PROUD OF BEING A REPUBLICAN.
Fellow citizens, I am a Republican and proud of my party's history. The history of the United States has been made rich and resplendent with victories and achievements of our party. We are proud of our nation's history from its earliest dawn down to the present, and for the valuable lessons it has taught. We would not expunge or obliterate a single line. We accept it as a whole, from Plymouth Rock to Bunker Hill, from Bunker Hill to Fort Sumter, from Fort Sumter to Appomattox, and from Appomattox down to the campaign of 1896. We dedicate crowns of laurel for the giants who have evolved the mighty principles and tenets of the republican party—Washington and Grant, Blaine and Logan, Sherman and Garfield, Harrison and McKinley, and most of all, that gentle soul, that man of equal poise, whose peer has never lived since the days of blessed Galilean—Abraham Lincoln! (Applause.) Our history is one of greatness and sublimity. Its pages are rich with the names of orators more eloquent than a Burke, with the names of statesmen more acute than the "Iron Chancellor" and the names of warriors greater and mightier than Napoleon.
IN THE DARK AND TURBULENT DAYS OF THE REBELLION, THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF DEMOCRATIC PATRIOTS, SAVED THIS NATION, WHILE NOW IN THE CLOSING DAYS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, BY THE LIVING GOD, PATRIOTS WILL SAVE AND PROTECT OUR NATION'S HONOR.
Ours is the greatest nation on earth, and the possibilities of the future are almost limitless; if we make no mistake in the great principles of protection, reciprocity and a sound currency, which have for their immediate object the betterment of the conditions of the wage-earners of this land.