After a time he took a sheet of paper and wrote a paragraph for the platform.

It pledged the party to investigate the food and tenement questions, and to pass such remedial legislation as should seem best.

It pledged the party to do this, with as little disturbance and interference with present conditions as possible, "but fully recognizing the danger of State interference, we place human life above money profits, and human health above annual incomes, and shall use the law to its utmost to protect both." When it appeared in the platform, there was an addition that charged the failure to obtain legislation "which should have rendered impossible the recent terrible lesson in New York City" to "the obstruction in the last legislature in the interest of the moneyed classes and landlords, by the Republican party." That had not been in Peter's draft and he was sorry to see it.
Still, the paragraph had a real ring of honesty and feeling in it.

That was what others thought too.

"Gad, that Stirling knows how to sling English," said one of the committee, when the paragraph was read aloud.
"He makes it take right hold." Many an orator in that fall's campaign read the nineteenth section of the Democratic platform aloud, feeling that it was ammunition of the right kind.