Our great sorrow is not felt by us alone. All nations mourn with us. The Queen of Great Britain with her own hand sends messages of the sweetest, the most touching sympathy. She, too, is a widow and her children are fatherless. She sends flowers for Mrs. Garfield and puts her court in mourning, a compliment never extended before except in the case of death in a royal family. Other European and Asiatic and African governments send their sympathy—they all feel it—they all deplore it. Emblems of mourning are displayed in every street in our city, and every heart is sad. The people mourn.
Boys, you may not be Presidents—probably not one here will ever be at the head of this nation; nor is this of any moment; but remember it was not only as President of the United States that General Garfield was wise and good—it was in every place where he was put; whether in school, in college, in teaching, in the army, in Congress, in the President’s chair, in his family and on his sick and dying bed, languishing and suffering, wasting and burning with fever, exhausted by wounds cruel and undeserved, he was always the same brave, true, real man.
Some of you know with what profound and tender interest people gathered in places of prayer that Tuesday morning to ask that the journey from Washington to Long Branch might be safe and prosperous, and how the hope was expressed, almost to assurance, that the Saviour would meet his disciple by the sea. The prayer was granted. The Lord did meet his disciple, not, as was so much desired, with gifts of healing; nothing short of a miracle could do that, but by a more complete preparation of the people for the final issue. It came at last. And while many of us were sleeping quietly, telegraphic messages were flashing the sad intelligence everywhere that, at last, he was at rest.
Now that we know that he is taken away, we stand in awe and amazement. We cannot yet understand it.
Shall we gather a few lessons from his life? Some of the most apparent may be mentioned very briefly.
The simplicity of his character is most interesting. Conscious as he must have been of the possession of no ordinary mental force, he was never obtrusive nor self-assertive. What seemed to be his duty he did, with purpose and completeness. And his associates often placed him in positions of high trust and responsibility.
He was an accomplished scholar. Even while engrossed in Congressional duties, to a degree which left him little or no time for recreation, he did not fail to keep himself fresh in classic literature. It is said that a friend returning from Europe, and desiring to bring him some little present, could think of nothing more acceptable than a few volumes of the Latin poets.
When his life comes to be written by impartial hands, it will be found that along with his great simplicity and his high culture there will be most prominent his devotion to principle. This was his great characteristic. I have no time, and this is not the place, to speak of his adherence, under strong adverse influences, to his sound views on the great currency question which has occupied so much the attention of Congress.
In a not very remote sense his death is to be attributed to his devotion to principle. That great and most discreditable contest at Albany might have been settled weeks before it was, although in a very different manner, if the President could have yielded his convictions. He did not yield, and he was slain.
The funeral services in the capitol are over and the men whom Mrs. Garfield chose as the bearers of her husband’s coffin were not members of the cabinet, nor senators, nor judges of the Supreme Court, any of whom would have been honored by such a service, but they were plain men, of names unknown to us, members of his own little church.