The second day’s proceedings of the convention introduced Senator H. C. Lodge, of Massachusetts, as the permanent chairman of the body. Twenty thousand people attended the session, in the expectation that President McKinley would be renominated, but for the time being they were disappointed. In his opening speech Chairman Lodge said:
“Dominant among the issues of four years ago was that of our monetary and financial system. The Republican party promised to uphold our credit, to protect our currency from revolution and to maintain the gold standard. We have done so. Failing to secure, after honest effort, any encouragement for international bimetallism, we have passed a law strengthening the gold standard and planting it more firmly than ever in our financial system, improving our banking laws, buttressing our credit, and refunding the public debt at 2 per cent interest, the lowest rate in the world. It was a great work well done.”
Concerning the war with Spain he said:
“Here they are, these great feats: A war of a hundred days, with many victories and no defeats, with no prisoners taken from us, and no advance stayed; with a triumphant outcome startling in its completeness and in its world-wide meaning. Was ever a war more justly entered upon, more quickly fought, more fully won, more thorough in its results? Cuba is free. Spain has been driven from the Western hemisphere. Fresh glory has come to our arms and crowned our flag. It was the work of the American people, but the Republican party was their instrument.
“So much for the past. We are proud of it, but we do not expect to live upon it, for the Republican party is pre-eminently the party of action, and its march is ever forward. The deeds of yesterday are in their turn a pledge and proof that what we promise we perform, and that the people who put faith in our declarations in 1896 were not deceived, and may place the same trust in us in 1900. But our pathway has never lain among dead issues, nor have we won our victories and made history by delving in political graveyards.
“We are the party of to-day, with cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows. The living present is ours; the present of prosperity and activity in business, of good wages and quick payments, of labor employed and capital invested; of sunshine in the market-place and the stir of abounding life in the workshop and on the farm. It is with this that we have replaced the depression, the doubts, the dull business, the low wages, the idle labor, the frightened capital, the dark clouds which overhung industry and agriculture in 1896. This is what we would preserve, so far as sound government and wise legislation can do it. This is what we offer now.”
In such an atmosphere of optimism the convention proceeded to adopt the platform on which the candidates should ask the suffrages of the American electorate. That document set forth that four years before—
“When the people assembled at the polls after a term of Democratic legislation and administration, business was dead, industry was paralyzed, and the national credit disastrously impaired. The country’s capital was hidden away and its labor distressed and unemployed.
“The Democrats had no other plan with which to improve the ruinous conditions, which they had themselves produced, than to coin silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. The Republican party, denouncing this plan as sure to produce conditions even worse than those from which relief was sought, promised to restore prosperity by means of two legislative measures—a protective tariff and a law making gold the standard of value.
“The people, by great majorities, issued to the Republican party a commission to enact these laws. This commission has been executed, and the Republican promise is redeemed. Prosperity, more general and more abundant than we have ever known, has followed these enactments. There is no longer controversy as to the value of any government obligations. Every American dollar is a gold dollar, or its assured equivalent, and American credit stands higher than that of any other nation. Capital is fully employed and everywhere labor is profitably occupied.