1. We pledge ourselves anew to the constitutional doctrines and traditions of the Democratic party, as illustrated by the teachings and example of a long line of Democratic statesmen and patriots, and embodied in the platform of the last national convention of the party. 2. Opposition to centralizationism and to that dangerous spirit of encroachment which tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever be the form of government, a real despotism. No sumptuary laws; separation of Church and State for the good of each; common schools fostered and protected. 3. Home rule; honest money, consisting of gold and silver, and paper convertible into coin on demand; the strict maintenance of the public faith, State and national; and a tariff for revenue only. 4. The subordination of the military to the civil power, and a general and thorough reform of the civil service. 5. The right to a free ballot is the right preservative of all rights, and must and shall be maintained in every part of the United States. 6. The existing administration is the representative of conspiracy only, and its claim of right to surround the ballot-boxes with troops and deputy marshals, to intimidate and obstruct the electors, and the unprecedented use of the veto to maintain its corrupt and despotic power, insult the people and imperil their institutions. 7. The grand fraud of 1876–77, by which, upon a false count of the electoral votes of two States, the candidate defeated at the polls was declared to be President, and, for the first time in American history, the will of the people was set aside under a threat of military violence, struck a deadly blow at our system of representative government; the Democratic party, to preserve the country from a civil war, submitted for a time in firm and patriotic faith that the people would punish this crime in 1880; this issue precedes and dwarfs every other; it imposes a more sacred duty upon the people of the Union than ever addressed the conscience of a nation of freemen. 8. We execrate the course of this administration in making places in the civil service a reward for political crime, and demand a reform by statute which shall make it forever impossible for the defeated candidate to bribe his way to the seat of a usurper by billeting villains upon the people.