Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/61

Rh government must protect alike native and naturalized citizens at home or abroad; resolved in favor of a judicious system of railroad improvement in Oregon to develop the vast resources, and for this purpose asked congress to make liberal donations. This convention instructed its delegates for George H. Pendleton for president.

The democratic state convention which met March 23, 1870, adopted a lengthy platform of thirteen resolutions, in substance declaring the attachment of the party to the principles of the republic; denouncing political partisans at Washington and the reconstruction measures as "a nefarious scheme, revolutionary in design, treasonable in execution.' It also condemned the then senators as misrepresenting the wishes and outraging the sentiments of the people of the state; denounced the bestowal of the elective franchise upon Indians, negroes, and Chinese, and denounced the ratification of the recent amendments to the constitution; urged the repeal of the Burlingame treaty between the United States and China; denounced special privileges as to burdens of taxation, and adopted the eighth resolution which reads, "that the continual payment of the semiannual interest on the bonded debt of the United States without abatement, together with other numerous expenses for which the people are taxed, make a burden too intolerable to be borne without an effort to find some speedy measures of relief;that the amount of the bonded debt was increased more than twofold by the venal, illegal, and unjustifiable terms of its contraction, and that there was neither justice nor wisdom in the repeated payment of the principal by the continued payment of the interest; that it is no part of good policy or good government to embarrass the energies of all labor and all business enterprises by excessive and oppressive taxation for the exclusive benefit of a