at he came from a
foreign country, and therefore was an ally to foreign labour. It was an
outrage on religion, on the Church, on common sense. As a nation,
however, we were safe. There was not another place in the world where
its chief ruler could travel five thousand miles, for three weeks,
unprotected by bayonets, as Mr. Cleveland did on his Presidential tour
of the country. It was a universal huzzah, from Mugwumps, Republicans,
and Democrats. We were a safe nation because we destroyed Communism.

The execution of the anarchists in Chicago, in November, 1887, was a
disgusting exhibition of the gallows. It took ten minutes for some of
them to die by strangulation. Nothing could have been more barbaric than
this method of hanging human life. I was among the first to publicly
propose execution by electricity. Mr. Edison, upon a request from the
government, could easily have arranged it. I was particularly horrified
with the blunders of the hangman's methods, because I was in a friend's
office in New York, when the telegraph wires gave instantaneous reports
of the executions in Chicago. I made notes of these flashes of death.

"Now the prisoners leave the cells," said the wire; "now they are
ascending the stairs"; "now the rope is being adjusted"; "now the cap is
being drawn"; "now they fall." Had I been there I would probably have
felt thankful that I was brought up to obey the law, and could
understand the majesty of restraining powers. One of these men was
naturally kind and generous, I was told, but was embittered by one who
had robbed him of everything; and so he became an enemy to all mankind.
One of them got his antipathy for all prosperous people from the fact
that his father was a profligate nobleman, and his mother a poor,
maltreated, peasant woman. The impulse of anarchy starts high up in
society. Chief among our blessings was an American instinct for
lawfulness in the midst of lawless temptation. We were often reminded of
this supreme advantage as we saw passing into shadowland the robed
figure of an upright man.

The death of Judge Greenwood of Brooklyn, in November, 1887, was a
reminder of such matters. He had seen the nineteenth century in its
youth and in its old age. From first to last, he had been on the right
side of all its questions of public welfare. We could, appropriately,
hang his portrait in our court rooms and city halls. The artist's brush
would be tame indeed compared with the living, glowin