McKINLEY’S GUARD IN ADVANCE OF HEARSE, CANTON.
PLACING THE BODY IN THE VAULT AT WESTLAWN CEMETERY, CANTON.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THE ASSASSIN ARRAIGNED.
At the mid-hour, when the people were filing past the casket that held all that was mortal of the late President of the United States, in the rotunda of the capitol at Washington, Leon Czolgosz, his assassin, was being arraigned for trial in the court room at Buffalo.
“Are you guilty, or not guilty?” was the question which the Law asked of him.
Whatever he was, whatever he had done, the public of the nation was too great to visit upon him the summary vengeance his awful act so richly merited.
Society is better than Czolgosz thought it to be. If it had been the monster he pictured, if it had been the unreasoning and unjust force he had been taught, and which his mad act showed that he believed, that man would have been turned loose from the jail in Buffalo, and the society he condemned would have had its will with him. And the mangled fragments of the Third Assassin would have borne mute testimony to the truth—as well, perhaps, as the justice—of the estimate which he placed upon it.
But instead of that, society gave him all the forms of trial, all the possibilities of defense.