The Westerner will listen attentively to a man he despises and has no intention of voting for, if he speaks well; but the standards are high. There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every political meeting, composed of veterans who compare all later performances with some speech they heard Garfield or “Dan” Voorhees, Oliver P. Morton or John J. Ingalls deliver before the orator spouting on the platform was born. Nearly all the national conventions held in the West have been marked by memorable oratory. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s speech nominating Blaine at the Republican convention of 1876 held at Cincinnati (how faint that old battle-cry has become: “Blaine, Blaine, Blaine of Maine!”) is often cited as one of the great American orations. “He swayed and moved and impelled and restrained and worked in all ways with the mass before him,” says the Chicago _Times_ report, “as if he possessed some key to the innermost mechanism that moves the human heart, and when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as when he began, the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of unspeakable wonder and delight.” Even making allowance for the reporter’s exuberance, this must have been a moving utterance, with its dramatic close: “Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his country and the maligners of his honor. For the Republican party to desert this gallant leader now is as though an army should desert their gallant general upon the field of battle.... Gentlemen of the convention, in the name of the great republic, the only republic that ever existed upon this earth; in the name of all her defenders and of all her supporters; in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field of battle, and in the name of those who perished in the skeleton clutch of famine at Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly remembers, Illinois, Illinois nominates for the next President of this country that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of leaders--James G. Blaine.” In the fall of the same year Ingersoll delivered at Indianapolis an address to war veterans that is still cited for its peroration beginning: “The past rises before me like a dream.”