E 711 G6 Copy 1 ^m 0al\m Cj) ieftain ^ ^ FRANK L. GOODSPEED t !i K fi Our Fallen Chieftain William McKinley A SERMON BY Rev. F, L. Goodspeed, Ph.D., Minister of the First Church of Christ, Springfield, IVIassachusetts Preached on September 15th, 1901, the Day Succeeding the Death or President William McKinley. Delivered ALSO, IN Substance, at a Mass -Meeting in Westfield, Mass., on the Day or THE President's Burial For tho' the Giant Ages heave the hill And break the shore, and evermore Make and break, and work their will ; Tho' world on world in myriad myriads roll Round us, each with different powers. And other forms of life than ours. What know we greater than the soul ? On God and Godlike men we build our trust. Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears: The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears : The black earth yawns : the mortal disappears ; Ashes to ashes ; dust to dust ; He is gone who seemed so great, — Gone ; but nothing can bereave him Of the force he made his own Being here, and we believe him Something far advanced in State, And that he wears a truer crown Than any wreath that man can weave him. Speak no more of his renown, Lay your earthly fancies down. And in the vast cathedral leave him. God accept him, Christ receive him. — Tennyson^ on the Duke of Wellington. >• A / Z^ ^ OUR FALLEN CHIEFTAIN WILLIAM McKINLEY Matt. 25: 21. " His Lord said unto him, Well done, good and faithful servant." Prov. 28 : 4. " They that forsake the law praise the wicked : but such as keep the law contend with them." ^HE dastardly hand of the assassin has again sent to his grave a prince of our WZ.^ nation. Three times in one generation '■■^^ has a president of the United States been murdered in cold blood. For nearly a century our chief magistrates moved about in the midst of their fellow-citizens without danger or fear. But now it would seem that we must surround our presidents with all the safe-guards which constantly hedge a European king. Our sorrow is almost too great for utterance. We are all stunned by the blow which has fallen. We feel that it was aimed at us and our homes and our safety. The president was the embodiment of the nation, the incarnation of orderly government, the representative of law and of society founded on law. When the assassin fired his fatal bullet at the person of the president he aimed it at your heart and mine and at all the institu- tions for which the Republic stands. The nation was assaulted when he was stricken. The nation was wounded when he fell in mortal agony. In his death the nation is smitten in the very heart. Our Fallen Chieftain This is one of the dates which will ever punctuate our national history with its anguish at the baseness and blindness to which our humanity is subject. It is a date which humiliates humanity by revealing the depths of infamy to which it is possible for human nature to descend. It will also be a date which will glorify our humanity by revealing the heights of noble- ness and sympathy and tenderness to which a human soul may attain even under the stress and the agony of death. A deadly weapon may strike down a frail human life, but no weapon can strike down the influ- ence and the power of a fair true life upon the world. " Good deeds cannot die : They with the sun and moon renew their light, Forever blessing those who look on them." William McKinley stood in the forefront of our nation's life as the ablest and best beloved man among us. Simple and unpretending in manner, with a calm and poise which proved a spirit under perfect self- mastery, he seemed removed to a region above the baser passions, the petty ambitions and meaner im- pulses of smaller and weaker men. His occupancy of the presidential office has been a gradual and constant revelation of the real greatness and power of the man, until we had come to trust his clear judgment, his transparent honesty, his courage in the face of tremen- dous difficulties, his calmness under criticism and his patience under burdens and trials which would have crushed a smaller spirit to the ground. He had the lofty and serene sense of duty which characterized Washington, and the unswerving endurance under Our Fallen Chieftain resentment and jealousy which was the great mark of Lincoln's character. And together with them, a trinity of manhood of which America will be forever proud, he will pass into history. He guarded the freedom of all who came under the Stars and Stripes. Some men are good, but not great. Some men are great, and not good. But in my judgment he will be un- derstood as combining greatness of character with sanity and strength of intellect. He was not a brilliant genius panting for an opportunity to display himself, but his intellectual powers indicated sound sense, clear insight into questions of complicated bear- ings, and with an exquisite tact which never forsook him and which enabled him to decline a request and yet at the same time give the impression that he had conferred a favor. Absolutely transparent in motive, absolutely pure in personal character, absolutely tender and devoted in the family circle, we can truthfully describe him in the phrase Guizot used of Washington as one of the greatest of virtuous men and one of the most virtuous of great men. Although there was nothing theatrical about him, although no bolts flamed from him as though hurled from a storm-shaken and angry sky, his light was a steady flame, a great beacon. While Napoleon and Caesar and Alexander sought to keep the world in fear, he sought to estabUsh more firmly the brotherhood of man, the friendship of all sections, the comity of nations, and to guide his coun- try into channels of wider beneficence and higher civilization. In that most trying and responsible situ- ation created by the Spanish war he was wise, prudent, Our Fallen Chieftain patriotic, adverse to war, an earnest advocate of peace, acting always in a manner befitting the grandeur and dignity of our country, showing that statesmanship is not a lost art, gaining for our country the sympathy and respect of the whole civilized world. Five years ago he found us a provincial people bound^ up in our own interests and without authority in the councils of nations. To-day we are in the front rank of nations, our flag respected on every sea and our influence felt around the world. Unselfish, and steady as the pole- star, his dearest wish was to emancipate the tribes brought under our sway, to establish among them ordered liberty, to deliver them from misrule and violence, and dedicate them to a real and lasting free- dom. In moral, manly greatness he stood in moun- tainous majesty above the demagogue and the politician and the jingo, an imperial man representing civic devotion, compact patriotism, an enthusiasm for the happiness and well-being of all the people, — a genuine, splendid man, best type of American manhood, calling out to himself as he lies there in death to-day the affection, the admiration and the honor of the whole world. Born of the old Covenanter stock, President Mc- Kinley incarnated the spirit of Scotch integrity and courage. Born in comparative poverty, he worked his way up until at seventeen he was teaching a country school at twenty-five dollars a month and boarding around. When Fort Sumter was fired upon, he dropped the spelling-book and shouldered his musket, the first man among all his townsmen to offer himself Our Fallen Chieftain in his country's cause. As a soldier he soon won the admiration of his colonel, Rutherford B. Hayes, for his prompt and eager performance of his soldierly duties. He fought at South Mountain and took part in the awful struggle of Antietam. A boy of eighteen and a commissary sergeant in charge of supplies for his regiment, he determined to get food to his faint and weary comrades on the firing hue. "And then the boy," so goes the record, " without orders, compelled by no soldier's duty, loaded his wagons, called for volunteer drivers, and on from the rear to the front, through the shower of shot and shell, braving death every instant, brought to the front and to the fainting soldiers of his regiment the reinforcement of food and strength that enabled them to go on with the conflict to the end." He took a valiant part in the later battles of the war, always conspicuous for bravery and obedi- ence to the orders of his superior officers. The war over, he finds himself a major. He returns home and studies law, and into his chosen profession he pours the same enthusiasm, the same courage, the same lofty purpose. What he was as a soldier he is as a citizen. He is a Christian man, belting all his activi- ties back to the power of God, resting on the unseen and eternal verities. Undaunted by the difficulties which meet every young man, he rose step by step in his profession, grew in mental and moral stature and in the esteem and confidence of his fellowmen, went to Congress and then to the White House. We cannot follow minutely all the steps in his ascent, but all were characterized by the same steadfast honor and trans- Our Fallen Chieftain parent faithfulness to duty which we saw in his earlier and later life. There is little dramatic about it all. He was simply master of himself, made a straight path between purpose and fulfilment, improved the present hour, was unterrified by difficulties, undaunted by dangers, his ardor never chilled by suspicions, his confidence and trust reposed in men never soured by neglect or betrayal. He never lost faith either in God or in the people. Mind and heart and conscience in splendid symmetry and in harmony with a splendid will, were preparing him to be the trusted chieftain of his people, a man four-square to all the cardinal points of manhood, a character in which "the length and breadth and height were equal," a man of whom we may truthfully say as Tennyson said of another : " Rich in saving common sense, And as the greatest only are — In his simplicity sublime ; Who never sold the truth to serve the hour, Nor palter'd with Eternal God for power ; Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow Thro' either babbling world of high or low; Whose life was work, whose language rife With rugged maxims hewn from life ; Who never spake against a foe. Let his great example stand Colossal, seen in every land, Till in all lands, and through all human story, The path of duty is the way to glor>'." And now in the fullness of his powers, at the height of his influence, when he was becoming every day more trusted and more loved, he is wrenched from his glorious heritage of honor and of opportunity, he is laid low on a bed of anguish over which his mourn- Our Fallen Chieftain ing countrymen, and all honest men of every nation, and foreign kings and rulers have shed unfeigned tears. Stricken by a hand thrust out of the vilest scum of humanity, by an infamous assassin represent- ing the most wretched, unrestrained, and desperate of all devilish theories, he falls back with an unparalleled prayer for his murderer, "May God forgive him!" That was Christlike. That was the Christian spirit in its finest expression, in its utmost reach. For it was a most foul murder. Other assassins had approached and slain from behind. Lincoln and Garfield both fell by the hand of those who stole upon them unseen. But this man came in the hypocritical guise of friend- ship to murder with the hand outstretched to greet and welcome. How could he slay a man so noble, one who had never knowingly wronged him or any man, how could he meet the kindly glance of those wonderful eyes, with more than the treachery of a Brutus and with almost the perfidy of a Judas ? And the blow to be met with no scream of fear or reproaches from the victim, but with the courage of the soldier and the forgiveness of the Christian ! I say that if the assas- sin degrades humanity, then his illustrious victim glorifies humanity. " On either shore not hard to find The lofty aim, the Godlike speech, The dauntless heart ; but who shall reach Thy grand simplicity of mind." We may well thank God for such a man. We may well boast that he is ours. A land that can continue to rear such men need not despair of the future. If Our Fallen Chieftain we were enriched by his life and by his service, we were still more enriched by the spirit of fortitude and patient resignation in the hour of mortal agony. He died as he had lived, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. All mankind have been made kin by this splendid example of heroism and Christian fortitude. The echo of the assassin's shot has awakened the sympathies of the world. If the illustrious victim was great in life, he was greater still in death, thinking not of himself, but of his poor invaUd wife, the object of his most tender solici- tude through many years. As his first thought, after the fatal shot, was for her, lest her frail system be overwhelmed by the stroke, so was his last conscious moment devoted to comforting her. For thirty years he had walked with her and been the object of her idolizing love. And through the long period, though engrossed with congressional cares, bearing the bur- dens of the governorship, and loaded with the great obligations involved by the presidency, never a day passed a portion of which was not sacredly devoted to that frail and gentle companion of his youth, who is today stricken, crushed, and wounded to the heart's core. The strong oak fallen, the vine also, which clung to it, lies prostrate. The world will never for- get his marvellous loyalty to his suffering wife. There are few more pathetic scenes in history than this dying man pouring his waning strength into the heart of the one he had loved and so tenderly cherished. Thus by a stainless life crowned by a heroic and unselfish death, did he set the seal to a grand example and pass from Our Fallen Chieftain the earthly burden to the heavenly crown. Thank God, we have to make no apology for his life. In honoring him we honor ourselves, and the spontaneous and over- whelming outburst of genuine sorrow on the part of all our people proves that the heart of the nation is still sound and true. Probably the death of no other man on earth could have so touched the heart of the world. What the surrender of cherished plans, what the baf- fling of his high ambitions, what the sundering of the sweet ties of friendship and of love cost him, who can tell ! Before him years of usefulness, the confidence of friends, the sweet society of a wife tenderly cherished through years of invalidism, the wife of his youth whose very life was bound up with his ! And yet this masterful man turns from it all in obedience to a higher summons, without a murmur, not fearing to tread the wine-press alone, and as a humble, untroubled soul, faced death with an unfalter- ing trust. With the same gracious and courteous man- ner he had ever shown, he took his leave of friends, 'hearing above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet the voice of God,' resigning himself with simple Christian trust to the divine decree and so passing to where beyond these voices there is rest and peace. Having lived with God and for God, when the inevitable moment came he required no minister to ask forgiveness or priest to make offering for the repose of his soul. His whole life had been a prepar- ation for death. He was already at peace. He had fought his good fight, and he had kept the faith. " Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he Our Fallen Chieftain heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning." His name will be great in history and his example in both public and private life will be a beacon light to the young of future generations who will be guided by the ** counsel of his life and charac- ter and courage." It is the faith and the example of such as he that are bringing the new heaven and the new earth. Concerning him will come to pass his own fine words concerning Washington, when he said, " While strong with his own generation, he is stronger even in the judgment of the generations which shall follow. After a lapse of a century he is better appre- ciated, more perfectly understood, more thoroughly venerated and loved than when he lived. He remains an ever-increasing influence for good in every part of the sphere of action of the RepubUc. He is recognized as not only the most far-sighted statesman of his gen- eration, but as having had almost prophetic vision. He built not alone for his own time, but for the great future, and pointed the rightful solution of many of the problems which were to arise in the years to come." William McKinley is our third martyred president. I say " martyr " deliberately. He is the nation's costliest sacrifice. In a very real sense he died for us. In a very real sense he died because of us. We are all to blame for the spirit of lawlessness abroad in our land. It is a national vice, and you and I are the nation. In one of Bret Harte's clever parodies of the F'rench, he tells a story of three gamin who were playing in the streets of Paris. A priest passed by. Our Fall en Chieftain i^ " There goes a priest," cried one ; " look out for your eggs and your chickens ! " Then the priest, hearing the words, knelt down and prayed for the boys. But reflecting upon the incident, he became convinced that it was not the fault of the boys, but of their parents. So he knelt down and prayed for the parents. But on second thought he saw that it was not the fault of the parents, but of society, so he knelt and prayed for society. And, as he rose from his knees, he said to himself, "But, my friend, who is soci- ety ? You and I are society." So he knelt down the last time and prayed for himself. And, after all, that is the whole of the matter. You and I are soci- ety, and it is society that has hatched the unlikely brood whose representative has smitten to the death our beloved president. His death will not have been wholly in vain if, as one result of it, we have in this country a revival of the idea of the majesty and suprem- acy of law. John Bright 's remark about the value of agitation as " the marshalling of a nation's conscience to right its laws " was good ; but what is specially needed now is that agitation which shall result in the marshalling of the people's consciences for obedience to the laws, and for the honest, fearless and impartial enforcement of the laws. There is a spirit of lawlessness rampant in this country which, unless checked, will surely bring us to the dust. We see it in the acts of mob violence when enraged multitudes take the law into their own hands to murder the supposed criminal. You see it when labor unions take matters into their own hands to 14 Our Fallen Chieftain enforce their own ideas, even by the use of force and violence and intimidation. If the laboring man takes the sword instead of the ballot, he will perish by the sword. We see it in the lynchings and burnings and torturings of negroes, without arrest by forms of law, without trial, without conviction or any pre- tence to the due course and form of justice. It is seen in the public, open and unblushing palliation of acts of lawlessness on the part of governors and others elected to enforce and defend the law. By them this lawlessness has been sometimes winked at, sometimes encouraged. We see it in the open, fla- grant, undisguised nullification of law by the liquor traffic throughout this nation. The licensed saloon is the nesting-place of anarchy. We see it in the brazen effrontery by which the brutes of the prize-ring are able to carry out their unlawful spectacles under the very eyes of men who are sworn to administer justice and maintain the law. It is seen in the widespread desecration of the Sabbath day. It is seen in the acts of public corporations which trample upon the rights of private citizens and use the public for their own pecuniary profit and advantage. We see it in the empty sensationalism and in the untempered, exagger- ated, and scandalous attacks upon public men by a yellow journalism, and in the bitter, cynical, and insid- ious taunts and gibes of a more respectable though no less dangerous portion of the press. It is seen in the debauching of legislators by means of bribes. It is seen in municipal misrule and in the reign of bossism in our great cities. It is seen in the nauseating sym- Our Fallen Chieftain 15 pathy manifested for criminals, when silly women send fruits and flowers to the occupants of murderer's row. It is seen in the open and avowed teachings of red anar- chism, not merely from little insignificant newspapers, but by bloody speeches given by anarchists from pub- lic platforms, their threats now having culminated in the destruction of our president. We need a great revival of conscience ; we need less maudlin sympathy for the law-breaker and more respect for the Deca- logue. All defense of lynching is foolish and wicked. Anarchy can never cure anarchy. Moral madness must be met by swift but sober justice. If I had my way, every man and woman against whom the utter- ance of anarchistic sentiments could be proved should be put at hard labor for life. We might banish them from the country, but that would be unjust to the land to which we sent them. Let them spend their natural days in strenuous toil on behalf of the society they would destroy, and of the government whose laws they would nullify and banish. Let them be hunted down like wolves ; let them be ferreted out like rats ; let them be crushed like vipers. If I had my way, summary justice, stern and unrelenting, should be meted out to this wretch who has lifted his hand against all organized society. His punishment should be so swift and terrible as to teach all similar mon- sters the awfulness of their crime and the sure retri- bution which should follow. To-morrow morning he should be tried, and, before the set of to-morrow's sun, his miserable soul should be sent into the presence of i6 Our Fallen Chieftain his Creator, and his miserable dust buried from the sight of man, to pollute the air no longer. By the ablest and most careful statisticians crime is said to be increasing more rapidly than the popula- tion in this country. Theft and burglary and vaga- bondism and highway robbery and murder ! It cannot be because of hard times, for the times are good. The men who would do such deeds would not work if they had a chance. These criminals will not labor in the most thrifty times. The only toil they will ever do is when they are in the penitentiary, with the overseer threatening them with a protracted shower-bath or the straight-jacket. Let the law be enforced. Let the police become more vigilant and fearless. Let the gangs of loafers on the street corners and all unlawful assemblies be broken up. Let the courage of public officials be toned up. While we want in our country asylums for the support of the incompetent and the sick and the aged and the invalid and the insane, let voluntary idlers and the plotters against public peace and safety be compelled to work for the state. If they will not work for themselves, let them be made to work. We are told that Czolgosz was a consummate idler. "Idleness is the mother of crime," and the father, too. I am satisfied that for these men who agitate anarchism and threaten to rob and burn and destroy, nothing is so well adapted as work and, upon their refusal to work, the old-fashioned whipping -post. We must also raise the public ideal and tone up the public con- science. We must restrain the agitator as well as punish the act ; we must hold the teacher of anarchy Our Fallen Chieftain 17 responsible for the conduct of his pupil. Most of the outlaws of society are perfectly satisfied with a lodg- ing in jail or a prison bunk, and there some of them recline through the long winter days and nights sup- ported by the self-respecting and hard-working tax- payers of our land. They are perfectly content that the government should pay their board and do their washing, while they rest from their hard and consum- ing toil of the summer tramp. Every patriot heart cannot but be oppressed with direful apprehensions on account of the utter contempt for law shown by certain elements of American society. " Oh Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name ! " Liberty is not hcense. Liberty is not the right of every man to do as he pleases. Government is not an artificial contrivance. Law is not an author- ity which one man assumes to exercise over another man. We are born into government when we are born into the world. We are born under a realm of laws and into a society where law is wrought into its very structure. Anarchy is modern diabolism. When every man is doing "that which is right in his own eyes," Satan is having his own way. Liberty under law developed a race of men before whom despots trembled, but license paralyzes the moral faculties to the eternal distinction between right and wrong. The Decalogue did not originate with Moses ; it was elab- orated out of the human frame and the human mind. Law is fundamental and constitutional, and he who renounces law not only denies the God who organized it into the nature of things and into the nature of man, Our Fallen Chieftain but denies himself and becomes an anomaly, a monster in the universe. Law is before all written expressions of it. It was the saintly Hooker who thus defined it : "Of law nothing other can be said than that her seat is in the bosom of God and her voice the harmony of the world." A man can never get away from law until he gets away from himself ; for law is not constraint from the outside, it is something born with him and within him. He is hedged about by physical and ma- terial and mental laws, and only by obedience to them has he made any progress in civilization. These laws a man may never defy. If he defies the law of logic, he belongs in the lunatic asylum. If he defies the law of mental processes, the law of the intellect, he belongs in the home for feeble-minded. If he defies the laws of the state, he belongs in the state prison. There are laws of mind, laws of art, laws covering the whole domain of man's mental and moral and material life. We are and must ever be bound about and bound together by social and economic laws. Defy the one, and you have anarchy. Defy the other, and you have commercial disaster. We are bound about also by the higher moral and spiritual laws, the laws that link us to the eternal and the infinite God. Those laws are written all over our nature and we can never defy or banish them. Those laws are stamped upon us and are interpreted by our conscience, and we can never disregard them without murdering conscience, without soul suicide. There are Biblical laws and there are reason's laws, and man has always been under law and always will be. "The only liberty," says Burke, Our Fallen Chieftain 19 "that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them." "Freedom," says Professor Green, "is a liberation of the powers of all men equally for contributions to the common good." And Henry Ward Beecher declares, "The only liberty is the liberty to be unhindered in obeying natural laws." Liberty is therefore not the right of every man to do as he pleases ; it is the right of every man "to be unhindered in seeking the common good in a lawful and orderly manner." Have we not had warning enough, that three times in a generation we have seen a president assasinated .'' Booth, Guiteau, Czolgosz — a trinity of infamy, of lawlessness, of murder, which has been equalled by no other nation in the same length of time! No other nation has been so humiliated by the murder of its high officers. When we ask with anxiety, "Are we growing better or worse.?" we may well listen to the conclusions of a keen observer of our civilization, who says : "The sun grows brighter. The world rever- ances our imperial aspirations as Americans, and beUeves on the whole that we mean justice to our entire population. One portion of our land is cer- tainly growing better, that which the churches and the schools and the Sabbaths are clearing of rubbish, plowing, irrigating, sowing and reaping, but there are jungles in civiUzation that grow neglected. There is a vast unchurched population among us. I think the people inside the churches, the Christian schools, and worthy households are growing better. I think the Our Fallen Chieftain unchurched, floating masses in this country are grow- ing worse. It becomes us to study both the sun with its resplendent, dazzling glory, and to thank God for all time to come for its glory in the heavens, but it becomes us also to study the blood-red bars of law- lessness, drawn in our recent history from side to side of the disc of civilization." It seems to me that reformation must come, if it comes at all, through the homes of the land. In those homes there must be a revival of reverence for all things sacred, for parental authority, for law, for public insti- tutions, for God. There is not the respect for parental authority that there was. A critic of American affairs has asserted that the Civil War was due largely to the fact that the young people of the South were not taught to obey their parents. The fifth Command- ment has been turned end for end, and is read at present, "Parents, obey your children." The art of reverence is wellnigh a lost art in America. Oliver Wendell Holmes said the apron-strings of the Ameri- can mother are made of india-rubber. But, if we may judge by the irreverent way in which parents are spoken of and treated by their offspring, today even that pliable, elastic apron-string has been severed, and parental authority has been lost. Young America is in the saddle. There is no theme too sacred, there is no personality too august, there is no institution too vener- able, there is no law too holy, not to be made the subject of jest or the butt of ridicule. Irreverance toward God and all sacred things is followed by disregard of paren- tal authority and restraints and all the bonds which bind Our Fallen Chieftain men to decency and right. Insubordination in the home means that the same spirit is carried into the school, until now the teachers are in despair over try- ing to fill minds already preempted by affairs which should engage the attention of those who are twenty- five instead of twelve. A scene came under my eye this summer which illustrates the temper of too many of the youth of our land and time. A man alighted from an electric car in the place where I was stopping. He had come from a neighboring city, and his son, a lad of ten or twelve summers, met him as he descended from the car and proceeded to examine his pockets to see if he had brougTit the regulation amount of sweetmeats, or whatever had been ordered. Upon his failure to find any, he drew back a step and with an angry face struck his father a vicious blow around the legs with a whip which he held in his hand. That father, cer- tainly, knew as well as old King Lear, " How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child." God meant it when He gave the Fifth Command- ment, and " when Greece and Rome began to breed up conceited, unruly sons, walking after their own heart's lusts ; when Greece produced vicious and per- fumed dandies such as Aristophanes pictures ; when Rome produced jewelled debauchees like Otho, and a matricide hke Nero — God, too, began to wipe out their glory as when one wipeth a dish, wiping it and turning it upside down." When the grand old honored title, " my father," is replaced by " the old man," or Our Fallen Chieftain "the governor," when children take all the love and toil of hard-working and ageing parents as though it were an offering due to their own transcendent import- ance and merited no return, when even children of seven years are confessed by their parents to be un- manageable, when infants omit childhood and leap with one bound from the nursery to the drawing-room, when the daughter, '• whose smattering of shallow accomplishments has led her to mistake herself for a lady, looks down on her mother from the whole height of her inferiority as a person to whom she can leave the domestic drudgery while she herself is reading sentimental romances or murdering vapid music on a cheap piano," we may well ask ourselves whether the heart of all that makes for reverence and home and obedient citizenship is not being eaten out by a gan- grene which will ultimately destroy the whole of the body politic. Our young people should be taught that " They that forsake the law praise the wicked ; but such as keep the law contend with them." The vipers that raise their heads against our gov- ernment to-day are mostly emigrants from the despot- isms of Europe. Our immigration laws must be made doubly strict and then enforced to the letter. Even if the doors were shut to-day, we have a tremendous undertaking to assimilate the elements in our midst. To let in more of the same sort is to endanger our Republic and run the serious risk of the same over- throw which destroyed Rome. For years Europe has been using the United States as a dumping-ground for her paupers and criminals. By an official investigation Our Fal len Chieftain 23 under Secretary of the Treasury Foster, it was found that for years there had been a systematic movement in Europe to use America as a place of deposit for the dregs of European society, where nations across the sea might unload their criminals, idiots, paupers and diseased people. Everybody knows it, and while we have protection in many things, there is almost abso- lutely free trade in rascals and criminals of all sorts, which is breeding in our country moral pestilence and assassination. A man so ignorant or so bad that Europe does not want him is not good enough for America. At the gateway of this New World, wel- coming the millions who seek our shores and greeting the traveller on his journey back to the land he loves the best, "a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night," stands the statue of Liberty Enlightening the World. Liberty enlightening the world, not license darkening and cursing the world ! Let that statue wel- come no murderous assassins. Let her torch of light be not turned into the blood-red torch of anarchy. Behind her symbolic form let no dastardly slayers of our pubhc men find a refuge and desecrate the emblem- atic figure by hurling thence the bomb, or firing thence the fatal shot to wound mankind in the consecrated name of freedom. Let her stand for ordered liberty, a warning as well as a welcome. And so, while we mourn, we must also plan for the defense of the things dearest to us. It is a great sac- rifice that has been made. God grant that it may atone for the sins of our nation ! It is for us to devote ourselves to the preservation and extension of those 24 Our Fallen Chieftain great principles for which the Republic stands, pour- ing, if possible, a new meaning and sacredness into the words of our first great martyr President, and, applying them to our latest martyr, say, " It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated to the unfin- ished work which he has thus so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from this honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which he gave the last full measure of devotion ; that we here highly resolve that he shall not have died in vain ; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of free- dom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." In a few days now will be repeated the sad procession so nobly described by Mr. Beecher while Lincoln's body was being borne to Illinois, and the description will fit the scenes through which will pass the sacred dust of our latest martyr President : " And now the martyr is moving in triumphant march, mightier than when alive. The nation rises up at every stage of his coming. Cities and states are his pall-bearers, and the cannon beats the hours with solemn progression. Dead — dead — dead — he yet speaketh. Is Washington dead .? Is Hampden dead .? Is David dead ? Is any man dead that ever was fit to live ? Disenthralled of the flesh, and risen to the unobstructed sphere where passion never comes, he begins his illimitable work. His life now is grafted upon the infinite, and will be fruitful as no earthly life can be. Pass on, thou who hast overcome! Your sorrows, O people, are his peace! Your bells and bands and mufifled drums sound triumph in his ear. Wail and weep here ; God makes it echo with joy and triumph there." LIBRARY OF CONGRESS" &FABASSLTTLCO PRINTLRS«»PVBU5HERS g.Hm»»MlVlLl>l»lC.*W»INCnOi>«K»<