For some years the political labor movement lost its independent character and was absorbed by the Greenback party which offered a meeting-ground for discontented farmers and restless workingmen. In 1876 the party nominated for President the venerable Peter Cooper, who received about eighty thousand votes--most of them probably cast by farmers. During this time the leaders of the labor movement were serving a political apprenticeship and were learning the value of coöperation. On February 22, 1878, a conference held at Toledo, Ohio, including eight hundred delegates from twenty-eight States, perfected an alliance between the Labor Reform and Greenback parties and invited all "patriotic citizens to unite in an effort to secure financial reform and industrial emancipation." Financial reform meant the adoption of the well-known greenback free silver policy. Industrial emancipation involved the enactment of an eight-hour law; the inspection of workshops, factories, and mines; the regulation of interstate commerce; a graduated federal income tax; the prohibition of the importation of alien contract labor; the forfeiture of the unused portion of the princely land grants to railroads; and the direct participation of the people in government. These fundamental issues were included in the demands of subsequent labor and populist parties, and some of them were bequeathed to the Progressive party of a later date. The convention was thus a forerunner of genuine reform, for its demands were based upon industrial needs. For the moment it made a wide popular appeal. In the state elections of 1878 about a million votes were polled by the party candidates. The bulk of these were farmers' votes cast in the Middle and Far West, though in the East, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, Maine, and New Jersey cast a considerable vote for the party. With high expectations the new party entered the campaign of 1880. It had over a dozen members in Congress, active organizations in nearly every State, and ten thousand local clubs. General James B. Weaver, the presidential nominee of the party, was the first candidate to make extensive campaign journeys into distant sections of the country. His energetic canvass netted him only 308,578 votes, most of which came from the West. The party was distinctly a farmers' party. In 1884, it nominated the lurid Ben Butler who had been, according to report, "ejected from the Democratic party and booted out of the Republican." His demagogic appeals, however, brought him not much more than half as many votes as the party received at the preceding election, and helped to end the political career of the Greenbackers.