We stand in the shadow of a national sorrow.
In an hour of national pride and jubilation, with the eyes of the world upon the greatest republic since the eagles of Rome overspread the earth, in the fullness of his powers and the prime of his usefulness, the Chief Magistrate of the Republic was stricken down by the hand of an assassin. It is meet here that I should refer in the opening of my address to this third assassination in the history of our country, for the purpose of illustrating the short story that I have to tell you and to point a moral and adorn a tale which may not be without value to us. For it is true that
"Lives of great men all remind us
We may make our lives sublime,
And departing leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time."
William McKinley was the incarnation, not only of the possibilities of the humblest American boy who, by diligence, integrity and devotion to the best interests of the country, rose by steady strides to the highest dignities in the gift of the people, but he was also the embodiment of that grand sweep of American business genius which has spread over the world, and promises to predominate it. If this man who now rests from his labors with his honors full upon him represented anything, it was the logic of business development in its largest and best sense, for, as Governor of Ohio and member in Congress and President of the United States, his name is indissolubly associated with the commercial promotion, protection and expansion of American trade.
He was not only a great executive and a great legislator, but, when yet a youth, when the great Republic was in the agony of possible dissolution, he heroically shouldered a musket and went to the front as a private to preserve the union of the states bequeathed to us by the noble fathers and the heroism of the American revolutionary soldier in that memorable struggle, the first victim of which was Crispus Attucks, the lineaments of whose personality have been chiseled in marble and will stand a monument upon Boston Common, to show a "Man's a man for a' that and a' that," and that the rank is but the guinea's stamp.
Ah, well, we faithful hearts and true, who were never false to a friend, who have always loved the flag, even when the flag waved not over us, who fought with Washington at Valley Forge and with Perry at Lake Erie, with Jackson at New Orleans, with Shaw at Fort Wagner, and with Butler at New Market Heights, who went up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt and the immortal Rough Riders and followed little Joe Wheeler in Luzon, who, although a Southern brigadier, as a reconstructed unionist in a reunited country showed in Cuba and Manila that he had the same regard for a black soldier as for a white one when he was loyal to the flag and faithful to his country, are here to mourn our loss. This great heart that loved his country and gave his life to it and for it is stilled in death!
The assassin! What of him? It is a matter of notorious fact that he was so obscure in the life that he had led and had contributed so little to the public weal in the place where his hands found labor that he was utterly unknown and went down to the quicklime that consumed his miserable remains, to the chaos from which we all spring, stigmatized with at least two cognomens and with the reputation of having contributed nothing to the wealth of the Republic or the happiness of mankind. There are millions of him in Europe and America who keep in perpetual jeopardy the splendid civilization evolved out of the tumult of Egypt and Rome and the Dark Ages. And the very genius of logical business development sprung out of the bosom of Moroe on the Nile and of Tyre where ancient Afro-Phœnicians ruled the blue waters of the adjacent seas and of the lordly Egyptians, who were African in their fiber, historians to the contrary notwithstanding, were the founders of the commercial spirit that dominates the world to-day. More than that, they laid the basis of our literature and of our philosophy. As Lord Byron hath beautifully said:
"Ye have the Pyrrick dances yet—
Where has the Pyrrick phalanx gone?
Of two such lessons, why forget
The nobler and the manlier one?
Ye have the letters Cadmus gave;
Think ye he meant them for a slave?"
Now, Cadmus was a black African slave captured in war; so was Aesop, the world's greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the grandest of Rome's lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-day of Russia; so was Alexander Dumas the first, the greatest, not only of French novelists, but of novelists of all times and the infinite storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honore De Balzac and Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.