tion. Anything that attacks that basis of human confidence is a crime against civilization and a blow against the foundations of social order. We believe that the very essence of civilization is mutual interest, mutual forbearance, mutual cooperation. We believe the world has passed the time when men's hands are at each other's throats. We believe to-day that men stand shoulder to shoulder, working together for a common purpose, beneficial to all, and we believe that this attempt to assail wages, which means an attempt to attack the prosperity of all, will be resisted, not by a class, but by the whole nation. The dweller in the tenement house, stooping over his bench, who never sees a field of waving corn, who never inhales the perfume of grasses and of flowers, is yet made the participator in all the bounties of Providence, in the fructifying influence of the atmosphere, in the ripening rays of the sun, when the product of the soil is made cheaper to him every day by the abundance of the harvest. It is from his share in this bounty that the Populists want to exclude the American working man. To him we say, in the name of humanity, in the name of progress, you shall neither press a crown of thorns upon the brow of labor nor place a Scourge upon his back. You shall not rob him of any one advantage which he has gained by long years of study, of progress in the skill of his craft, and by the careful organization of the members who work with him at the same bench. You shall not obscure the golden prospect of a further improvement in his condition by a further appreciation of the cost of living as well as by a further cheapening of the dollar which is paid to him.

There can be no distress, there can be no hard times, when labor is well paid. The man who raises his hand against the progress of the working man raises his hand against prosperity. He seeks to restrict the volume of production. He seeks to degrade the condition of the man who is steadily improving himself, and in his own improvement is accomplishing the improvement of all mankind. But this attempt will fail. I do not regret this campaign. I am glad this issue has arisen. The time has come when the people of this country will show their capacity for selfgovernment. They will prove that the men who have led

the world in the pathway of progress will be the jealous guardians of liberty and honor. They are not to be seduced by appeals to their cupidity or moved by threats of injury. They will forever jealously guard and trim the lamp of enlightenment, of progress. They will ever relentlessly press and crush under their heels the flaming torch of Populistic discontent, Populistic agitation, and Populistic destruction. When this tide of anarchy shall have receded, this tide of Populistic agitation, this assault upon common honesty and upon industry shall have abated forever, the foundations of this republic will remain undisturbed. The government will still shelter a people indissolubly wedded to liberty and order, jealously forbidding any distinction of burden or of privilege, conserving property, maintaining morality, resting forever upon the broad basis of American patriotism and American intelligence.

ROSCOE CONKLING

NOMINATING GENERAL GRANT FOR A THIRD

TERM

[Roscoe Conkling was born at Albany, N. Y., 1829. At the age of thirteen he entered the Mount Washington Collegiate Institute in New York City, where he studied several years, and in 1846 entered the law office of Spencer and Kernan. He was admitted to the bar in 1850, and in the same year was appointed district attorney of Oneida County. In 1858 he was elected mayor of Utica. Toward the close of his second term he resigned this office to enter Congress. He was chosen United States senator in January 1867. In a speech in the Senate, Conkling advocated the bill that proposed the formation of an electoral commission. After the election of Garfield, he, with his colleague, Thomas C. Platt, claimed the right to control federal appointments in New York state on the ground of previous agreement with the President. He opposed the appointment of William H. Robertson as collector of the port of New York, and after the appointment was confirmed, Mr. Conkling and Mr. Platt resigned their seats in the Senate, expecting a confirmation of their attitude by a reelection by the Legislature. In this they were disappointed, however, Warner Miller and Elbridge G. Latham being sent to the Senate in their stead. From this time Conkling engaged in law practice in New York. He died in 1888 from the effects of exposure in the great "blizzard" of that year. The speech below was made at the National Convention in Chicago, 1880.]

WHEN

HEN asked whence comes our candidate, we say from Appomattox. Obeying instructions I should never dare to disregard, expressing also my own firm conviction, I rise in behalf of the state of New York to propose a nomination with which the country and the Republican party can grandly win. The election before us will be the Austerlitz of American politics. It will decide whether for years to come the country will be "Republican or Cossack." The need of the hour is a candidate who can carry

the doubtful states, north and south; and believing that he more surely than any other can carry New York against any opponent, and carry not only the North, but several states of the South, New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. He alone of living Republicans has carried New York as a presidential candidate. Once he carried it even according to a Democratic count, and twice he carried it by the people's vote, and he is stronger now. The Republican party with its standard in his hand is stronger now than in 1868 or 1872. Never defeated in war or in peace, his name is the most illustrious borne by any living man; his services attest his greatness, and the country knows them by heart. His fame was born not alone of things written and said, but of the arduous greatness of things done; and dangers and emergencies will search in vain in the future, as they have searched in vain in the past, for any other on whom the nation leans with such confidence and trust. Standing on the highest eminence of human distinction, and having filled all lands with his renown-modest, firm, simple, and selfpoised—he has seen not only the titled, but the poor and the lowly, in the utmost ends of the world rise and uncover before him. He has studied the needs and defects of many systems of government, and he comes back a better American than ever, with a wealth of knowledge and experience added to the hard common sense which so conspicuously distinguished him in all the fierce light that beat upon him throughout the most eventful, trying, and perilous sixteen years of the nation's history.

Never having had "a policy to enforce against the will of the people," he never betrayed a cause or a friend, and the people will never betray or desert him. Vilified and reviled, truthlessly aspersed by numberless presses, not in other lands, but in his own, the assaults upon him have strengthened and seasoned his hold upon the public heart. The ammunition of calumny has all been exploded; the powder has all been burned once, its force is spent, and General Grant's name will glitter as a bright and imperishable star in the diadem of the Republic when those who have tried to tarnish it will have moldered in forgotten graves and their memories and epitaphs have vanished utterly.