Czolgosz

     It is now nearly a month since President McKinley died through trying to get his tongue round the name of Czolgosz, the miscreant who fired the two bullets into him. Well, in a few days more Mr. Czolgosz will be asked to take the chair (they call it the lethal chair) at a meeting of Government officials who are anxious to sound his feeling upon some ‘current’ question. Czolgosz is pronounced ‘Sholgosh.’ A grateful public need not present me with a wooden marble clock for this important bit of information, even though it will save them the cost of sundry visits to the dentist—for every attempt to pronounce that heathenish looking name as it is written plays red havoc with your front teeth. I do not believe in alleviating the sufferings of the human race for the sake of mere paltry gain. Memo: A motor-car would not be inopportune, all the same. But I hope some friend will tell me when the presentation is to be made, as I want at least a solid fortnight to prepare my extempore speech and to rehearse being taken by surprise. The New Zealand public sorely need a professor of names, to tell us how anarchists and other foreign notabilities call themselves in their own countries, just as they need to be told that the old English name Wemyss is pronounced Weems, St. Leger is pronounced Sillinger, Colquhoun is pronounced Cohoon, Cirencester works out into Sissister, Beauchamp is pronounced Beecham, Cholmondely is Chumly, Marylebone is called Marrabun, and Marjoribanks is Marshbanks.

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     But to return to our ‘muttons.’ The people of the ‘Stites’ want to have the ‘electrocuted’ corpse of Czolgosz weighted with a cookery-class scone and dumped into a tolerably deep part of the Atlantic. If Mr. Seddon allows this to take place he will have to look for another job after the next elections. The scone could not keep the corpse at the bottom of the deep and dark blue ocean more than a few hours—even a dead anarchist knows what a cookery-class scone is, and we should have the disintegrated Czolgolz [sic] leaving pieces of himself on the St. Clair and Sumner beaches. If this does not come to pass, it is because the American fish have not the same objections to anarchists that the American people have, and the end of it all would be that Czolgosz, refused a grave in ‘Murkan’ soil, would find a resting place in ‘Murkan’ stomachs. So much for his body. With regard to his soul: well, somebody has stated that, owing to the number of Americans in a certain place where people are in a perennial condition of spontaneous combustion, he will have to be accommodated in heaven or in purgatory, or else be presented with a box of matches and told to start a ‘show’ of his own.