A History of the Republican Party

by George Washington Platt

A small standing army with a well-disciplined state militia are amply sufficient in time of peace. This republic has no place for a vast military service and conscription.

When the nation is in danger the volunteer soldier is his country's best defender. The national guard of the United States should ever be cherished in the patriotic hearts of a free people. Such organizations are ever an element of strength and safety.

For the first time in our history and co-evil with the Philippine conquest has there been a wholesale departure from our time-honored and approved system of volunteer organization. We denounce it as un-American, un-Democratic, and un-Republican, and as a subversion of the ancient and fixed principles of a free people.

TRUSTS DENOUNCED.

Private monopolies are indefensible and intolerable. They destroy competition, control the price of all material, and of the finished product, thus robbing both producer and consumer. They lessen the employment of labor and arbitrarily fix the terms and conditions thereof, and deprive individual energy and small capital of their opportunity for betterment. They are the most efficient means yet devised for appropriating the fruits of industry to the benefit of the few at the expense of the many, and unless their insatiate greed is checked all wealth will be aggregated in a few hands and the republic destroyed.

The dishonest paltering with the trust evil by the Republican party in state and national platforms is conclusive proof of the truth of the charge that trusts are the legitimate product of Republican policies; that they are fostered by Republican laws, and that they are protected by the Republican administration in return for campaign subscriptions and political support.

We pledge the Democratic party to an increasing warfare in nation, state, and city against private monopoly in every form. Existing laws against trusts must be enforced and more stringent ones must be enacted providing for publicity as to the affairs of corporations engaged in interstate commerce and requiring all corporations to show, before doing business outside the state of their origin, that they have no water in their stock and that they have not attempted and are not attempting, to monopolize any branch of business or the production of any articles of merchandise, and the whole constitutional power of Congress over interstate commerce, the mails, and all modes of interstate communication shall be exercised by the enactment of comprehensive laws upon the subject of trusts.

Tariff laws should be amended by putting the products of trusts upon the free list to prevent monopoly under the plea of protection.

The failure of the present Republican administration, with an absolute control over all the branches of the national government, to enact any legislation designed to prevent or even curtail the absorbing power of trusts and illegal combinations, or to enforce the anti-trust laws already on the statute books, proves the insincerity of the high-sounding phrases of the Republican platform.

Corporations should be protected in all their rights and their legitimate interests should be respected, but any attempt by corporations to interfere with the public affairs of the people or to control the sovereignity which creates them should be forbidden under such penalties as will make such attempts impossible.