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.