ILLINOIS DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. I 63 



repay. Yon have been a history making people. With the name 

 of Ilhnois is associated the name of the most remarkable city in 

 the world, not alone because of its size, but because of its loca- 

 tion. Its value as a market for the products of the west, its neces- 

 sity as a distributing point, and more than all, because of its 

 personnel, that (when completely destroyed by fire) that caused 

 it to be rebuilt larger and better than ever, even before the de- 

 bris had quit smoking and the ground had cooled off after the 

 greatest fire of the century. 



It is seldom we peruse a paper that we are not reminded of 

 Illinois by the mention of him, whose name was associated with 

 that wonderful national convention in your windy city the sum- 

 mer of 1896. When the political party represented at that 

 meeting was almost on the verge of stampeding, it remained for 

 Illinois to furnish a man (one of her own sons) who, with his 

 magnetism and his oratory, poured oil on the troubled waters 

 and electrified a nation wnth the most w^onderful oratorical effort 

 of the age, and whatever may be our political faith, regardless 

 of our political prejudices, aside from any personal opinion, any 

 of us may have concerning his views, everybody is glad of the 

 opportunity to put himself on record and the entire people are 

 of one mind with no division of sentiment, that the name of 

 W. J. Bryan belongs on the enrollment of Illinois' illustrious 

 sons. 



When farther back on the page of history, it was the earn- 

 est desire of his party to make him leader ; when they determined 

 to place him at the head of their ticket, whose name w^as svnony- 

 mous with supremacy and political loyalty in their supreme anx- 

 iety to repay the man (whom everybody delighted to honor for 

 his superiority, by putting him in a position they doubtless felt the 

 American people owed to him, they selected the man to present his 

 claim, who, in his lifetime had no peer as an orator, and it was an 

 Illinois man who immortalized himself and made prominent the 

 state in which he lived through that wonderful speech, in which 

 he placed in nomination for President of the United States the 

 man he called the Plumed Knight, James G. Blaine, and every 



