A White Minister Believes President M’Kinley’s Assassination Ordered of God

     Rev. C. C. Cline, of the Johnson Ave. Christian church, Nashville, seeks to be sensational in his charge that President McKinley was a commercial president, harboring corporations to the detriment of the masses. We live in times of great commercial prosperity and corporations have grown powerful through the force and development of our country’s resources. Our greatness and strength have come to the nation through its increasing wealth and industries. The inventive genius of mind has contributed to the spread of commercial enterprise, the result of which has led brainy men to combine and form corporations, thus affording employment to millions of the laboring masses. Corporations in America have contributed in the main to the growth and prosperity of all our home institutions, and though it is claimed that the masses have suffered largely from the hard oppression of corporations, yet it must be admitted that none more than the laboring classes have derived greater advantages to themselves and their families. Our country has felt the touch of their powerful influence and villages, towns and cities have been built as if in a day. Population has grown with the spread and growth of the country and the people everywhere have come to acknowledge the effect and influence of these institutions upon the destiny of the people. President McKinley as a philosopher and statesman recognized the wonderful possibilities of American corporations as directed under wise and generous management and as such he withheld not his influence to whatever might serve as a blessing and a help to the masses. He could ill afford to cast the force of his influence against those tendencies which warrant an actual good to the masses. The masses in their dealings and relations have to depend upon corporations for a livelihood and support, hence it is manifest that they are beneficial to those concerned. As the chief magistrate of the republic, President McKinley was bound to regard and treat corporations in the light of that wisdom dictated by the highest reason. He could not have consistently warred upon them; he could not have denied them those advantages offered under the government. It was his duty then to foster every influence tending to the best interest of the people as a whole. Rev. Cline, then, is in serious error when he argues that the assassination of the president was in accordance with the design and will of God. He is guilty of a wicked and woful [sic] blunder, to reason in justification of the dastardly and red-handed deed of the murderer. The anarchist deserves no show of sympathy or protection under our government since he means the subversion of all lawful authority and the destruction of human governments. He is opposed to all government, both human and divine, and his crime admits of no excuse or palliation. It cannot appear that divine agency had any part in a death so unprovoked as that of President McKinley, and Rev. Cline is himself none less than an anarchist when he holds that the assassination of the president was a providential design. Our government has been all along too tolerant of traitors and mobs, too lenient toward those who would fling defiance in the teeth of the nation, and it is high time that stringent action be taken to quell violence, suppress mobs and dismiss from our land the last miscreant that would directly or indirectly lift a disloyal hand against the republic.