The President Passes Away

     For the third time in the history of their Republic the American people have seen their Chief Magistrate, chosen by their own suffrages, struck down by the hand of an assassin.
     Learning no lessons from the past, nearly eighty millions of freemen have taken no precautions to guard against such an atrocity, and to-day they sit dumb, as it were, with despair and overwhelmed with grief. To-morrow when they shall awake to the tremendous ominousness of the situation, they will arise in their might and demand a remedy, complete, far-reaching and potential.
     But to-day let them weep, for their grief is the due of him who has been so cruelly and so causelessly sent to his death. For the Republic, the taking away of President McKinley is a great loss, but to us of the Southern States of the Union it is even more serious.
     William McKinley it was who released the South from the ban of a hostile sectionalism. He was the President of the Republic, the South’s President as much as the North’s, and when he sent the young men of the South to fight for their country side by side with the young men of the North, and when they found they were fighting under the command of the tried and true soldiers who in a former war had led the Confederate hosts, it was then that the Southern people felt that the war of sectionalism had come to an end through the patriotic efforts of William McKinley.
     Let us of the South mourn for him to-day, for we owe him love and reverence. Let our people express their sorrow by draping their city in the garb of mourning, and for one day abstain from their ordinary diversions in respect for the memory of one who was their friend, and who, nevertheless, held the highest official station in the gift of the great American people, a station which placed a simple citizen of this Republic among earth’s proudest monarchs.
     To-day, cut down by the hand of the Mighty Reaper, his head lies as low as the lowliest, and it is because the American people have lost one whom they loved and admired, and were proud to hail as their President, that they mourn.