Anarchy’s Victim

     For the third time in the history of the United States Government its President has been stricken down by the hand of an assassin. In 1865, when the fierce agonies of a civil war heated fraternal blood to deadly hatred, the martyr Lincoln fell, shot to death by a fanatic who had the excuse at least of believing that he was performing the duty of a patriot, misguided man that he was.
     In 1881 a mad egotist, made drunk by the bitter antagonisms of party divisions, fired the shot that sent the lamented Garfield to his grave. The act was despicable. In this case, as in the killing of Lincoln, however, the act was that of a single individual—that is, it did not represent any sentiment of approval even of a small portion of the people. A mad brain conceived the crime and an irresponsible hand executed it. But the third crime in the calendar of our assassinated Presidents, the cruel, dastardly and sneaking murder of McKinley—the beloved, the kindly and the peace-loving McKinley—what is the awful portent it brings?
     For the first time we find that loathsome, venomous creature Anarchy—the enemy of all law, the snarling, hating foe of order, morality and cleanliness—raising its dirt-crusted hand to strike at the existence of a government which is of the people, for the people, and by the people. The loathsome character of Anarchy could not be more clearly brought out than by its selection for a victim of a man whose whole life and whose death breathed the God-given sentiment which that other victim of passion and ignorance, Lincoln, bequeathed to a Christian world, “Charity for all.”
     The man whose purity of life, whose kindliness to all men, made all civilization kneel when his dust was consigned to dust, was the antipode of all that Anarchy represents. The unclean, crawling creature sunk its venomous sting into the breast of the man of virtue and personal purity, and the poison did its work.
     McKinley is dead, but the Government still lives. McKinley is dead and Anarchy survives him. If the life which was given is the price which we have paid for permitting Anarchy to exist till now, are we to pay countless other lives of inestimable value before this vile exotic is eradicated from the soil of our free Republic? God grant that it be not so. But may it be that the price already paid is for our complete deliverance from the pestilence that now walketh by night.