. These times and places are sufficiently wide
apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that
Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived
there so long ago.

Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic
was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob surrounded our hotel,
shouting, howling, singing the "Marseillaise," and pelting our windows
with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the mob
demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly--to be drubbed,
and then driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel remained up
until far into the night, and experienced the several kinds of terror
which one reads about in books which tell of nigh attacks by Italians
and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd; the arrival,
with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal to rearrange
plans--followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and harder to bear
than even the active siege and the noise. The landlord and the two
village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob was
persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in peace. Today four of
the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public
sort--and are become local heroes, by consequence.

That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian
village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated and repeated--just
as France is doing in these later months.

In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in
a humble way our Cesario--I hope I have spelled this name wrong. Fifty
years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been
passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of
periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.

In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In that day, for a
man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery
was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against
the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right
mind. For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years
ago, was to proclaim himself a madman--he could not be in his right
mind.

Now the original first blasphemer against any institution profoundly
venerated by a community is quite sure to be in earnest; his followers
and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself is
sincere--