The Deed of an Anarchist

The man who shot President McKinley seems to have been undoubtedly an anarchist,—at least, he had come under the influence of anarchists in such a way that his evil deed was suggested to him by their teachings. It is not strange that the average citizen should be perplexed and unsatisfied in his attempt to find some rational explanation for the strange existence of the black creed of anarchism in a free country like ours. The man who assassinated a President twenty years ago was a disappointed office-seeker whose morbid nature had become wholly poisoned with a feeling of personal hatred against James A. Garfield. The man who killed Abraham Lincoln fancied himself an avenger, representing a people and a cause after the culmination of one of the most bloody wars in all history. But the murder of President McKinley seems to have been an attack upon the Presidential office, so far as its motives were concerned, rather than an attack upon the particular incumbent of that office. It is not that the anarchists favor one kind of government rather than another, but that they are the enemies of all gov- [387][388] ernment. The anarchist who killed President McKinley belongs to a Polish family, although he claims to have been born in this country. He had become an anarchist through the teachings of a set of men and women nearly all of whom are European immigrants. Most of these anarchists are simply criminals, whose perverted instincts lead them to prefer confusion and chaos to social order and beneficent institutions. Their pretense of concern for workingmen is as impudent as it is false; for the political institutions of this country afford the greatest hope and reliance of all honest and intelligent sons of labor. The anarchists everywhere are enemies of society and of progress. They are deadly foes of real liberty.