“That his life should be sacrificed at such a time, just when there was an abundant peace, when all the Americans were rejoicing together, is one of the inscrutable mysteries of Providence.”

“There was no benefit conceivable to be gained by his cruel taking off; nothing but evil—evil, deep-dyed evil—in the act. . . . Only the counsels of insensate anarchy, the whisperings of a demon viler than Satan, could have inspired such a deed. . . .”

“Let us compare crime with crime, and we shall see in this the worst of all we have ever known, the worst, the most outrageous ever committed in this land.”

“Never before was a death so causeless, a chief so beloved so pitilessly laid low, and never was humanity startled from universal peace with a grief so sad.”

“The awful feature of this calamity is undisguised in the fact that it is a stroke against the enterprise of government, which is the noblest enterprise undertaken by man. It was a dagger thrust at the heart of civilization.”

“If we wish to prevent a renewal of the calamity which we mourn to-day it is only through stronger faith in God. That is the bulwark of society and of this nation.”

Poor soul! He’s gone to heavenly bliss,
Slain by a fiendish anarchist.

“This outrage is the legitimate outcome of the agitation which certain classes of demagogues have been carrying on for years. The generation and aggravation of class hatred, the wholesale denunciation of rich men, the persistent attacks and aggravation of class hatred, the wholesale charges of robbery and oppression continuously brought against large employers of labor, could not but end in violence, sooner or later.”

“How frail beyond measurement are the plans of nations! The greatest of free nations had chosen William McKinley to be its leader; and the meanest, the most obscure, of its teeming millions—a wretched, blind failure in life, a human derelict drifting miserably in a land abounding in freedom and prosperity—had power enough to turn a national triumph into ashes—not in hatred, not in the service of some great cause, but even as a wanton urchin might set fire to some priceless library.”

“The murder was planned with all the diabolical ingenuity of which anarchy and nihilism are capable, and the assassin carried out his plan as perfectly as did his prototype, Judas.”

            By the assassin’s bullet’s sting
The nation’s heart in sorrow was made to ring.

“We have prayed for the President’s life, but it did not please God to grant our petition.”

“Yesterday I met a prominent banker of this city, who said to me: ‘It is awful, awful!’ and then tears came to his eyes and his utterance was choked. Presently he added in slow and serious tone, ‘but I have been thinking that there are times when nothing but such a calamity as this will awaken us. Somebody we love and honor has to be sacrificed.’”

“For the first time in the one hundred and twenty-five years of our national life an assault has come from that especial bodyguard of Beelzebub the lawless one, who abhor law because they hate mankind and detest God.”

“Truly the treacherous hand struck through our leader at us, at just and stable government, at law and order and peace. But collective citizenship, government, law and order are abstract things, safe in the keeping of an intelligent and patriotic people. The blow aimed at these by the powers of lawlessness and lust was futile folly; and, though they never were endangered they are safer yet to-day in the affections of an aroused and outraged nation.”

“The design and the deed of the cowardly fiend who, Judas-like, struck down his unsuspecting victim under the pretense of greeting him and paying him dutiful respect, this design and this deed were altogether evil, and nothing can be said in mitigation of its heinousness.”

Dead! the simple, kindly man:
Dead! the plain republican;
Dead! the great American;
In flower of manhood and renown
By cruel treason stricken down.

“Some of the wild and passionate utterances, natural enough, indeed, when men are under strong feelings of indignation and horror at an attempted assassination of the President, sound like words from a darker age.”

“President McKinley died for the American people and the American idea.”

“No occurrence in the history of our government has ever brought as much pain to the hearts of the American people as the foul murder of President McKinley.”

“Peace, Prosperity and Plenty is not an alliteration which breeds disciples of anarchy. Our country, laden with the fruits of the fertile soil, listening to the noisy hum of the huge manufactories, all betokening an era of commercial solidity, may well be astounded at this dastard’s deed.”

“There was one sentiment on every lip—‘Terrible, too terrible to be believed.’”

“My God, it can’t be possible!”

“No act in the whole sinister gamut of crime could have excited deeper horror than the one committed yesterday by an irresponsible madman at the Temple of Music at the Exposition.”

“I cannot imagine how any human being could have harbored sufficient malice against the great-hearted man whom the people of this country have twice called to preside over their government.”

“It is the most horrible crime imaginable.”

“I warned him against this very thing time and time again, and asked him for the country’s sake, if not for his own, to have a body guard [sic] when he went out. He refused. He laughed at me. He insisted that the American people were too intelligent and too loyal to their country to do any harm to their chief executive. He had supreme confidence in the people.”

“. . . [McKinley] has had the constant fierce and unjust criticism of the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘independent’ press, and those attacks are responsible for the assassin’s bullets.”

“If men will ignore fundamental principles of morality and good order, such things must be the consequence.”

“No man was weak who wept; it was the time for weeping.”

“I do not believe any anarchist will applaud this deed.”

“The bullets that hit the president hit every good heart at home and abroad.”

“It is appalling. Words cannot express the horror, the pity, the wickedness of it. It is an overwhelming sorrow. May God preserve this precious life.”

“Great gloom prevails in Buffalo.”

“Our hearts are borne with sorrow and our souls filled with indignation and shame to think that in this great and free country a miscreant could be found so cowardly, base, and craven as to attempt so foul a deed. No words of reprobation can be too severe or unmeasured to brand such an infamy. . . .”

“The President’s death at this time would be a calamity from which countless prayers will today arise that the country may be saved.”

“There are statutes which make punishable personal violence to minor officials, such as internal revenue agents, but it is passing strange that, notwithstanding the fact two Presidents have been assassinated and attempts have been made upon the lives of two more, no law has ever been passed to place an attempt on the life of the President on the same plane as high treason.”

“The commercial conditions of the country are so good that even such a regrettable affair as the attack upon the life of the President has not been able to disturb business seriously.”

“I have not the slightest doubt that the teachings of the yellow journals that all political parties are corrupt and that all political conditions are entirely rotten so preyed upon the young man’s brain that he was prompted to commit the deed.”

“The lawlessness shown in the horrible lynchings, so frequently reported from the south, is of another type from that of the Buffalo criminal. But it is equally a defiance of law and order, in some cases equally a crime against humanity, and nearly always more cruel and barbarous as well as more cowardly than the assault on the president.”

“The merely personal details of the attempted assassination—the President’s moment of enjoyment of the popular greeting, the treachery of the act performed at the instant when he was about to shake his assassin by the hand, the pathetic meeting between the wounded chief of the State and his afflicted wife—bring out those touches of our common nature which make the whole world akin.”

“Czolgosz may have been inspired by me, but if he was he took the wrong way of showing it.”

“What good would it do to kill McKinley unless Roosevelt was killed, too? Both must be put out of the way to do any good.”

O Freedom, though they strike thee down, thy head
     Shall still be raised, and still thy voice shall guide!
And thou shalt even grasp and crush the red,
     Smeared hand whose ugly stain is on thy side!

“The President’s recovery is assured.”

“It could have been the deed only of a lunatic.”

“It was horrible, horrible.”

“I see no reason to expect any important complications, and I fully believe that Mr. McKinley will entirely recover. It is true that possible disturbances might still arise, but I look for their occurrence after this time as improbable in the extreme.”

“What has disturbed me is to find a reason for even anarchists to attack a man like President McKinley. Here is the one country where they are allowed perfect freedom of speech. Here, where the ruler is a man descended from farmer stock and self-made. Here is a man who has no fortune nor no means other than that which he may manage to save out of his salary as President. Probably many a workingman in the United States to-day has as large an amount of real estate as Mr. McKinley. In addition, he is kindly disposed and a Christian gentleman and in every great emergency in which he could act he has been a friend of the common people. Why should he be shot, then, even by anarchists?”

“The blow fell like a devastating bolt of lightning leaping from a cloudless sky. Seventy millions of people were smitten dumb with amazement that such a thing could be possible . . . .”

“Every true American felt that a brother had been struck down.”

“It’s the very best day’s work I ever did. If I had not grabbed that crazy loon he would have shot again. I got a strangle-hold on his neck that I learned down South. Just think, old Father Abe freed me, and now I saved his successor from death provided that bullet that he got into the President don’t kill him.”

“At first impulse it is natural to wish that the officials had allowed the maddened crowd to stamp the life out of the wretch as they would that of a venomous serpent. The deed was so wanton, so cruel, so treacherous.”

“If the liberty and equality and fraternity which we profess, not because we are republicans or democrats, but because we are disciples and brothers of the Christ, were a reality in our national life, such crimes as this would not be committed.”

“Is it not time to call a halt in this custom of requiring the chief magistrate of the United States to hold public receptions, thus becoming an easy mark, exposing him to malignant attacks of the assassin, who represents the scum and dumpings of the whole world?”

“No ruler could have seemed safer against the feathered shaft or the leaden shot of malice.”

“. . . we have seen, in papers which this week are full of his praise and of denunciations of the assassin, day after day, pictures which represent him as an insignificant, monkey-like dwarf, submissively led by an obese, dollar-marked figure representing the trusts or Senator Hanna. We have all seen those pictures and have read the editorials that match them. But they are all of the same criminal character as the speeches of Emma Goldman. To them we must look for the accursed inspiration that struck down the President.”

“McKinley should have been shot. He brought about the Filipino war for personal aggrandizement and for the benefit of syndicates and trusts, and could not expect anything else. I am not surprised at the news.”

“The ruler, not the individual, was shot at, and vigilance alone, not reason, can avail against minds which learn nothing by seeing the succession of rulers keep even pace with the file of assassins.”

“It is one of the occasions when lynch law becomes right, when the aroused public vengeance should have full sway, unfettered by legal impediments, and any proclaimed Anarchist have no further grace than the time to take him to the nearest tree.”

“It is always difficult to understand what an assassin expects to accomplish by murdering the head of a nation, but in the case of the murder of an elected president of a happy and prosperous country, the asylum for the oppressed of every land—a president whose life had almost precluded the possibility of his having enemies, personal or political—reason is absolutely lacking.”

“The author of such an act can only excite feelings of execration, and one sympathises involuntarily with the American crowd which did its best to lynch him in defiance of the law.”

“Had the mob seized the prisoner [assassin], and, carrying him to the nearby Court of the Fountains, ripped up the park benches for kindling wood, and burnt him alive, the action would have been comprehensible, but it would have covered the American people with an indelible disgrace. It would have been a blow to civilization, felt throughout the world.”

“There is no political or industrial or economic tension or excitement to which we can attribute the act.”

“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.”

“These violent crimes are the curse of our days.”

“Surely there was no occasion, no reason for that dreadful deed, and whether the work of a sane man or a lunatic, there can be no justification for it.”

“The shooting of the President had no more to do with the patriotic arraignment of his imperialistic policy than it had to do with the phases of the moon.”

“When a Nihilist throws a bomb in Russia, or an Anarchist thrusts a dagger in France, the world is moved to intimidation, but is not surprised. The conditions which obtain in those countries are peculiar, and discontented and desperate men are expected to commit desperate deeds at times. But when an Anarchist aims at the life of the President of the United States the world is shocked and startled.”

“Was such a shock and outrage upon the public mind and sentiment that the hanging of the would-be assassin could not satisfy the demand.”

“. . . now there is rejoicing everywhere that the recovery of the President is almost a certainty.”

“In its hour of sorrow, great and tender as that is, the republic has no moments of weakness or of doubt. The foremost in place among her distinguished sons lies stricken, but others stand ready to take up the burden of duty, and to see that, whatever may betide, the republic shall take no detriment.”

“We are not in the least surprised at this occurrence, because we anarchists maintain that the individual which stands highest in the social scale and impersonates the political and economical oppression under which the people are suffering so horribly is naturally most exposed to attacks by the oppressed and disinherited, who suffer under their emancipated thoughts and from an empty stomach.”

“. . . the loss of the President in the circumstances has filled Buffalo with a sense of special sorrow that can be estimated only by mingling with the people and listening to their laments.”

“To have such a man as President McKinley die would be awful. He is a great and good man, and as President of this great country was a great influence for peace in the world.”

“There is no excuse for a condition where the many eke out a bare subsistence and the few pile up millions and billions of wealth that they cannot use, and so long as this state of affairs exists, so long as the capitalistic profit system of production exists, it need not be surprising that half crazed cranks spring forth here and there and blindly attempt to wreak vengence [sic] on those whom they believe to be responsible for present unjust conditions.”

“The President in office is invested directly with the majesty and prerogative of the people. An attack upon him, beyond the legitimate lines of criticism of policies, is an attack upon the people.”

“Our country will be morally better because of the ordeal through which it is passing. Suffering rightly endured is ministry to mankind.”

“Our sympathies have been deeply stirred for Mrs. McKinley, even while we have been shuddering over the loss to the nation and to the peace of the world if her husband should die.”

“As Mr. McKinley remarked in his speech, ‘The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day in all Christendom,’ but he little thought that the attempt on his life would be the next great event to which this would literally and exactly apply.”

“The blow of the mad deed was aimed not only at the law, but at the liberty which the law shelters and maintains. This makes the crime larger and blacker than the crime against the man, or his office, or against the government, for it becomes a crime against humanity.”

“The whole world joins with a sorrowing nation over the sad result of this shocking crime.”

“The popularity of the president among all classes of the people made him a shining mark for the bullets of the assassin.”

“. . . now again, just twenty years after the slaying of Garfield the nation is shocked, crazed, from center to circumference by another spectacular attempt to assassinate its chief ruler, by another apparently half-demented victim of bad heredity and perhaps still worse training or environment.”

“The responsibility for Czolgosz’s crime is a dual one: anarchism supplied the doctrine; yellow journalism pointed out the victim.”

“Unquestionably the shooting of the President was the act of a lunatic.”

“. . . it seemed as if even the street urchins were mourning the loss of their President. . . .”

“The careless use of the English language, depriving its most solemn words of their true solemnity, makes it impossible to find language in which to express the commingled sentiments of horror and apprehension awakened in the hearts of the American people by the attempted assassination of President McKinley.”

“An offense of this kind is an offense against the whole people, and it would be most consonant with the dignity of the Nation that trial and punishment should be had before a Federal court, rather than be left to possible prejudice and conceivable stupidity of a local court in perhaps some outlying and not fully settled part of the land.”

“In the lawless spirit which this crime has excited, sober-minded men will see more to deplore and more for the republic to fear, even than in the crime itself.”

“It is difficult to comprehend how it is possible for crime of this character to be perpetrated, or even contemplated, in a country in which the institutions are free and the independence of the individual is paramount. The only explanation of such an act seems to be that there is disease prevalent in the land; that such an act can only be conceived by a disordered brain.”

“The deep sympathy for Mr. McKinley, and of indignation at the crime, which has been expressed throughout the British Islands, has been remarkable for its absolute spontaneousness and sincerity.”

“The truth, the melancholy truth, in that very little more can be done to prevent assassination than is done already. Society has developed a class whose homicidal malignity is mainly directed against Kings and Presidents, and those great personages must accept the danger . . . as one incidental to their profession.”

“All that the resources of the commonwealth, the love of a devoted people, the best surgical skill in America could do; all that the desires and prayers of good people throughout the world might effect; whatever force there was in the strength, courage and determination of the President himself, were matched against the achievement of one miserable man in one fatal moment.”

“‘The crime of the century’ is a phrase which has been somewhat hackneyed by ignoble use, but it would have been applicable here had it not been for the reassuring tidings that the wounds inflicted by the assassin Czolgosz are not now likely to prove fatal. But that happy anticipation, if it should be finally borne out by the event, in no way lessens the gravity of the occasion, or the importance of the reflections the crime suggests. That the Head of the State should thus be stricken down at a moment of public rejoicing, in a country which has so much reason to boast of the large measure of freedom enjoyed by each citizen as a personal heritage, and by the hand of an obscure individual, whether lunatic or anarchist or both, discovers a condition of things which must compel the guardians of society everywhere to seriously consider the situation.”

“If we consider that within a few years, comparatively speaking, three Presidents of Republics—one of France and two of the United States—have been murdered by anarchist, or maniacal hands, and that now the assassination of a third President of the American Republic has been attempted, we must conclude that it is as safe to be Czar of Russia, or Shah of Persia, as it is to be the head of a constitutionally-governed country—a land of liberty.”

“The attempted assassination of President McKinley is one of those calamitous events in the history of nations against which the wisdom of man is incompetent to provide. It is the deed of an insane criminal which no one could forefend or foresee.”

“It is hard at such a time as this to calmly and patiently await the unfolding of the purpose of God.”

“The lesson taught by the death of our beloved President will be remembered for all time by the American people.”

A million prayers arose on high—
     Yet hope went downward with the sun,
As faintly came that farewell sigh:
     “It is God’s way—
                   His will be done!”

“The sad events of the past week have chilled the spirit and pierced the heart of our nation.”

Why is the face of Heaven hid from us!
How can it countenance this hellish wrong
Nor strike with bolts of fire, and all consume

Who gave by word or thought to this fell deed!

“Some excuse may be found in hatred or partisan excitement for the assassinations of Lincoln and Garfield; but no such excuse exists for this foul deed.”

“. . . one of the blackest, foulest, and most cowardly crimes in the history of the American people.”

From East to West, our country through,
     A mighty sigh of anguish went;
As o’er the wires the message flew,
     Death claims our martyred president.

“The day of mourning proclaimed . . . by Mr. McKinley’s successor will be no merely formal testimony to the grief of the nation. It will express feelings intensified by the reaction from highly-wrought hopes to the cruel certainty that the assassin had been successful in his crime. The keenest sympathy for the bereaved and suffering wife of the late Chief of the State is a factor in the condition of the public mind the importance of which can hardly be overestimated.”

“The event is clearly a chastisement from God upon this nation.”

“Great as is the nation’s loss, mighty and deep as is the sorrow of this people, how small and poor do they seem when we think of Mrs. McKinley in this, her hour of incomprehensible grief.”

“. . . a calamity that carried the weight of its woe to every home in the land.”

Give us more laws! A time like this demands
Strong, binding laws to stay the assassin’s hands,
Laws which will drive the fell anarchist out,
Clear out of free America’s great land.

“The death of the President gives us the profoundest assurance of the unity of our people, and tells the alarmist and pessimistic onlookers of the nations that none is more stable than ours.”

“How far the agitation of thoughtless speakers and writers is directly responsible for the cowardly act may be debatable, but that the murder was the reward of the study of that inflammable and sophistical buncombe so prevalent and effective upon the illogical there is not the slightest doubt.”

Weep, oh, Columbia! Be thou bowed down
     With grief; and more, grief mixt with bitter shame!
Unequal laws have snatched stars from thy crown,
     And unchecked license stained thy glorious name:
For, born to brood the brotherhood of man,
     Thou’st nourished in thy bosom class and caste;
And in thine arms, where freemen’s rule began,
     Thou’st nursed the fiend to deal it death at last.

                  Death struck wisely in an hour
     When multitudes of fellowmen might see
How one with all the pride of earthly Power
     Could strong and reverent bow to Destiny!

Ingratitude! that braced a traitor’s hand
     Has spread from sea to sea a funeral pall.
Is there a tongue so cruel in the land
     That can the foul assassin’s deed extol?

“Society has not been terrorized by the awful calamity of the past weeks, because deep down in its heart it feels the power of God, and recognizes as it looks upon its brave young President, that it is this which he represents, as it was this for which his predecessor died.”

Bow down unto the dust your lofty head:
     Strip you of all your rich and proud attire;
In sackcloth and in ashes humbly tread:
With shame and sorrow let your prayers be said,
     In this the hour of grief, and peril dire

“Humiliating the thought that an obscure, contemptible specimen of humanity may suddenly end the life of a most noble and pure-minded president, thereby robbing a great nation of its honored head.”

“I feel very bad for the sake of Mrs. McKinley; outside of that I have no sympathy.”

O, lower the flag and drape it
     As he to his rest is borne!
While the long, long bells go tolling
     Mourn ye, and mourn and mourn.

“. . . assassination is a crazy expedient, and the man who plans it is neither actuated nor deterred by reason.”

“The ocean is not wide enough to hold all the sympathy that streams from the old world to the new.”

In all the land each stricken heart
Will share a patriot’s loyal part
And, joined in tears, as one, will lay
Our gift—a nation’s love—today
     Upon his silent tomb.

The blow is crushing: words are hard to find:
     From the true mourner halting phrases come
Which aptly voice the anguish of the mind:
     Sorrow is never deeper than when dumb.

“We are maddened, grieved and disgusted all at once when we think of the manner of his taking off. That such a man should be stricken down in so cowardly and dastardly a manner by a weak, worthless, insignificant whelp, who was born under Old Glory and had the privileges of its priceless freedom and opportunities, tends to make us believe that our country is too free and lenient in certain directions.”

“The assassination of another President of the United States, sad and sorrowful though it is, will not have been an unmixed evil if the eyes of our citizens are opened to see that the relation is of cause and effect between irreligion and anarchy, relaxed laws and increased criminality, a debased press and a depraved generation.”

“A man making an assault on the head of the nation is like a fool attempting to guide a horse by beating him over the head with a club. There are wrongs in our social system, but if there is any one thing the philosophy of Socialism teaches us it is that no individual is to blame for either the existence of such wrongs or for their perpetuation.”

“When the country heard the news it turned aside to weep.”

“The death of the President summons every citizen to a sacred duty. It is to give to the Government, with its new Chief Executive, prompt and hearty support.”

“Perhaps the enterprise of Christianizing this land will assume in the eyes of all people a greater significance and importance, now that we have had the terrible object lesson of what an irreligious man and one opposed to all religions can accomplish.”

“It is indeed strange that in democratic modern times the President of the American Republic should have been on three occasions the victim of assassination. President Lincoln, President Garfield, and now President McKinley, have by the fate of each shown that democracy is no safeguard against the murderer’s deadly malice. The crowned heads of Europe have escaped lightly in comparison.”

“. . . heaven knows how sedulously the yellow press for years past has been preaching discontent, hatred of wealth, dislike of work, enmity toward corporations, and particular distrust of Mr. McKinley as an alleged ‘tool of the trusts.’ It has been sickening the past week to see how the same papers, realizing at last how utterly out of touch they are with real American sentiment, have turned around and tried to square themselves by representing the martyred President as little short of an archangel.”

“The death of President McKinley has called forth more expressions of profound sympathy and regrets than that of any man of modern times.”

“The horror of this crime stuns us by its inconceivable baseness.”

“A great man had passed away; the greater nation endured; and with it the prosperity his wisdom had done so much to promote.”

“Not the least striking feature in connection with Czolgosz’s deed is the indignant repudiation of his act by the Anarchists themselves.”

“As long as society breeds misery, misery will breed assassination.”

“If his aim had been the exact opposite of what he says it was; if he had desired to defeat the purposes of Anarchism as taught by its logical thinkers and reasoners . . . if Czolgosz had desired to strengthen the power of the Trusts, and consolidate and perpetuate the rule of the few over the many, he could have done nothing better for his purpose than to slay the President of the United States, in the way and at the time he seems deliberately to have chosen.”

“It is clear that no human skill could have saved the President’s life and that everything that modern scientific medicine could possibly suggest was done for him.”

“The horror of it is so great, the method of it so dastardly, the aim of it so foreign to our history, our traditions, and our principles, that the crime and its consequences seem alike incredible.”

“Death by assassination is always terrible, and the country is to-day staggering under the severe shock.”

“The triumph of wickedness fills us with sorrow.”

“The pulse of the nation beat in unison with that of its suffering leader. Eighty million American hearts beat as one.”

“In sober earnest, it seems that the most effective deterrent from political assassination would be oblivion. Let the assassin taken red-handed not be permitted to issue any declaration to the public; let him be tried in secret, punished, if condemned, in secret, only let the sentence be made known.”

Mourn, all countries! Toll, sad bells!
     And walk with hushed and quiet tread!
For the leader of a nation lies
     Peaceful—silent! Cold and dead!

“Not all the love and loyalty of seventy millions of people, not all the respect and esteem of the civilised world, has availed to shield an honoured life from the malignity of criminals who saw in him an impersonation of the social order they detest.”

“If by his death McKinley has aroused the people of his love, whom he served so faithfully and governed so nobly, to such a realization of the dread enemy that menaces their entire future, that their indignation will stamp out forever that hydra of destruction, like the Roman Consul of old, from his blood will have sprung the glory, the greatness and the stability of the Republic for all time.”

“One of the most regrettable consequences of this madman’s act will be the enactment of repressive laws, proper enough to protect our representatives, but which will almost surely be used to work injustice upon innocent people.”

“The crime is inexplicable to a well regulated mind. . . .”

Dark grow the skies, the sounds of joy are hushed.
     Reason can scarce attest the sudden change;
When did the flower of hope, so fully flushed,
     So swiftly fail, with portent sad and strange?

“If any person except the man who fired the shot is responsible for the death of President McKinley, it is Chief Bull, of Buffalo. He was there to protect the president and he did not do it. Now he raises the cry of plot. There was no plot.”

Oh, God! In thy long look adown the years,
Did’st Thou see but this way to save our land,
In time to come, from Anarchy’s red hand?
This way that floods a nation’s heart with tears?

“In the death of the President the people of the United States have not only lost a statesman but a Christian gentleman. His record stands out bright, clear, and honorable. I consider that Mr. McKinley during his term as President has done more for the masses than any ruler of this generation. Although the nation has lost him, from what I know of Americans, it will never cease to honor and revere his name.”

“. . . I am convinced, if I never was before, that there is such a thing as a national heart and that that great national heart has been weeping as it never wept before, that great heart is broken and it will take God’s own time and God’s own way to heal it, such a great calamity has been brought about.”

“It was an assault upon the dignity and the majesty of the law.”

“In all sincerity, I want to ask, is Czolgosz alone guilty? Has not the entire nation had a part in this greatest crime of the century? What is anarchy but a defiance of law and has not the nation reaped what it has been sowing? According to records 2,516 persons have been lynched in the United States during the past sixteen years, and every state in the union, except five, has had its lynching. A conservative estimate would place the number of persons engaged in these lynchings at about fifty per individual lynched, so that there are or have been engaged in this anarchy of lynching nearly 125,800 persons, to say nothing of the many organized bands of technically organized anarchists. Those composing these mobs have helped create a disregard for law and authority that, in my mind, has helped to lay the foundation for the great disgrace and disaster that has overtaken the country.”

“. . . no one could have dreamed that a man so lovable as William McKinley would have become an assassin’s victim.”

No Anarchist with blood dyed hand,
Could cause McKinley’s death;
He only changed the course of life,
By robbing him of breath.
He lives in every patriot’s heart
As ne’er he lived before;
He lives at home—he lives abroad—
On every foreign shore.

“Ah, brethren, we have had a hard blow. It has brought us all grief. It has brought tears to thousands; distress and lamentation to millions; anxiety and fear to very many.”

“The business world and the thinking world are alike convinced that, although all hearts are wounded, no wound has befallen the republic.”

“Whatever other results may flow from the assassination of President McKinley, let us hope that that object-lesson may be sufficient to put an end to our national habit of promiscuous handshaking in public.”

“The assassination of the President of the United States has deeply grieved every rational member of the English-speaking race.”

“It was a blow directed, not against Mr. McKinley, but against the President of the United States; it was prompted not by anger or spite against the man, but a deep seated prejudice against the office and the authority it represented. It was executed, not out of hope of any mere personal advantage, but under a settled conviction that the success of certain principles of government, called ‘anarchy,’ were necessary to release the world from an imagined tyranny, and that the death of those high in authority were the legitimate and nearest means of its attainment.”

“I am especially sorry for Mrs. McKinley.”

“It will be a long time before the example of this Christian death fades from the minds of the people.”

“If the result of this national affliction shall be to further soften political animosities and make an end of personal detraction and abuse, it will be only another illustration of the great truth that the ‘wrath of man’ may sometimes be made to serve the noblest and divinest ends.”

“But, inexpressibly sad as is the death of McKinley the illustrious citizen, it is the damnable murder of McKinley the President that melts seventy-five million hearts into one, and brings a hush to the farm, the factory, and the forum.”

“Christ said to Judas, ‘Friend, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?’ The President could have said to his slayer, ‘Betrayest thou the head of the Nation with the grasp of the hand?’”

“The assassination of its President has stirred the Nation to its depths. But while it is still sorrowing over the tragedy that has passed, it sees hope for continued prosperity, for continued National progress, in the accession of a man who has been tried in the balance of high office, who is conversant with important public affairs, and whose record thus far has been one of achievement and activity.”

“The world is not thinking of Czolgosz, but of Presidents M’Kinley and Garfield, King Humbert, the Empress of Austria, President Carnot, Premiers Canovas and Stambouloff, and the Czar Alexander, all of whom have perished at the hands of similar mean agents in quite recent years. It is thinking of the number of hair-breadth escapes which rulers, princes, chancellors, and premiers have had from the like attempts. It cannot forget the Barcelona riots, the Vaillant, Ravachol, and Mennier outrages, and the still vivid record of the Commune Suspicion may be allayed for a time, and vigilance may slumber; but every now and then an assassination rudely awakens civilisation from its security with its reminder of the anarchist and nihilist elements of disturbance lurking beneath the surface.”

“The cause which seems to us in the main most rationally to account for this shocking crime, as it accounts for similar deeds which have occurred in other countries, is the prevailing spirit of brutalism and violence on the part of the nations. When this spirit is awakened and cherished by the governments on a comprehensive scale, as has been the case in recent years, it is sure to manifest itself in the most unexpected places and ways, especially on persons whose natures are coarse, brutal and undisciplined. If the nations fill their belts with revolvers, their hip pockets with Krupp guns, and their pouches with dynamite; if they pitilessly crush out human lives by the thousands, and trample down whole peoples, in order to accomplish their purposes,—why should it be thought strange that to individuals of the type of which we are speaking, affected as they must be by the prevailing spirit, the taking of any life should seem entirely justifiable for the accomplishment of a definite end?”

“. . . is it not worth while to ponder, notwithstanding its tainted source, the utterance of the wife of a notorious Chicago anarchist who paid the penalty of his crime with his life fifteen years ago? This woman, herself an anarchist, is reported to have pronounced the action of Czolgosz as ‘the deed only of a lunatic,’ because in her opinion no person of sound intellect would assail the head of the government in a republic where the chief executive is chosen by popular vote and holds his office for only a limited time.”

“Their assassination of the President of the United States has had no more effect upon the firmness of our institutions than a puff of dust from the desert might have upon the Great Pyramid.”

“Assassination cannot reach or affect the Constitution of the United States.”

“In witnessing the slaying of our Chief Magistrate by an anarchist, we are sharing in the evil inheritance of Old World tyranny and absolutism, without being able to utilize those defensive measures which absolutism makes possible.”

“The death of McKinley, lamented and grievous, falling a victim as he has to the organized spirit of lawlessness, if organism can be predicated of anarchy, may have its uses in arousing the feelings of our citizens in favor of respect for law and order, which of late years has tended to become too dormant.”

“Every crowd like that which surrounded the President at Buffalo contains just such hair brained monomaniacs who would feel it to be their ‘duty’ to ‘remove the President.’ There is no objection to any amount of law for such monsters, but that would not protect their victims. The more law the more glory to the perpetrator who defies it.”

“President McKinley died not because he represented bad government, nor even because he represented government at all. He died because he seemed a conspicuous citizen to the weak-brained, uncontrolled scoundrel who slew him.”

“It is an appalling record for the most democratic country in the wide world, when we can say that in the past 36 years three out of seven who have been elected President have been sent to an untimely grave by the hand of an assassin.”

“Free governments may be overthrown, but they cannot be reformed, by those who violate the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“. . . the most heinous, dastardly, revolting murder ever committed within the boundaries of this free and enlightened union of states.”

Dark treason’s hand has cut again
A prince uncrowned, the best of men!

“That a life so actively employed and so fully rounded out in the varied pursuits of a soldier, a lawyer, a legislator, a statesman and a President, could have been lived in the less than three score years which mark its earthly boundaries seems no less marvellous than the mysterious Providence which permitted its sudden ending.”

Offended Liberty enveils a blushing face,
Humanity condoles with an afflicted race:
McKinley’s tragic end! Justice, though blind,
The misdeed to avenge, her way will find!

“Mr. Garfield at the death of Lincoln said, ‘The Lord reigneth and the government at Washington still lives,’ and as true as that God reigneth he uses this calamity to the elevation and the building up of his kingdom.”

“This dreadful calamity looks very much like a visitation upon us of the wrath of the Most High. The nation must realize that it is alone with an angry God. We must get back to the foundations, back to the guiding principles of our forefathers, to find out wherein we have offended Him. God expects much from us. He probably expects more than from any other nation on the globe.”

“It is not regicide, for we have no king. It is as yet a nameless crime, a degree baser than regicide, for our Chief Magistrate is of the people, and ruled, not by divine right but by the will of the people; a shade darker than parricide on account of the eminent place held by the victim. It is treason doubly dyed, and it is more.”

Brothers, the blow has fallen, smiting not one, but all;—
Over the world of nations Liberty’s blood-drops fall.
Rally, then, all ye peoples,—one in the common cause,—
Order against sedition,—Order, the first of laws!

“Killing a president does not kill the presidency; this institution of government goes right on. Three times in less than forty years has the ghastly futility of assassination been proven in this republic.”

“God reigns and government by the people still lives.”

“Misdirected revenge and cowardly passion killed the president.”

“To our finite minds a tragedy of this character is appalling. Why did God in his omnipotence permit it? Time alone can solve this vexed question. We have an abiding faith that he who notes the sparrows fall would never have permitted a tragedy of this kind, unless out of it he had planned in some way to teach a lesson which should benefit mankind. Doubtless in time we shall learn what that lesson is.”

“No event of the new century has so profoundly moved the people of all nations as the assassination, so soon followed by the death, of the President of the United States of America.”

“. . . if we as a people awaken to a stern realization of the fact that cancerous sores infect the body politic for which the nation’s safety demands the swift, sharp sweep of the surgeon’s knife rather than the laissez-faire of the social optimist or the nostrum of the political quack, McKinley will not have died wholly in vain.”

“The unclean, crawling creature sunk its venomous sting into the breast of the man of virtue and personal purity, and the poison did its work.”

“Then and there Americanism fell a victim to un-Americanism.”

“Not since the betrayal of the Son of God by the hypocritical kiss of Judas Iscariot has evil been set in sharper contrast with good than in the foul assassination of President McKinley.”

“The attack of the monster who shot President McKinley was as sudden, as desperate, and as unprovoked as might be that of a wild beast in the African jungle.”

“The bullet that, probably aided by his physicians, finally ended McKinley’s career, was not aimed at the blameless individual, but at McKinley—unscrupulous imperialist and crafty politician—at McKinley, ignorer of the rights of working men, defender and supporter of the infamous Trust system of the United States—at the President of a ‘Free’ Republic, who, spurning the title of monarch, possessed more power than all the autocrats of the world rolled into one, and never in one single instance used that power other than to foster the privileges of the rich—to ameliorate the condition of his less fortunate countrymen seems never to have entered his thoughts.”

“There have been other equally exciting assassinations, it is true; but, although this is the second time that the people of the whole United States have waited far into the night for the tolling of bells, and the third time that a funeral train has impressively borne from Washington to the West a murdered President, this is only the first time that the murder has been done in the midst of the peculiarly democratic ceremonial wherein the Chief Magistrate by taking the hand of any comer illustrates the equality of all men before the American law, and the first time that the assassin has been a mere enemy of government.”

“. . . it is certain that the assassination of neither Lincoln nor Garfield was so charged with profound menace as this deliberate and dastardly blow struck by the hand of anarchy.”

“The boldness of the assassin is really the logical outcome of the systematic and utterly unscrupulous and often villainous attacks upon capital and corporations in this country, and mostly for political and journalistic reasons.”

“The cathedral chimes of England, echoing across the sea, bring England’s lament for America’s sorrow.”

“A restful sense of the high moral qualities, the scholarly attainments, the courage, manliness, singleness of heart and purpose acknowledged to be marked characteristics of the new leader of the nation, has everywhere checked fear and assuaged sorrow in the calamity which befell the entire people of the United States.”

“The death of a President of the United States at a time of unparalleled material prosperity, has caused men whose minds were being engrossed in the pursuit of wealth to pause in admiration of the noble qualities manifested in the life of an ideal American.”

“. . . when the historian of the future shall look back upon the present age to chronicle the event we are now describing, he will see it as the result of the most gigantic conspiracy the world has ever known; a conspiracy so tremendous as to take a generation for its preparation and include a nation among its conspirators; a conspiracy, the chief actors of which moved with that marvelous accuracy which the mind only attains when working unconscious of the dictates of reason. When in the perspective of time the events of today shall be seen in their proper relations, some future writer will draw up an indictment, ‘In re the Murder of William McKinley. The People of the United States vs. Czolgosz et al.’”

“Most prominent among those who make up this body of responsible conspirators must be put the great financial interests that control the destinies of the republican party. They it is who have resisted every attempt at change in social conditions and who see in this assassination but one more weapon ready to their hand with which to drive back all enemies of exploitation and oppression. They it is who for their own profit insist upon holding down the safety valve upon a social boiler long past the bursting point.”

“If beauty can come from such a terrible crime as we have just witnessed, it is in the fact of the unanimity of sentiment of love for our President on the part of the people of the civilized world.”

“Again we realize, after nineteen hundred years, how one man who has passed his life in the service and for the good of those around him can be sacrificed by the evil of one of those for whom he had labored to do good.”

“Are we ourselves entirely guiltless of being particeps criminis in this matter? For so long as we know that some American citizens have been direct active agents in taking the law into their own hands, and many more have been found to be silent partners and apologists for such lawlessness, while each and every one of us has sat calmly by and in our apathy and indifference have made little attempt to wipe out this great blot upon law and society, how can we, when Justice lifts aloft her even scales, hope to escape entirely this great condemnation.”

“It is no common sorrow that touches the peoples of the world: for Mr. McKinley was universally beloved.”

“. . . the English language is not sufficiently strong to properly express our detestation of so vile an act. . . .”

“Murder as the product of covetousness and accompanied by robbery we know; murder as an act of malignancy inspired by personal revenge we know; murder by a fanatic rendered desperate by a despotism from which he foolishly expects relief by the assassination of the despot we know; but the assassination of President McKinley falls into none of these categories. So far as we can judge, this murder is the act of a man chiefly inspired by that most inexplicable and most despicable of ambitions, the desire for notoriety; the most despicable, and yet, in a democratic community, with its characteristic passion for publicity, liable to become more common in the future than in the past.”

“William McKinley, President of the United States, was made a sacrifice to the mad theories of fanatics.”

“. . . after the first poignancy and tear-baptized grief had passed—after the prayers of the world had seemingly been unanswered, we looked deep into the mysterious ways of God, and found compensation there in the thought of thousands of young minds opening to the future, and which will receive as an ideal and life inspiration the lesson of the glorious life and death of William McKinley.”

“The bullet was aimed at the heart that always beat in sympathy for the wants of his fellow men and idealized the American fireside.”

“. . . alas! there can be no legal panacea for similar crimes in the future. Murders will never cease while men are depraved. We have plenty of laws to repress such acts of crime as this at Buffalo, but they are of no effect on fiends in human shape.”

“. . . the death of McKinley is a stab at the vitals of constitutional liberty and rightful authority.”

“So atrocious was the crime, so unjustifiable, so unreasonable, so unprovoked, that the mind, dazed and shocked, instinctively revolts from the narration.”

“The greatest hindrance to progress is the false notion that one can kill ideas or abolish institutions by slaying their representatives. The assassination of kings in Europe has so far only strengthened the reactionary powers, and the assassination of a president in America will certainly not weaken the people’s belief in our constitution.”

“Never has the whole civilized world expressed more sincere sorrow than has been caused by the assassination and death of President McKinley.”

“Every lover of justice was staggered when news of the cowardly crime of that anarchistic idiot was flashed throughout the civilized world. Prejudice was everywhere forgotten and the sympathy of all true men and women was extended to the sufferer. Even those hypocritical scribblers who gloated in secret over the downfall of the martyred President were compelled, for the sake of appearances, to assume a sympathy they could not feel.”

“The diseased brain of an assassin can not alter the course of history.”

“Every patriotic citizen must feel that he is in personal danger, when such crimes and the teachings that lead to them are possible in this, the most peaceful, prosperous and happy country in the world, the country of the open door.”

“It was simply the cowardly act of a half-witted degenerate, with an abnormal desire for notoriety.”

“[The anarchists’] assassination of the President of the United States has no more effect upon the firmness of our institutions than a pea-shooter would have upon the protected sides of the battleship Iowa.”

“In our opinion our immigration laws are responsible for the tragedy enacted at Buffalo, and are responsible for daily tragedies that are being enacted, of which no cognizance is taken, in which the poor American laborer is the sufferer.”

“Never in the history of any nation were its people so entirely united in a great grief as has been those of the United States in the presence of this calamity.”

“. . . the death of President McKinley brings home to every American the common sympathy and the common sentiments of our country. At the grave of our President every true citizen of every State in this Union bows his head in humble submission and with a spirit of brotherhood one to the other.”

“Still let us not despair of the republic. No government seems to be free from such assaults as those that thrice have given us such sorrow, and one of the most hopeful rays of light at this dark hour is the sane, composed attitude of a grief-stricken people. Surely it is the best plea for popular government.”

“A casual review of the daily papers of the past three weeks reveals eighteen different causes of the crime of Czolgosz, assigned by different distinguished persons or periodicals, positively and with all the fine composure of ignorance.”

“Laws of a distinctly repressive character, abridging personal liberty, can only be passed under the cover of popular emotion. This is why such a crisis as the one through which we have just passed is such a menace to human freedom. It enables the reactionaries to score for tyranny under the cloak of popular condemnation.”

“We can stop breeding assassins if we really want to. No one enjoys being an assassin.”

“Human society can rid itself of assassins only by ceasing to produce them.”

“The assassination of McKinley is not politics, it is not economics, it is not sociology; it is murder.”

“Had we no part in this tragedy? No share in molding and forming and driving this boy to his crime? Our civilization rests on privilege and inequality, luxury and want; it grows a beautiful, parasitic orchid class, which absorbs all the joy and freedom out of the coarser, homelier class which supports it; one idle, the other toiling, forever toiling. Inequalities, drudgery, squalor and want—just the things to breed discontent and rebellion!”

“Was ever a more contemptible, base, vituperable deed recorded in the history of the world?”

“. . . to a certain degree, we are each accessory to the crime which has been committed. It is only owing to the combined selfishness or thoughtlessness of the community, that the national body could have become infected with the moral disease germs which have produced this terrible disorder.”

“Even if assassination could change the government of a monarchy, it could have no effect on the government of a republic like ours—except to strengthen the patriotism of the people and to entrench our institutions deeper in their esteem.”

“Shocking as the assassination of Mr. McKinley was to the moral sense of all right-minded men, it is the utter senselessness of the crime that makes it especially striking and deplorable, for this cruel murder cannot of course bring the votaries of social disintegration one step nearer their goal, but must necessarily work in the opposite direction.”

“There is no punishment so adequate for such a crime as the execration of mankind.”

“. . . no crime in the previous records of political murder could compare in international significance with this. The effect of other assassinations, for all main purposes, has been null or negative.”

“The power of his example, the corectness [sic] of his economical creed, the momentum the nation has gained under his grand administration will not be lost, although he is gone from among us forever. We have reason to believe the policy he mapped out for himself will be carried forward in the minutest detail. Our nation is too great to fall back even when its greatest man drops the reins of government and lays down his authority in conformity with the mandate of that stern reaper—Death.”

“Sin is the ultimate explanation of that awful tragedy at Buffalo. Sin is the consummate folly and the pursuing curse of history.”

“. . . no watchfulness can prevent the acts of single zealots like our last assassin; nor will the restriction of immigration succeed any better. Our three assassins of Presidents have all been natives of the country. We cannot reverse our time-honored and beneficial encouragement of immigration out of fear of anarchists. The air of freedom is its best panacea.”

We mourn for our Lincoln, with sorrow unhealing,
We grieve for our Garfield, by murderer slain,
But who can portray the deep anger and feeling
The death of McKinley has wakened again.

“. . . Buffalo has stood up bravely under affliction. What could be done it did promptly and perfectly. It showed good feeling, good taste and good discipline, and seemed, like the rest of the country, to have no thought for the time being except for its wounded guest.”

“The assassination of President McKinley, honored servant, and not master, of his country, is a frightful sequel to the tyrannies of tyrants dead and gone.”

“. . . because an ignorant, uneducated man—uneducated except in the lore of the Catholic church whose record is one of murder and assassination since its organization as a church, because this product of bad heredity and environment, unknown to Anarchist societies, suspected of sinister designs by those to whom he tried to introduce himself as a friend of Anarchy—because this man, Leon Czolgosz, whose brother declared him to be ‘too lazy to read and study,’ chose to seek notoriety by killing the President of the United States, the whole country goes insane with rage and fear lest their government and institutions are all to be destroyed and its privileged classes deprived of their right to rob and murder their fellowmen according to law!”

“The dastardly and now thrice-repeated assassination of a President of the United States, and the terrible circumstances attending the crime, have filled the popular mind with shock and trepidation.”

“President McKinley appears to have been a sincere believer in the equality of men, and although warned that he put his life in jeopardy when he stood upon the floor of the Temple of Music in Buffalo to meet his countrymen as equals, he did not shrink. He died in illustrating the American principle of republicanism. . . .”

“Much as we love the memory of our martyred president, sorrowful as every true patriot must be over the deep infamy of his taking off, frightful as are the conditions that mock at peace, and continually warn us of the danger that is within, still, at this hour we have much to be grateful for. Had Mr. Roosevelt been other than the man he is the ship of state might have found rough sailing, but no sooner had the blow fallen than the nation steadied herself with the thought that a strong man and true was at the helm.”

“The murder of President McKinley, more than any event of recent times, seems to have brought home to non-Catholics the need of religious training in the schools.”

“. . . the blood of McKinley will not have been shed in vain, if these United States, stirred from center to circumference, as it has never been before, shall make it forever impossible for such a deed to occur again.”

“If McKinley was right when he said, ‘It is God’s way—his will be done,’ why should Czolgosz be punished for doing God’s will?”

“There could not have been a more cowardly or a more dastardly crime.”

“In the history of the country there never has been a more dramatic sight than that glass car in the midst of the long funeral train which carried the dead head of the nation to his last rest.”

“The most heinous crime of civilization, the most dastardly of history, was the assassination of our beloved President, William McKinley. This event of current history challenged the attention of all nations, but it struck that chord of human sympathy which makes the whole world kin, and draws nations as well as people in closer union.”

“It was glamour of prospective notoriety that incited Czolgosz to the commission of his fiendish crime.”

“I killed the President because he was an enemy of the good people—of the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”

“In future years when sages sadden over the end of McKinley’s career and trace back the events precedent to his undeserved murder, their scholarly brains will no doubt be astounded over this most atrocious, motiveless crime.”

“The common people are still resentful and vindictive concerning this man who murdered the blameless McKinley. They are the more vindictive because he murdered Mr. McKinley only because he was President and the representative of the people. Nor is this feeling abated when the public beholds the assassin going to his doom, unabashed and unrepentant, regretting nothing except his inability to make an anarchistic harangue to ‘a lot of people’ and get a little notoriety on the edge of eternity.”

“He slew innocence that criminality might be exalted.”

“. . . unhappily the tragedy at Buffalo has called forth from ministers and editors, and in a few instances from statesmen, a number of foolish, irrational, and essentially lawless expressions that must be deplored by all right-thinking individuals.”

“. . . [i]n this monstrous and unparalleled crime, that has cast a pall over the universe and bathed a world in tears, we recognize not alone the foul murder of a beloved President, but an attack upon our precious governmental institutions and a blow at those private and domestic virtues—the crowning attributes of a pure and noble manhood and the very life blood of our republic. . . .”

“The nation has suffered the loss of a chief magistrate. The people, one and all, have lost a personal friend.”

“A kind of weird presentiment gnaws, I suspect, at the heart of the nation, and we are wondering whether this deed at Buffalo is merely the blind deed of an isolated fanatic, or whether in any degree it is the expression of some deeper forces at work in certain local sections of our land, or even of forces and tendencies unconsciously existing throughout the nation?”

O, twine the laurel, wreathe the bay, bring lilies and the palm!
A strain of triumph sounds amid the penitential psalm.
In her humility of loss, th’ abasement of her need,
Yet crowned the mourning Nation sits, yea, proudly crowned indeed.
The greatest of her sons has given what e’en the lowliest may—
A faithful life, a trustful death, an heritage for aye.

“It is absolutely necessary that the press treat the criminal in a case of this character with the most evident expression of contempt; to give him a station of importance or even extraordinary notoriety, is to invite hysterical outbreaks of a similar nature.”

“In his untimely decease the Country has suffered not only an irreparable national bereavement, but a distinct loss in personal character, although it has gained a splendid memory which will ever gild with the glow of kindness, intelligence, energy and strength the period of national existence moulded by his hand.”

“The bullet was the assassin’s, but the powder behind the bullet was exploded by the criminal suggestion of a woman [Emma Goldman] whose every word was calculated to do the utmost mischief. . . .”

“Never was a death more widely and sincerely lamented.”

“It would seem that the guards in attendance upon the President that fateful day should have halted Czolgosz the very minute they noticed him in the line with a covered hand, especially a covered right hand. If the hand was really an injured one, no great commotion need have resulted from the act of halting him, but had a concealed weapon been disclosed, as it doubtless would have been at Buffalo, the disturbance arising from the assassin’s being discovered would probably have saved the President’s life. One minute’s inspection would have revealed the assassin’s intent and at least an effort would have been made to make him harmless.”

“The death of President McKinley by an assassin’s hand has emphasized the fact, of which many have long been conscious, that there are a large number of people whose minds have been so warped by long years of oppression that they look upon the rulers of the nation as well as the prosperous members of the community as their enemies.”

“This fair land of ours is now under a sorrow so heavy and crushing as to overshadow the whole world.”

“Time was when many would have felt the assassination to be in some measure atoned by the death of the assassin. No one feels so today. His trial, conviction and all that have followed during the current month are disagreeable contingencies which do not in any degree solve the real problem, but in fact, make it harder to solve. In spite of current talk of changed legislation with regard to anarchy, more stringent laws as to immigration, treason, etc., deep, deep beneath all this chatter there is in the national heart a conviction that these man-made laws will avail little, that we must begin to understand and follow the Higher Law. There is a growing conviction that all this calamity is ‘God’s will’ and that any remedy which leaves out of the question the Higher Law or God, will be no remedy at all.”

“I killed President McKinley because I done my duty.”

“I am glad I did it.”

“Whatever may be said of the case in the light of modern progress in medicine, the lamentable fact was that the doctors in attendance allowed the nation to believe for some days that he would recover. The result was that the shock of his final collapse and death was as great as the first news of the assassin’s dastardly crime.”

“. . . nowhere has the death of our beloved late President exerted a mightier influence than in the religious circles of our country. It gives a mighty inspiration to enter into a vast campaign for the evangelization of our whole populace. Seldom has the world known of a more triumphant Christian death.”

“Were we to attempt to foresee the results of such an occurrence as the striking down suddenly of the chief magistrate of the nation, I take it that financial flurries and disaster would be the first thing we would predict. But here we have the remarkable instance of just such an occurrence, the country at large changed from its usual quiet routine into a state of intense excitement and anxiety, and again restored to its equanimity with scarcely a ripple to disturb the regular flow of its business and commercial affairs. It is hardly conceivable that such an event, so widespread in its effects, could transpire so tranquilly.”

“Il n’y a que deux causes à son [Czolgosz’s] crime : intelligence et pauvreté.”

“Czolgosz killed Mr. McKinley, not because he was William McKinley, but because he was President of the United States; not because of his personality, but because he represented the idea of law and government.”

“Not the wildest stretch of imagination could conceive any betterment for the masses in Mr. McKinley’s taking off.”

“The horror inspired in the minds of the hundreds of thousands of people in Buffalo, as soon as the news of the bloody deed had swept through the city,—the intense rage of the thousands who were in sight or hearing of the pistol shots aimed at the distinguished guest of the occasion, might easily have found expression in the instant annihilation of the assassin by such a wave of righteous indignation as would have swept him from the face of the earth. Had this happened, how many are there who would not in their secret souls have exulted? The justice of it, though rude, would have seemed to most of us to be altogether fitting. But the President, pierced by the murderous bullet, and lying writhing with pain in the arms of his horror stricken friends, evidently seeing the mass of guards who had instantly seized and thrown themselves upon the cruel wretch, said: ‘Let no man hurt him.’ At once the reign of law prevailed,—righteous passion gave way, and the miserable life of the slayer was spared to be weighed in the scales that turn only in obedience to the time-honored rules of orderly legal procedure, which safeguard the trial of the guilty and the innocent with rigid impartiality.”

“It may never be known which cost President McKinley his life—Czolgosz’s bullet or some of his physicians’ knives.”

                                                       Our grief
Wakes with each dawn to question our belief
     That God is just.

“. . . our Country survives and is made more sacred to us still by the blood of its martyred President and the tears of an afflicted people.”

“. . . it was as if death had entered every household.”

“The inscrutable Providence of that sad death none can explain. . . .”

“. . . I am satisfied that Leon F. Czolgosz, the assassin, was a tool in the hands of some group of Anarchists, who had among their number some vile man or woman who, through Post Hypnotic Suggestion, led him to his awful deed.”

“The assassination of President McKinley was as atrocious as any act could possibly be.”

A coward’s hand the bullet sped,
That laid him with the sacred dead;
     Our martyred President,
           McKinley.

“The death of the President is one which must be regretted not alone by the people of the United States, not alone by the people of Anglo-Saxon lineage, but by all the civilized peoples of the earth. . . .”

“It was the result of a monstrous propaganda for the total overthrow of law and order, the inauguration of a universal carnival of spoliation, and the successful revolt of every species of villainy. . . .”

“The assassination of William McKinley was the ripened fruit of seed sown by lawless tongues in partisan invective which public opinion, regardless of party, should have sternly rebuked, and in Anarchistic counseling of crime which public law ought to have forbidden under severe penalty.”

“What a contrast between the President’s love and the criminal’s hate! What a contrast between the divine benignity manifested in the character of the one, and the satanic malice expressed in that of the other! It was the contrast between the brightness of heaven and the blackness of hell on earth.”

“. . . a crime whose only motive seems to have been founded in delusion and a significant and fatal egoism. . . .”

“The nation mourns a trusted chief, and the American people one of the best and brightest examples of those virtues which constitute the truest glory of our social and national life.”

“Hanna selects McKinley to do his will; and God selects Czolgosz to do his will, by slaying the great oppressor of Labor; ‘and God said,’ by the mouth of his servant Czolgosz, ‘for the sake of the good working people’. . . .”

“. . . I believe that human nature is stronger than social philosophy. I believe that environment has more to do with social action and with individual conduct, than theories and ideals. If the slayer of McKinley was an Anarchist, he struck, not because he believed in peace but because he abhorred war; not because he loved liberty, but because he hated tyranny. Because he knew that peace would not be established by his act—that freedom would not come from McKinley’s death. Present conditions made him a rebel. It was not the ideal of Anarchy that pulled the pistol’s trigger, but the misery and wrong and crime of the existing order, of which McKinley was the representative.”

“The cruel shot rang with horror around the world.”

“. . . I recognize and accept the act as the supreme protest of a brave and generous heart against ‘the curse of government.’”

“It is a startling commentary on our vaunted intelligence, progress and security, that we are unable to guard the life of one individual in this country, and he the most honored and best beloved. With millions of men, as our recent experience revealed, ready to rise at a mement’s [sic] warning in defense of the Republic; with boundless resources; with armies and navies and all the appliances of modern warfare at our command; fearing not, in our conscious strength, the attack of any foreign foe; standing proud, erect, and invincible before the world; we still see our Chief Magistrate shot down with the same ease that a highwayman would shoot down a defenseless traveler on the public way. Something must be wrong somewhere.”

“As the death of Lincoln sounded the knell of chattel slavery and the passing of Garfield focused public attention upon the evils of the spoils system, so may the martyrdom of William McKinley arouse the public conscience to resist the encroachments of anarchy and disorder.”

“The blow was aimed at the government and the moral, social, religious, and political institutions it stands for. It was civilized society which the assassin sought to destroy.”

“Lapse of time and succession of events can never diminish the weight of the calamity that befell America in the murder of this noble man.”

“How could that man kill my husband? Why did he, how could he?—you know my husband was no man’s enemy. How could it be that he was shot? Why, oh, why was it?”

How could he slay the people’s friend?
     The good, the brave, the true;
The greatest and the best of men—
     With proffered hand of friendship too!

“. . . from a study of all the facts that have come to my attention, insanity appears to me the most reasonable and logical explanation of the crime.”

“If the death of such a man as William McKinley was necessary to wake us up to the study of the conditions that produced a Czolgosz, then the sacrifice was not in vain.”

“It was carefully premeditated and planned with satanic ingenuity.”

Toll the bells—a nation weepeth
     For the son it loved so well;
Lo, the noble hero sleepeth,
     And our hearts with anguish swell.

“In a land of freedom and enlightenment, in a year of abundance and prosperity, when our institutions are admired and imitated, and our peace and happiness are envied in all the world, it is indeed a mysterious providence that anarchy should rise up to smite the head of the nation.”

“This terrible series of assassinations—which began with Ravaillac and Jacques Clément and ends with Lucchini and Czolgotz [sic], the assassin of McKinley, shows that society has no protection against a fool, a madman, or a fanatic.”

Not one man’s sin this crime that blots the white
Of our fair century’s just opened page!
It is the sin of every age and land
Where greed of gain treads mercy underfoot;
It is the sin of every narrow heart
That harbors vice and fosters ignorance,
And sows among its brethren seeds of hate;
My sin and thine, if we have failed to do
Our part to haste the coming of the day
When love shall rule the nations; thine and mine,
If we have set no hand against the power
Of vice and folly, raised no healing cup
To lips that, parched by poverty and pain,
At last have opened to curse God and Man,
And hail the lurid dawn of anarchy!

O God of Justice, why must thus be furl’d
The stainless banner of a perfect fame?

“The tragedy at Buffalo was the master crime of the new century.”

“The murder had no political significance, though certainly a tragic rebuke to virulent editorials and cartoons in papers wont to season political debate with too hot personal condiment.”

“So little does this fool with his careless sin know what is the purport of this rash, foolish act that unorders the world!”

“. . . if he had been in control of his senses he might have foreseen the consequences of his act, by which he made government stronger and discredited his own beliefs.”

There is no surer path to God’s white throne
Than through the martyr’s grave. Let this atone,
And prove a sign, that we may seek and read
Beyond the bitter of this wanton deed.

“. . . how I should have liked to kill McKinley’s assassin!”

From cells Gehennal came the dire advice
To slay the unimpeachable, because
A prince controls himself with righteous laws
While lawless men cast their perdition-dice.

We see him stricken from the earth,
     In prime of life, with honors rare,
And as a Nation stand aghast
     That Anarchy could such crime dare.

“When the assassin’s shot rang round the world on the sixth day of September, 1901, it struck the hearts of millions not only with the awe and horror of a dastard deed, but with the hurt of a personal sorrow. No President of the United States had ever won in his lifetime a more deep and general regard from the people, and in that dark hour this hero of millions rose to his fullest height. Then and to the end the nobility of his nature shone forth like the light of a star, which, though swept from the zenith into eternal space, can never be wholly effaced from the mental vision.”

“What a world of insoluble problems such an event excites in the mind! Not merely in its personal, but in its public aspects, it presents a paradox not to be comprehended. Under a system of government so free and so impartial that we recognize its existence only by its benefactions; under a social order so purely democratic that classes can not exist in it, affording opportunities so universal that even conditions are as changing as the winds, where the laborer of to-day is the capitalist of tomorrow; under laws which are the result of ages of evolution, so uniform and so beneficent that the President has just the same rights and privileges as the artisan; we see the same hellish growth of hatred and murder which dogs equally the footsteps of benevolent monarchs and blood-stained despots. How many countries can join with us in the community of a kindred sorrow!”

“It was one of the blackest and meanest crimes ever committed in the world.”

     “The family fosters obedience; our schools inculcate patriotism; the church stultifies mental growth; our courts are designed to uphold the precious lie of equality before the law; furthermore, the majority are being weakened and unnerved in factories and mines—is all this insufficient to perpetuate the power of capital?
     Is it possible that the act of a solitary being could tear off the mask of the face of authority, religion and capital and expose their real nature?”

“The act of Czolgosz was the explosion of inner rebellion; it was directed against the savage authority of the money power, and against the government that aids its mammonistic crimes.”

“To read the press reports one would think the President were a being capable of a million-fold the suffering of an unofficial man.”

“With profound sorrow in this the first hour of our affliction, we may fail to discern the purposes of an all-wise Providence; but with heavy hearts and heads bowed low in grief we say, with our lamented President, ‘His will be done—not ours.’”

“September fourteenth, 1901, will be forever memorable as the date and day of the death of one of America’s greatest statesmen, citizens and patriots.”

“I would have as much and perhaps more sympathy for my neighbor if he were killed than for McKinley”

“To-day the deluded still cry: ‘The King is dead! Curses upon his murderer!’ But greater and more lasting than Cæsar’s fame is the beloved memory of Brutus.”

“My brother’s deed has been a curse upon our family.”

“Never did evil commit a more dastardly deed.”

America mourns! her sons and their sires,
Men from abroad send grief o’er the wires;
Matrons and daughters shed many a tear,
For McKinley, our idol, lies cold on his bier.

Alas, O Land of Liberty for thee
When dastards seek for victims such as he.

“Had this thing been done on Southern soil, had a deed so dastardly, a crime so cruel, so cowardly and so causeless been committed in a crowd of Southern men like the mighty multitude where this thing happened, aye, even in the intensely Southern State of Arkansas, not all the cordons of all the police of all the municipalities of the combined Commonwealth, backed by armies and banked with siege guns, could for one moment have stayed the storm of righteous wrath and just indignation that would have seized the assassin on the spot and ripped him limb from limb, and sent his blood-stained soul to judgment before the smoke had ceased to curl from his pistol’s mouth—and in less time than I have taken to tell it.”

Who is lying on the bier?
     Ah, well-a-day! Well-a-day!
’Tis our Chieftain lieth here.
     Ah, well-a-day! Well-a-day!

That brute may yet in God-like image move
     ’Mong men and do the work that hell commands,
This treacherous stroke doth once more dearly prove
     In deed that thrills with horror all the lands.

For pagan souls with Christian feel the shock
     That, following round the earth th’ electric wave,
Makes faith in man a lightning-shattered rock
     As stunned we stand beside our chieftain’s grave.

“The pistol shot at Buffalo has demonstrated the lie of the contentment of the American people. It has unveiled the terrible contrast of classes. The shrill voice of the oppressed and the exploited re-echoed all over the world.”

“Nothing can ever surpass the heroism, the Christian fortitude, the thoughtfulness and unselfishness with which William McKinley met his fate, and passed from this world to another.”

“The pathos of that death has rarely been equaled. It touched as few others the great heart of the world.”

“A Crime smote the people, as if it were a lightning-bolt from out serenest blue. Men staggered where they stood. For an hour, for a day, the social fabric reeled. The finger of an assassin, pressing the fatal trigger, felt for and almost found the Nation’s heart. For the assassin’s victim was the Nation’s head—honored and beloved; he typified the Republic; he was the Government embodied. To shoot him down was to strike a blow at our national institutions; and this blow these felt in every fiber; under it they quivered even to the core.”

“This wretch in human form, whose unpronounceable name shall be anathema for evermore, aimed this deadly blow at the idol of the American people, and rolled a heavy stone on the nation’s heart.”

“On the 6th of September, 1901, a lamentable act took place, one of those tragic occurrences that are apt to arise from the mad ferment of modern life.”

“The depths of our hearts are powerfully moved by the barbarous and brutal way in which our honored and much-loved President was torn from us.”

Our leader, chosen and tried,
Our chieftain, benign and great,
Our trust, and our hope, and our pride,
Hath given his life for the state.

“Though the flaming hand of anarchy wrote across the lurid sky the ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’ of the ancients, yet purposeless the dark deed stands for the strength and wisdom of a great leader illumines the way where others may follow.”

“Never do the wings of God brood man so closely as in the hour when the Angel of Sorrow comes to lend the crown of suffering and martyrdom.”

“The republic will survive the death of McKinley; it is not ephemeral, but is eternal.”

Lift the trumpet to thy mouth,
          America!
East and West and North and South—
          America!
Call us round the dazzling shrine
Of the starry old ensign—
New baptized in blood of thine,
          America! America!

The deed is done! The noble man—
Think of it calmly, ye who can,
With hand outstretched for friendly grasp
Fell ’neath the hand he sought to clasp.

“The President’s death was all the more hideous that we were so sure of his recovery.”

“The awful sound of the assassin’s bullets seemed to reverberate throughout the world. To every American home the news brought a sense of personal bereavement. To the royal palaces of Europe it brought a shock of horror and amazement.”

“Czolgosz struck down not only McKinley, but the intense solicitude for material prosperity which McKinley represented.”

“Oh, the talk in the newspapers! Evidently the Human Race is the same old Human Race. And how unjust, and unreflectingly discriminating, the talkers are. Under the unsettling effects of powerful emotion the talkers are saying wild things, crazy things—they are out of themselves, and do not know it; they are temporarily insane, yet with one voice they declare the assassin sane—a man who has been entertaining fiery and reason-debauching maggots in his head for weeks and months. Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms—fortunately harmless forms as a rule—but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while; and then if our form happens to be of the murderous kind we must look out—and so must the spectator.”

“. . . the death-bed scene will in future years be portrayed in sculpture and on canvas and be sung in immortal verse by the poets of the future, equal to any for which Rome and Greece have become immortal.”

“. . . as he stood there extending the hand of friendship to his assassin and received two bullet wounds in return, the scene enacted more nearly approaches the spirit of the Crucifixion than any event in history with which I am familiar.”

“Do any say that God has done this? But God is not an assassin, nor does he appoint assassins. Don’t let any warped and twisted faith, so-called, lead you to imagine that God is the author of this diabolical crime. We have no such God. The crime is our own.”

“The dark hand of evil has made a hideous assault upon one of the noblest of men, and humanity stands aghast in contemplation of a senseless, monstrous crime and its dire consequences.”

“No punishment on earth is adequate to the crime.”

But see, how quick, confusion round,
     How rush the wild, excited throng—
How sharp that flash, that deadly sound,
     As from the air rung out, some wrong.

“The assassination of President McKinley was a more dastardly act than that which made martyrs of two other Presidents.”

“Horror at the crime is prominent; exasperation at the criminal is very inconspicuous, which is as it should be; but the universal feeling is undeniably one of personal grief at the loss of such a man in such a way, for, first and foremost, McKinley was a man whose sympathies extended to all about him.”