in Chicago in the heat of June, but in
the sober quiet that comes between now and November, in the silence of
deliberate judgment will this great question be settled. Let us aid them
to-night.

"But now, gentlemen of the convention, what do we want? Bear with me a
moment. Hear me for this cause, and, for a moment, be silent that you
may hear. Twenty-five years ago this Republic was wearing a triple chain
of bondage. Long familiarity with traffic in the bodies and souls of men
had paralyzed the consciences of a majority of our people. The baleful
doctrine of State sovereignty had shocked and weakened the noblest and
most beneficent powers of the national government, and the grasping
power of slavery was seizing the virgin territories of the West and
dragging them into the den of eternal bondage. At that crisis the
Republican party was born. It drew its first inspiration from that fire
of liberty which God has lighted in every man's heart, and which all the
powers of ignorance and tyranny can never wholly extinguish. The
Republican party came to deliver and save the Republic. It entered the
arena when the beleaguered and assailed territories were struggling for
freedom, and drew around them the sacred circle of liberty which the
demon of slavery has never dared to cross. It made them free forever.
Strengthened by its victory on the frontier, the young party, under the
leadership of that great man who, on this spot, twenty years ago, was
made its leader, entered the national capitol and assumed the high
duties of the government. The light which shone from its banner
dispelled the darkness in which slavery had enshrouded the capitol, and
melted the shackles of every slave, and consumed, in the fire of
liberty, every slave-pen within the shadow of the capitol. Our national
industries, by an impoverishing policy, were themselves prostrated, and
the streams of revenue flowed in such feeble currents that the treasury
itself was well-nigh empty. The money of the people was the wretched
notes of two thousand uncontrolled and irresponsible State banking
corporations, which were filling the country with a circulation that
poisoned rather than sustained the life of business. The Republican
party changed all this. It abolished the babel of confusion, and gave
the country a currency as national as its flag, based upon the sacred
faith of the people. It threw its protecting arm around our great
industries, and they stood erect as with