Ernest Crosby’s “Feels” [excerpt]

     Even Tucker’s logic is faulty at times. He thinks that it was Czolgosz’s feelings that prompted him to shoot President McKinley. This was clearly not the case. Every feeling in him must have protested against the killing of a smiling elderly gentleman who was receiving him like a father.

     In the whole range of hypnotic phenomena I know nothing to compare with the effect on Crosby of McKinley’s beaming smile. Ever since that fatal day when the old hypocrite stood smiling at and shaking hands with everybody that came along, in artful and abundant dispensation of that universal love common to politician and Tolstoïan, Crosby has forgotten the island-stealer and the Filipino-killer in his overwhelming remembrance of that perpetual and undiscriminating smile. Not so Czolgosz. His feelings for the victims were deeper and more lasting than his feelings for the oppressor, and, had he seen one tear of honest repentance in the tyrant’s eye rather than a smile of self-satisfaction on his lips, he would have been much more likely to relent in his stern, though foolish, purpose. In carrying out that purpose he departed from his logical ideal to practise an expediency at variance with his ideal. In that respect his act was analogous to the course of Crosby in “preaching logic and practising common sense,” and as such I cited it. I have not raised the question whether it was feeling or logic that prompted Crosby to vote for Bryan, nor did I raise a similar question with regard to Czolgosz.

     It was logic that wrecked the lad.

     Whether true or not, the sentence has a kindly ring,—a very different ring from that of Crosby’s former denunciation of Czolgosz as a “perverted wretch.” A case of feelings-plus-feelings, I suppose. And a precious lot of good they have done!