A minority of the platform committee composed of sixteen delegates presented objections to the platform as reported by Senator Jones and offered amendments. In their report the minority asserted that many declarations in the majority report were "ill-considered and ambiguously phrased, while others are extreme and revolutionary of the well-recognized principles of the party." The free coinage of silver independently of other nations, the minority claimed, would place the United States at once "upon a silver basis, impair contracts, disturb business, diminish the purchasing powers of the wages of labor, and inflict irreparable evils upon our nation's commerce and industry." The minority, therefore, proposed the maintenance of the existing gold standard; and concluded by criticizing the report of the majority as "defective in failing to make any recognition of the honesty, economy, courage, and fidelity of the present Democratic administration." This minority report was supplemented by two amendments proposed by Senator Hill, one to the effect that any change in the monetary standard should not apply to existing contracts and the other pledging the party to suspend, within one year from its enactment, the law providing for the independent free coinage of silver, in case that coinage did not realize the expectation of the party to secure a parity between gold and silver at the ratio of sixteen to one. After the presentation of the platform and the proposed changes, an exciting and disorderly debate followed. The discussion was opened by Mr. Tillman, who exclaimed that the Civil War had emancipated the black slaves and that they were now in convention to head a fight for the emancipation of the white slaves, even if it disrupted the Democratic party as the Civil War had disrupted it. Without any equivocation and amid loud and prolonged hissing, he declared that the new issue like the old one was sectional--a declaration of political war on the part of the hewers of wood and the drawers of water in the southern and western states against the East. He compared the growth of fifteen southern states in wealth and population with the growth of Pennsylvania; he compared Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri with Massachusetts; to these five western states he added Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, and Nebraska, and compared them all with the state of New York. The upshot of his comparison was that the twenty-five southern and western states were in economic bondage to the East and that we now had a money oligarchy more insolent than the slave oligarchy which the Civil War had overthrown.