Even before the Civil War, the labor vote had become a factor that could not be ignored, and both old parties consistently conciliated it by many references. The Republicans in 1860 commended that "policy of national exchanges which secures to the workingmen liberal wages." The defense of the protective system was gradually shifted by the Republicans, until, judging from the platforms, its continuation was justifiable principally on account of their anxiety to safeguard the American workingman against "the pauper labor of Europe." The Democrats could not overlook the force of this appeal, and in their repeated demands for the reduction of the tariff they announced that no devotion to free trade principles would allow them to pass legislation which might put American labor "in competition with the underpaid millions of the Old World." In 1880, the Democratic party openly professed itself the friend of labor and the laboring man and pledged itself to "protect him against the cormorant and the commune." In their platform of 1888, the Democrats promised to make "due allowance for the difference between the wages of American and foreign labor" in their tariff revisions; and in 1892 they deplored the fact that under the McKinley tariff there had been ten reductions in the wages of the workingmen to one increase. In the latter year, the Republicans urged that on articles competing with American products the duties should "equal the difference between wages abroad and at home." Among the more concrete offerings to labor were the promises of homesteads in the West by the Republicans--promises which the Democrats reiterated; protection against Chinese and coolie labor, particularly in the West, safety-appliance laws applicable to interstate carriers, the establishment of a labor bureau at Washington, the prohibition of the importation of alien laborers under contract, and the abolition of prison contract labor. On these matters there was no marked division between the two old parties; each advocated measures of its own in general terms and denounced the propositions of the other in equally general terms.