the Judges' claim was a good one. Mr.
Wright, the Deputy Master, to whom I also put the question,
spoke of it with rather less respect.

CHAPTER XXIV
A REPUBLICAN PLATFORM

I have had occasion several times to prepare the Republican
platform for the State Convention. The last time I undertook
the duty was in 1894. I was quite busy. I shrunk from the
task and put it off until the time approached for the Convention,
and it would not do to wait any longer. So I got up one morning
and resolved that I would shut myself up in my library and
not leave it until the platform was written. Accordingly
I sat down after breakfast, with the door shut, and taking
a pencil made a list of topics about which I thought there
should be a declaration in the platform.

I wrote each at the top of a separate page on a scratch-
block, intending to fill them out in the usual somewhat grandiloquent
fashion which seems to belong to that kind of literature.
I supposed I had a day's work before me.

It suddenly occurred to me: Why not take these headings
just as they are, and make a platform of them, leaving the
Convention and the public to amplify as they may think fit
afterward. Accordingly I tore out the leaves from the scratch-
block, and handed them to a secretary to be put into type.
The whole proceeding did not take fifteen minutes.

The sense of infinite relief that the Convention had when,
after listening a moment of two, they found I was getting
over what they expected as a rather tedious job, with great
rapidity, was delightful to behold. I do not believe there
was ever a political platform received in this country with
such approval, certainly by men who listened to it, as that:

PLATFORM

"The principles of the Republicans of Massachusetts are as
well known as the Commonwealth itself; well known as the Republic;
well known as Liberty; well known as Justice.

Chief among them are:

An equal share in Government for every citizen.

Best possible wages for every workman.

The American market for American labor.

Every dollar paid by the Government, both the gold and the
silver dollars of the Constitution, and their paper representatives,
honest and unchanging in value and equal to every other.

Better immigration laws.

Better naturalization laws.

No tramp, Anarchist, criminal or pauper to be let in, so
that citizenship shall not be stained or polluted.

Sympathy with Liberty and Republican government a