Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1875 — National Platform of the Industrial Congress. [ARTICLE]

National Platform of the Industrial Congress.

Indianapolis. Ind., April 14. The following is the platform adopted by the Industrial Congress this afternoon: Resolved, That we submit to the people of the I’nited States the objects sought to be accomplished by the Industrial Congress: 1. To bring within the folds of the organization every department of productive industry, making knowledge a standpoint for action, and industrial, moral and social worth, not wealth, the true standard of individual and national greatness. 2. To secure to the toilers a just share of the wealth they create, more of the treasure that rightly belongs to them, more society advantages, more ot the privileges, benefits and emoluments of the world; in a word, all those rights and privileges tojnake them capable of enjoying, appreciating and defending the blessings of republican principles. 3. To arrive at a true condition of the producing masses in their educational, moral and financial condition, -we ’ demand from the several States, and from the National Government, the establishment of bureaus of labor statistics. 4. The establishment of co-operative institutions, productive and distributive. 5. The reserving of the public lands, the heritage of the people, for the actual settler; not another acre for railroad speculators. 6. The abrogation of all laws that do not bear equally upon capital and labor; the removal of unjust technicalities, delays and discriminations in the administration of justice, and the adoption of measures providing for tlie health and safety of those engaged in mining, manufacturing, or building pursuits. 7. The enactment of a law to compel chartered corporations to pay their employes at least once in every month tn full for labor performed during the preceding month, in the lawful money of the country. - . . 8. The enactment of a law giving mechanics and other laborers a first lien on their work; also preventing a stay of execution in case of judgment liens. 9. The abolishment of the contract system on National, State and municipal work. 10. To inaugurate a system of public markets to facilitate the" exchange of the productions of farmers and mechanics, intending to do away with middlemen and speculators. To inaugurate systems of cheap transportation to facilitate the exchange of commodities. The substitution of arbitration for strikes whenever and wherever employers and employes are willing to meet on equitable grounds. 13. The prohibition of the importation of all servile races and the discontinuance of all subsidies granted to national vessels bringing them to our shores. 14. To advance the standard of American mechanics by the enactment and enforcement of equitable apprentice laws. 15. To abolish the system of contracting the labor of convicts in State Prisons and reformatory - - - 16. To secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work. 17. The reduction of the hours of labor to eight per day, so that laborers may have more time for social enjoyment, intellectual improvement, and be enabled to reap the advantages conferred by labor-saving machinery which tneir brains created. 18. To secure legislation providing for the assessment and collection of moneys required to prosecute wars from the wealth of the nation, on the principle that, if the Government possesses the right to draft the poor man's body for purposes of national defenses, it has an equal right to appropriate the rich man’s accumulations under the same conditions, and in order that such debts as those which now oppress this people may never again be entailed upon ourselves or our" posterity. 19. To prevent by all lawful means the practice now in vogue of invoking the aid of the military whenever and wherever the toiling masses refuse to submit to the arbitrary or unjust demand^of aggregated wealth of unprincipled employers, by which the men enlisted as the nation’s defender’s become the nation’s oppressors. 20. The establishment by the Government of a just standard of distribution between capital and labqr by providing a purely national circulating medium, based upon the faith and resources of the nation, issued directly to the people without the intervention of any system of banking corporations, which money shall be a legal tender in the payment of all debts, public or private, and interchangeable at the option of the holder for registered Government bonds bearinga rate of interest not to exceed 3.65 per cent., subject to future legislation of Congress.

The following extract from a Sjtka letter to the Alta California shows how much milder is the climate ot Alaska than that of Northern Illinois: “ Though only the beginning of March the weather is by no means wintry here, though this is Alaska. We have had, all through winter, but about one month’s cold snap, and evefi then the mercury did not make himself so low as to fall below zero—eight degrees below zero being the most King Frost could force the thermometer down to. At the present time St. Peter makes many a wry face at us, and would have us believe he would treat us to seme pretty severe weather yet; but it only amounts to a few minutes of half rain, half snow, and the good-hearted old chan's countenance” dissolves in genial smiles, with rosy sunbeams lighting up his gray, wrinkled features.” All the people in a Paris house were startled one night by a tremendous noise made in an upper apartment. Rushing to the doors they saw a man coming down four steps at a time. was arrested, half dead with fear. He was a thief, had made his way in with a false key, and, feeling his way about the apartments from room to room to find valuables, had come upon some strange, soft, movable, upright thing in the middle of a room. He felt of it, passed his hand higher and higher, and felt a face, cold as ice. Frightened, eager to escape, he could not find his way to the door, and in his flight upset every article of furniture in the apartment. Then they all went up-stairs, and found the tenant of the fourth floor hanged in his room. A cruel April-fool hoax was perpetrated on nearly all the Hartford (Conn.) clergymen, by sending invitations to them to come to the United States Hbtel to unite a couple in marriage. About twenty-four of them came around, to the great delight of the crowd who had assembled to see their discomfiture.