be, settled, unless by the abolition of indirect taxation. It is a convenient issue, always raised when the people are excited over abuses in their midst. While we favor a wise revision of the tariff laws, with a view to raising a revenue from luxuries rather than necessities, we insist that, as an economic question, its importance is insignificant as compared with financial issues; for whereas we have suffered our worst panics under low and also under high tariffs, we have never suffered from a panic, nor seen our factories and workshops closed, while the volume of money in circulation was adequate to the needs of commerce. Give our farmers and manufacturers money as cheap as you now give it to our bankers, and they can pay high wages to labor, and compete with all the world.
11. For the purpose of testing the sense of the people upon the subject, we are in favor of submitting to a vote of the people an amendment to the Constitution in favor of suffrage regardless of sex, and also on the subject of the liquor traffic.
12. All disabled soldiers of the late war should be equitably pensioned, and we denounce the policy of keeping a small army of office-holders, whose only business is to prevent, on technical grounds, deserving soldiers from obtaining justice from the Government they helped to save.
13. As our name indicates, we are a national party, knowing no East, no West, no North, no South. Having no sectional prejudices, we can properly place in nomination for the high offices of state, as candidates, men from any section of the Union.
14. We appeal to all people who believe in our principles to aid us by voice, pen, and votes.
The Prohibitionists divided in the contest of 1884. Their first was a mass convention, held at Chicago on the 19th of June, under the title of the American Prohibition National Convention, with J. L. Barlow, of Connecticut, as president. The fact that it was not largely a representative body is evidenced from the fact that on the ballot for President, Samuel C. Pomeroy, of Kansas, received 72 votes to 12 for all others, and was declared the nominee, and John A. Conant, of Connecticut, was nominated for Vice-President without a ballot. This organization did not have any electoral tickets as far as I can learn.
It adopted the following platform:
We hold: 1. That ours is a Christian, and not a heathen, nation, and that the God of the Christian Scriptures is the author of civil government.