Governor Kristi Noem’s remarks were, in our view, the highlight of the third day of the GOP National Convention. The speech Wednesday evening by the fast-rising Republican of South Dakota included some of the most to-the-point constitutional and historical comments of the whole parley, particularly when she quoted Lincoln’s Lyceum address warning against mob violence.

The governor made a point of acknowledging that at times, “our country has struggled to live up to our founding principles.” That’s when she spoke of one of President Trump’s Republican predecessors, President Lincoln. She quoted his address of 1838 before the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois. The future president took the occasion to warn of the dangers America was facing from within.

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger, Lincoln asked, introducing some of his earliest words of political prophecy. “I answer,” he answered, “if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Lincoln had been animated by the murder by a pro-slavery mob in St. Louis of a freedman, Francis McIntosh, who was burned to death, and murder by a different mob of an abolitionist editor in Alton, Illinois, named Elijah Lovejoy. He warned of the “increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts.”

After quoting that warning, Governor Noem sketched Lincoln’s concern for the people who had seen their property destroyed, their families attacked, and their lives threatened or even taken away. And his worry that “these good people were becoming tired of and even disgusted with a government that offered them no protection.” Then Mrs. Noem looked out at the vast convention audience and said, “Sound familiar?”

“It took 244 years to build this great nation, flaws and all,” the governor said. She warned that we could lose it all “in a tiny fraction of that time, if we continue down the path taken by the Democrats and their radical supporters, from Seattle and Portland, to Washington and New York. Democrat-run cities across this country are being overrun by violent mobs. There is looting, chaos, destruction and murder.”

After we listened to Mrs. Noem’s speech, we went back and re-read Lincoln’s language at the Lyceum. It’s an extraordinary document, and it left us thinking that the governor was making a sage point. “The Republican Party’s commitment,” said the rancher’s daughter who arose in Dakota, “to individual rights and self-government is as necessary today as it was in 1860, when we won our first election.”

What is going to happen in the election this fall isn’t yet clear, at least not to us. One of the things that is clear though is that a remarkable lineup of new stars is — with Kristi Noem among them —starting to emerge in a Republican party that knows how to connect its message during the current crisis to the party’s own glorious roots. It’s an important story.

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Correction: This editorial and its headline have been revised to correct the first edition, which erroneously asserted that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow had censored Governor Noem’s remarks by cutting away from them to interject a comment. The governor had completed her remarks when Ms. Maddow interjected her comment.