Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents | Page 3

struck at in the sense that power is irresponsible or centered in
the hands of any one individual. The blow was not aimed at tyranny or
wealth. It was aimed at one of the strongest champions the
wage-worker has ever had; at one of the most faithful representatives of
the system of public rights and representative government who has ever
risen to public office. President McKinley filled that political office for
which the entire people vote, and no President--not even Lincoln
himself--was ever more earnestly anxious to represent the well

thought-out wishes of the people; his one anxiety in every crisis was to
keep in closest touch with the people--to find out what they thought and
to endeavor to give expression to their thought, after having endeavored
to guide that thought aright. He had just been re-elected to the
Presidency because the majority of our citizens, the majority of our
farmers and wage-workers, believed that he had faithfully upheld their
interests for four years. They felt themselves in close and intimate
touch with him. They felt that he represented so well and so honorably
all their ideals and aspirations that they wished him to continue for
another four years to represent them.
And this was the man at whom the assassin struck! That there might be
nothing lacking to complete the Judas-like infamy of his act, he took
advantage of an occasion when the President was meeting the people
generally; and advancing as if to take the hand out-stretched to him in
kindly and brotherly fellowship, he turned the noble and generous
confidence of the victim into an opportunity to strike the fatal blow.
There is no baser deed in all the annals of crime.
The shock, the grief of the country, are bitter in the minds of all who
saw the dark days, while the President yet hovered between life and
death. At last the light was stilled in the kindly eyes and the breath
went from the lips that even in mortal agony uttered no words save of
forgiveness to his murderer, of love for his friends, and of unfaltering
trust in the will of the Most High. Such a death, crowning the glory of
such a life, leaves us with infinite sorrow, but with such pride in what
he had accomplished and in his own personal character, that we feel the
blow not as struck at him, but as struck at the Nation. We mourn a good
and great President who is dead; but while we mourn we are lifted up
by the splendid achievements of his life and the grand heroism with
which he met his death.
When we turn from the man to the Nation, the harm done is so great as
to excite our gravest apprehensions and to demand our wisest and most
resolute action. This criminal was a professed anarchist, inflamed by
the teachings of professed anarchists, and probably also by the reckless
utterances of those who, on the stump and in the public press, appeal to
the dark and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and sullen hatred.
The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they
cannot escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is

reaped. This applies alike to the deliberate demagogue, to the exploiter
of sensationalism, and to the crude and foolish visionary who, for
whatever reason, apologizes for crime or excites aimless discontent.
The blow was aimed not at this President, but at all Presidents; at every
symbol of government. President McKinley was as emphatically the
embodiment of the popular will of the Nation expressed through the
forms of law as a New England town meeting is in similar fashion the
embodiment of the law-abiding purpose and practice of the people of
the town. On no conceivable theory could the murder of the President
be accepted as due to protest against "inequalities in the social order,"
save as the murder of all the freemen engaged in a town meeting could
be accepted as a protest against that social inequality which puts a
malefactor in jail. Anarchy is no more an expression of "social
discontent" than picking pockets or wife-beating.
The anarchist, and especially the anarchist in the United States, is
merely one type of criminal, more dangerous than any other because he
represents the same depravity in a greater degree. The man who
advocates anarchy directly or indirectly, in any shape or fashion, or the
man who apologizes for anarchists and their deeds, makes himself
morally accessory to murder before the fact. The anarchist is a criminal
whose perverted instincts lead him to prefer confusion and chaos to the
most beneficent form of social order. His protest of concern for
workingmen is outrageous in its impudent falsity; for if the political
institutions of