The Coin of the Yellow

FOR the first time in many a year the people of the United States have fronted a great public calamity without having their sorrow disturbed by the clamor of the Examiner seeking to make money out of the universal grief. Before the grave of McKinley the yellow journal stands abashed. In face of the wrath of the public denouncing its vile cartoons and vicious editorials it slinks away and does not venture to come forth passing the hat for nickels and announcing an “Examiner monument fund,” with a long array of “commissioners” selected to take charge of the “memorial which W. R. Hearst is to raise as a tribute of the American people to the illustrious dead.”
     There is no little gratification in having for this once at least escaped from the affliction of the intrusion of yellow journalism, with its self-advertising and self-enriching schemes into public sorrow. Something more, however, is needed than the abstention of the yellow anarchists from their usual faking in matters of this kind. Popular sentiment demands that for no monument or other memorial to be erected to President McKinley should there be accepted any aid from the yellow journals, or any subscription from them. Their coin should be refused as emphatically as their hypocritical grief is condemned. Having derided, abused, vilified, maligned and belied McKinley during his whole term of office as President of the United States, they should not now be permitted to insult his memory by contributing to erect a monument over his grave.
     There has never before been a President whose death has been followed by so many earnest demands for a monument to commemorate his services and the popular love of his fellow citizens. There is hardly a State in the Union that has not some memorial project under consideration. All classes of honest citizens have united in these movements. In the Northern States the men who were McKinley’s comrades in the war that saved the Union have been conspicuous in promoting them, and in the South men who wore the gray and who were his foes on the field of battle have taken the lead. No voice has been more earnest, and hardly any more eloquent, in urging contributions to a McKinley monument than has been that of General Gordon, commander of the Confederate Veterans. It is right that it should be so. The loyal people of the North will not grudge nor misconstrue the subscriptions which McKinley’s former foemen of the Civil War may offer now to commemorate his fame. All such contributions will be but another evidence that the old divisions and animosities among the people have passed away, and that the restored Union is a union of hearts and of hands as well as of States.
     So, too, with full graciousness and appropriateness, thousands of Democrats who voted against McKinley and opposed his policies in war and in peace may rightly contribute to his memorial. Political differences there must always be among us so long as we remain a free and an intelligent people, and political controversy dishonors neither one side nor the other. When he entered upon his high office McKinley ceased to be a Republican partisan and became the representative of the whole people. Over his grave there can be no partisan controversies or even differences. With respect to his memory all true Americans are now nothing else than Americans, and therefore all can with sincerity, with honesty and with patriotism unite in raising a monument to him who so nobly served the State and fell a martyr to anarchist hatred of its government.
     From this universal right to take part in every effort made to do honor to the dead there is excluded but one thing that exists in America, and that is the yellow press of W. R. Hearst. The public can neither forget nor forgive the wrongs done to the dead by the three lying papers in which Hearst day after day for years assailed the President and inculcated in the minds of the vicious the hatred that led to the crime of Czolgosz. Hearst’s coin must not be accepted. There is blood on it.