A party of traditions, a party that has directed in every critical period save one since the Republic began, has said that he meets the requirements of the time.  That party chose him because of his record for doing, because there was an inner conviction that he could enter upon a still larger field with a growing, an ever-expanding capacity.

This, too, furnishes a fitter chapter in the history of country and party.  For the wise selection of men, even obscure men, has been the tower of our national strength.  America had her Thomas Jefferson to expound for all the world the real underlying truth of her Revolution.  The equality of rights and duties spread from a dream of philosophers to be the doctrine of warriors for freedom.  There was her George Washington to hold together the tenuous bands of freedom.  She found her James Monroe to lay the foundations of the doctrine that stern moral precepts forbid the violation of sovereign rights of the nations.  She brought forth her Andrew Jackson to make the country in his time safe for democracy, and to establish for all time that no single money baron, nor yet any collection of them, is superior to the power of all the people.

In later time she had her Abraham Lincoln, now in the judgment of the succeeding generations but little beneath the Savior of men, preserver of the Union for its larger duties.  She had in this day her Woodrow Wilson, builder of the newer policy of world union and recognized spokesman of freedom in the death struggle with military autocracy.  It is of history that Lincoln and Wilson both were stricken down with their work incomplete.  After Lincoln there was no doer of the work to finish his task and the evil of those who perverted the exalted purpose of the Civil War continues even unto this day.

Coming into the arena of national affairs when even America seems to doubt and when the selfish motive of fear threatens to palsy the nation’s hand, Governor Cox became the man to vindicate the statements and the pledges given before all the world.  His introduction to the conscience and intellect of the country was a demand that the faith be kept.

Out of the night of war, the League of Nations has long been a supreme issue with Governor Cox and he was chosen to carry the standard because he had expressed the sentiment most strongly, most clearly and with greatest emphasis.

Doers have ever been practical men, and such is Governor Cox.  But practicality need not, and does not, imply a lack of vision.  There is such a thing as ideality in vision and a practical hand to make good the picture of the mind.  The combined qualities are considered as essentials to the adequate man of the times, for a vision of a new world order is the rarest gift of the century, but the man with the dynamic force and the cunning skill to make this new dream come true has been wanting.

History—­political history—­was changed profoundly when President Woodrow Wilson was stricken.  Men were slow in rallying to his cause, there were even clouds of doubt, ominous and disturbing, when the party he led to two victories prepared in the late June and the early July days of the year 1920 to state its position, its hope and its aspirations.