The President at Canton

     The McKinley mausoleum, the tribute and gift of this nation to the martyred president, William McKinley, was dedicated September 30. The mausoleum is built of Vermont granite, it stands upon Monument Hill, an eminence in West Lawn Cemetery, overlooking the city and commanding a view of the surrounding country. Its location is where the late president often suggested that a monument should be erected to the memory of the soldiers and sailors of Stark county. Leading to the entrance of the mausoleum is a long and broad flight of granite steps, halfway up which stands upon a lofty stone pedestal an imposing life statue of McKinley in bronze. The figure represents the late president in his characteristic pose of speaking, and was designed to illustrate his attitude while he was delivering his last speech at Buffalo, just before he fell by the assassin’s weapon.
     The mausoleum contains the bodies of President McKinley, Mrs. McKinley and their only children, Ida and Mary.
     A feature of the dedication was the presence of the president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, Vice-President Fairbanks, members of the president’s cabinet. United States senators, and governors of several states.
     President Roosevelt in his Canton speech said:
     “Men of means, and above all men of great wealth, can exist in safety under peaceful protection of the state, only in orderly societies, where liberty manifests itself through and under the law. It is these men who, more than any others, should, in the interests of their children and their children’s children, seek in every way to insist upon and to build up respect for the law.
     “It may not be true from the standpoint of some particular individual of this class, but in the long run it is preeminently true from the standpoint of the class as a whole, that it is a veritable calamity to achieve a temporary triumph by violation or evasion of the law, and we are the best friends of the man of property, we show ourselves the staunchest upholders of the rights of property, when we set our faces like flint against those offenders who do wrong in order to acquire great wealth or who use this wealth as a help to wrongdoing.
     “Wrongdoing is confined to no class. Good and evil are to be found among both rich and poor, and in drawing the line among our fellows we must draw it on conduct and not on worldly possessions.
     “If both the wage-worker and the capitalist are able to enter each into the other’s life, to meet him so as to get into genuine sympathy with him, most of the misunderstanding between them will disappear and its place will be taken by a judgment broader, juster, more kindly, and more generous; for each will find in the other the same essential human attributes that exist in himself.
     “It was President McKinley’s peculiar glory that in actual practice he realized this as it is given to but few men to realize it; that his broad and deep sympathies made him feel a genuine sense of oneness with all his fellow-Americans, whatever their station or work in life, so that to his soul they were all joined with him in a great brotherly democracy of the spirit.”