The President’s Assassin

     On the sixth of September Leon F. Czolgosz while in line to greet President McKinley at the Music Hall of the Buffalo Pan American Exposition, with revolver concealed in his right hand by a handkerchief, fired two shots into the Chief Magistrate’s body. The sad sequel has already been mournfully told by a sorrowing people.
     The President died of his wounds on the morning of the eighth day after the firing of the fatal shot. Promptly disarmed and borne to the ground by those about him, the captive assassin showed neither emotion of fear nor remorse and went to prison confessing and justifying the foul [721][722] deed as one of fancied duty. Then with paranoiac egotism and an assumed or real stoical indifference to consequences, he exclaimed: “Tell them all that Czolgosz lived without hope and perished without fear. There is no hereafter and death ends all” repeating often “I killed the President and as an anarchist did my duty.” In jail he ate and slept well and was tranquil, asked for a cigar and accepted the security of his captivity as one who had done a noble deed, in this darkest of crimes. There is a painful suggestion of paranoia here, that bids the psychologist seek further than the imbecile mind of the convicted assassin for the raisin [sic] d’etre of this foul crime against constitutional liberty.
     That sound public policy which makes it unwise to let these poranoiac [sic] villains escape, should seek further than the fool who fired the fatal shot and gather into the toils of Justice the Nihilistic villains who have stood behind and urged the paranoiac actor on to the dastardly deed.