Notes and Remarks [excerpt]

     Hanging anarchists and other outlaws in effigy—there has been any amount of it—is a practice that no sensible man, however patriotic he may be, will encourage. It is akin to burning at the stake; and there has been a great deal of that, too, of late. Hanging in effigy and the observance of lynch law are apt to go together. Now that the excitement over President McKinley’s assassination has abated, everyone ought to recognize the folly of men like the Rev. John Bunyan Lemon and the Rev. Cornelius L. Twing. The foolishness, not to call it by a harsher name, of Brother Bunyan we have already pointed out. His confrère is quite as blameworthy, unless the newspapers misrepresented him. At the memorial service in his church, after denouncing Emma Goldman and all other anarchists, Mr. Twing took the American flag from where it stood by the pulpit, and, detaching the emblem of mourning from it, he laid the flag across the altar and in a loud voice cried out: “Cursed be the man who shoots down the leader of our men!” There was silence for a moment, as the report goes; then the congregation forgot the solemnity of the occasion and there was an outburst of applause. We do not object to applauding in Protestant churches, but Mr. Twing should have remembered the solemnity of the occasion, and his congregation should not have forgotten it.