The first of these speakers denounced the Republican party as a "great class maker and mass smasher"; he scorned that "farcical practice" which had given governmental protection to the wealthy and left the laborer to protect himself. "This protected class of Republicans," he exclaimed, "proposes now to destroy labor organizations. To that end it has organized syndicates, pools, and trusts, and proposes through the Federal courts, in the exercise of their unconstitutional powers by the issuance of extraordinary unconstitutional writs, to strike down, to suppress, and to overawe those organizations, backed by the Federal bayonet.... Men who lived there in their mansions and rolled in luxuries were the only ones to get the benefit of this Republican [sugar] bounty called protection." Senator Blackburn, of Kentucky, exclaimed that "Christ with a lash drove from the temple a better set of men than those who for twenty years have shaped the financial policy of this country." Governor Altgeld declared: "We have seen the streets of our cities filled with idle men, with hungry women, and with ragged children. The country to-day looks to the deliberations of this convention to promise some form of relief." This relief was to be secured by the remonetization of silver and the emancipation of the country from English capitalists and eastern financiers. * * * * * On the third day of the convention, Senator Jones, of Arkansas, chairman of the committee on platform, reported the conclusions of the majority of his committee. In the platform, as reported, there were many expressions of class feeling. It declared that the act of 1873 demonetizing silver caused a fall in the price of commodities produced by the people, a heavy increase in the public taxation and in all debts, public and private, the enrichment of the money-lending class at home and abroad, the prostration of industry, and the impoverishment of the people. The McKinley tariff was denounced as "a prolific breeder of trusts and monopolies" which had "enriched the few at the expense of the many."