“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.