Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 September 1878 — The Massachusetts Platform. [ARTICLE]

The Massachusetts Platform.

Chicago Inter-Oce.au. WO confess to surprise in reading the remarkable document adopted as a platform by the Republicans of Massachusetts. Our astonishment arises as much from its omissions as from what it contains. * * * This platform is not only for hard money, but for the hardest kind of hard money—gold. It says nothing of a government *of the people, for the people, aud I*y the people, out advocates Presidential prerogatives and the eivil-servicc reform. Its “honor” seems to be involved in the interests of the bondholders and moneyed power, while the rights of all other people, and all other property, are neglected. There is no breath in it for freedom and equal rights. Its framers seemed to have learned nothing from the disastrous hard money campaign in Maine. If it does not aid in swelling the vote for Ben Butler, it will be because human nature in the old Bay State is very different from what it is in other regions. * ♦ ♦ * *

Any man. or body of men, who, in the present condition of the country, can solemnly announce a political platform without the slighte t allusion to the protection of Southern Republicans, or the condition of the thousands who have been bankrupted through a false and pernicious financial policy, while it bristles in all parts with the interests of money, the prerogatives of the President, and cant about the civil service, seems to us wanting iu the necessary elements of political sagacity. A green sportsman, after a fruitless tramp, met a boy with tears in his eyes, and said: “Isay, youngster, is there any Hing around here to shoot”” “Nothin’ just ’bout here, but there’s tho schoolmaster t’other side the hill. I wish you’d shoot him.”