The platform made the money question, however, the paramount issue, and declared for "the free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold at the present legal ratio of sixteen to one without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation." It stated that, until the monetary question was settled, no changes should be made in the tariff laws except for the purpose of meeting the deficit caused by the adverse decision of the Supreme Court in the income tax cases. The platform at this point turned upon the Court and asserted that the income tax law had been passed "by a Democratic Congress in strict pursuance of the uniform decisions of that Court for nearly a hundred years." It then hinted at a reconstruction of the Court, declaring that, "it is the duty of Congress to use all the constitutional power which remains after that decision or which may come from its reversal by the Court, as it may hereafter be constituted, so that the burden of taxation may be equally and impartially laid, to the end that wealth may bear its due proportion of the expense of the government." The platform contained many expressions of sympathy with labor. "As labor creates the wealth of the country," ran one plank, "we demand the passage of such laws as may be necessary to protect it in all its rights." It favored arbitration for labor conflicts in interstate commerce. Referring to the recent Pullman strike and the labor war in Chicago, it denounced "arbitrary interference by Federal authorities in local affairs as a violation of the Constitution of the United States and a crime against free institutions, and we specially object to government by injunction as a new and highly dangerous form of oppression by which Federal judges, in contempt of the laws of the states and rights of citizens, become at once legislators, judges, and executioners; and we approve the bill passed by the last session of the United States Senate, and now pending in the House of Representatives, relative to contempt in Federal courts and providing for trials by jury in certain cases of contempt." The platform did not expressly attack the administration of President Cleveland, but the criticism of the intervention by Federal authorities in local affairs was directed particularly to his interference in the Chicago strike. The departure from the ordinary practice of praising the administration of the party's former leader itself revealed the feeling of the majority of the convention.