CHAPTER XL.
CANTON’S FAREWELL TO McKINLEY.
William McKinley had come home for the last time.
At Buffalo, at Washington and throughout the hundreds of miles between, the nation had mourned the dead President. The city and state which gave him to the nation now knelt and wept for him. For a decade and more his life had been the greatest fact in their history. To say Ohio or Canton was to say McKinley.
Two weeks before he left them in the full tide of health and strength, followed by the cheers of his neighbors, who felt themselves honored in him, their President. And now he was brought back dead. He whose life was all of kindness and love had been stricken by the hand of an assassin. That thought added a bitter drop to the cup of woe which his city and state now drinks.
Canton had done its utmost a score of times in honor of William McKinley. The demonstration as he came home with the representatives of a sorrowing nation and of sympathizing peoples in his funeral train rolled them all up into one supreme testimonial.
Imagine the picture. The city robed in black. Places of business are closed and draped. Crepe from public buildings and on private houses where death has never entered. Arches of mourning span the street. Flags looped with crepe and great banners of black and white wave overhead. The business block which bears his name, the old law office where he worked, are wrapped in mourning. The multitude is silent in the streets with loops of crepe on arms and shoulders.
The courthouse, scene of his early struggles as a lawyer, has been transformed, as it were, into a huge funeral crypt, swathed in the garb of sorrow from sill to tower peak. Across the front, shining in letters of gold against the somber background, is inscribed President McKinley’s last message to those he loved: “It is God’s way; His will, not ours, be done.”
There the stricken President’s body lay all day guarded by soldiers of the state and nation, only one step from the tomb, while his old friends and neighbors, companions of his early struggles and his later triumphs, streamed by for one last look at his face.
For one night he rested under the cottage roof whence he went to the highest seat in the nation.
The scenes along the last stage of President McKinley’s progress toward the grave duplicated those which accompanied his funeral train from Buffalo to Washington. Most of the journey from Washington to this city was by night. It made no difference to the people who sought the last chance to show their regard for the lamented President.