Note and Comment [excerpt]

     President Roosevelt falls into the error of most of his predecessors in imagining that he has been installed as high priest of the nation as well as its chief executive. His first official act was to appoint a day of national prayer, Sept. 19, and to advise the people to go to church on that day.

     The coincidence noted in the case of Lincoln’s assassins, that all concerned in the conspiracy were Catholics by education, holds good with respect to others who have taken or attempted the lives of rulers. The European variety of assassins, to which Czolgosz belongs, are of Catholic antecedents.

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     The pastor of President McKinley’s church in Washington, the Rev. Dr. H. R. Naylor, says that the affair at Buffalo almost converts him to an advocate of lynching. The Rev. Dr. Talmage declares that the officer who arrested Czolgosz should have slain him on the spot. There is plenty of anarchy and lawlessness in the pulpit when passion is aroused.

     Carrie Nation had an engagement to exhibit herself at a fair in Massachusetts, for which she was to receive $200; but when the managers of the fair heard that in a public address on Coney Island she had said she did not care if President McKinley died they told her she need not come. It is unlawful to say that McKinley’s death might, under God, be for the best, unless the person so saying explains that had he lived the hanging of Czolgosz, so devoutly to be wished, could not be consummated.