ublic rights
and representative government who has ever risen to public office.
President McKinley filled that political office for which the entire
people vote, and no President--not even Lincoln himself--was ever more
earnestly anxious to represent the well thought-out wishes of the
people; his one anxiety in every crisis was to keep in closest touch
with the people--to find out what they thought and to endeavor to give
expression to their thought, after having endeavored to guide that
thought aright. He had just been re-elected to the Presidency because
the majority of our citizens, the majority of our farmers and
wage-workers, believed that he had faithfully upheld their interests for
four years. They felt themselves in close and intimate touch with him.
They felt that he represented so well and so honorably all their ideals
and aspirations that they wished him to continue for another four years
to represent them.

And this was the man at whom the assassin struck! That there might be
nothing lacking to complete the Judas-like infamy of his act, he took
advantage of an occasion when the President was meeting the people
generally; and advancing as if to take the hand out-stretched to him
in kindly and brotherly fellowship, he turned the noble and generous
confidence of the victim into an opportunity to strike the fatal blow.
There is no baser deed in all the annals of crime.

The shock, the grief of the country, are bitter in the minds of all
who saw the dark days, while the President yet hovered between life and
death. At last the light was stilled in the kindly eyes and the breath
went from the lips that even in mortal agony uttered no words save of
forgiveness to his murderer, of love for his friends, and of unfaltering
trust in the will of the Most High. Such a death, crowning the glory of
such a life, leaves us with infinite sorrow, but with such pride in what
he had accomplished and in his own personal character, that we feel the
blow not as struck at him, but as struck at the Nation. We mourn a good
and great President who is dead; but while we mourn we are lifted up by
the splendid achievements of his life and the grand heroism with which
he met his death.

When we turn from the man to the Nation, the harm done is so great as
to excite our gravest apprehensions and to demand our wisest and most
resolute action. This criminal was a professed anarchist, inflamed by
the teachings of professed anarchists, and p