The Shooting of the President

     President McKinley was shot twice and severely wounded on the Pan-American grounds in Buffalo, last Friday afternoon shortly after four o’clock. One of the wounds was slight and the other, while serious, we are now told will not prove fatal, and the President will recover. The bullets were fired by an Anarchist who came with the crowd of others to shake hands with the President at the public reception in the Temple of Music. The details of the shooting are given on the third page of the TIMES today.
     Party feeling disappears in universal indignation at the crime. The pistol shots fired into the body of our National Chief Executive were directed at our American life and our American institutions by the beastly instinct of murder which unaccountably remains in some human beings. Such frightful deeds threaten to compel changes in our laws and new restrictions upon the intercourse of great officials with the people. Already a sentiment is forming to abolish public handshaking and to restrain the free and unguarded intercourse of a President with the people. Either this must be done or strict laws against Anarchists and men of their caliber must be enacted and enforced to the letter. We are not the simple community we used to be, and it is evident some changes must be made.
     The news came like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. None but an Anarchist could have done the deed. President McKinley has probably not an enemy in the world. Rivals he has, and of opponents and critics his share—but personal enemies, no. He is a singularly lovable man. We who oppose many of the policies with which his name is identified, feel that President McKinley has made serious mistakes; but no man questions his personal rectitude, or doubts that he tries to do right. Perhaps to no public man in our history as a nation have good intentions been so generally, and so cheerfully, attributed.
     No murder or attempt at murder can be excused. Such deeds can, however, usually be explained by circumstances which arouse passions common to mankind. But this particular creature of blood had no motive which ordinary human beings could ever share. There is no public excitement. The period is one of unexampled well being and contentment. The scene, a panorama celebrating progress in the useful and peaceful arts, should have soothed and disarmed frenzy itself. If the perpetrator is an Anarchist, then we now know that the Anarchists are willing slaves of mere envy and bloodthirstiness; who deserve no pity, and can be the subjects of no argument. They must be dealt with severely. It is shocking to know that the First Citizen of a free country is no more exempt from the bullets of the seditious than are the monarchs of lands where the commonalty has no protection against the will of despotism.
     At this writing the reports convince us the President will recover. A nation’s hope goes out that he may be spared to fill out the term for which he was elected; for a week a nation has prayed, “God save the President of the United States! God save our land from Anarchy!”