Note and Comment [excerpt]

     Mrs. Carrie Nation of Kansas has ceased to be an attraction at county fairs, and promises to abandon the lecture platform. Mrs. Nation denies the sentiments attributed to her about President McKinley.

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     A clergyman whose name is not disclosed was knocked down and beaten in Binghamton, N. Y., last week for indorsing [sic] a criticism of President McKinley’s attitude on the Prohibition question. As has been observed, the lawless violence of many persons since Mr. McKinley’s death shows there are more anarchists in the country than any one could have supposed.

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     On Sept. 24, at Buffalo, N. Y., Leon Czolgosz was convicted of the murder of President McKinley. On Sept. 26 Czolgosz was sentenced to die in the electric chair during the week beginning Oct. 28. Before receiving sentence he stated that no other person was concerned with him in his crime, or knew that he intended to commit it, and that the idea of shooting McKinley came to him only two days before he committed the act. Czolgosz appears stupid and ignorant. When asked if he were temperate in his habits, he said he did not know what “temperate” meant.

     Mrs. Gaetano Bresci, who lives in Cliffside, N. J., and is the widow of the man who killed King Humbert of Italy, still refuses to obey the order of Mayor Newman and quit the town. She attended a meeting of the board of councilmen the other day, and having addressed the members in a twenty minutes’ speech, handed them the following before she closed: “May the curse of God rest on all that are interested in the plot to hound me from home, where I have tried to make my living, into the world that is turning against me.” This evidence of her orthodoxy should procure Mrs. Bresci a stay of proceedings.

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     The failure of the united prayers of Christendom to save President McKinley is explained by Mrs. Eddy as due to a lack of harmony among those who did the praying. “These conflicting states of the human mind, of trembling faith, hope, and fear,” she says, “evinced a lack of the absolute understanding of God’s omnipotence, and thus they prevented the power of absolute truth from reassuring the mind, and, through it, resuscitating the body of the patient.” There was a young lady in Stanford University who accounted for cyclones on the theory that they were caused by different groups of earnest Christians praying for a fair wind while going in opposite directions.