In Memoriam

President William McKinley,
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States of America.

Born in Niles, Ohio, January 29, 1843.
Died in Buffalo, N. Y., September 14, 1901.

VICTIM of the treacherous blow of an assassin, William McKinley, twenty-fifth President and Commander-in-Chief of the military and naval forces of the United States of America has passed away in the fulness [sic] of his powers, in the heyday of his achievements and in the plenitude of a people’s love and affection. Assuming the chief magistracy at a critical period in the Nation’s history, he guided the affairs of state so wisely and so skillfully that the republic emerged from a great international conflict, not only victorious in a war undertaken from the purest of motives, but with a newly confirmed national unity and a fixed position among the great powers of the world. Broad in mind, discriminating in observation and sympathetic in character, his temperament ever maintained an appreciative attitude toward the healing art both in peace and in war. He held his own physician by the closest ties of friendship and regarded the entire profession with generous and kindly interest. A soldier while hardly more than a boy, he knew, as do few, the difficulties, hardships and discouragements of the military surgeon. His generous qualities were never suppressed nor superseded. With intellectual attainments of the highest order, he possessed a masterly grasp of practical affairs, constituting a combination as rare as it was admirable. In his untimely decease the Country has suffered not only an irreparable national bereavement, but a distinct loss in personal character, although it has gained a splendid memory which will ever gild with the glow of kindness, intelligence, energy and strength the period of national existence moulded by his hand.