Notes and Remarks [excerpt]

     The announcement of President McKinley’s death was a fresh shock to the country and the world. There were good reasons for making the official reports of his condition as reassuring as possible; and it was only natural to hope against hope that a life on which, humanly speaking, so much depended might be preserved. It was prudent to prepare the public mind as far as possible for what must have seemed inevitable to many whose office entitled them to know all the facts of the case. The physician’s bulletins might have been truthfully hopeful or gloomy: they were properly reassuring. The nation hoped: now it mourns and the whole world sympathizes.
     The assassination of another President of the United States, sad and sorrowful though it is, will not have been an unmixed evil if the eyes of our citizens are opened to see that the relation is of cause and effect between irreligion and anarchy, relaxed laws and increased criminality, a debased press and a depraved generation. It is in the nature of things that under a government like ours liberty should be more abused; but the deplorable event in Buffalo emphasizes the necessity of prompt action against anarchists, and of conserving more and more the forces which make for peace and righteousness.