The Midnight Bells.--Universal Sorrow.--Queen Victoria's
Messages.--Extract from a London Letter.--The Whitby
Fishermen.--The Yorkshire Peasant.--World-wide
Demonstrations of Grief.
"There passed a sound at midnight through the land,
A solemn sound of sorrow and of fear;
A sound that fell on every wakening ear
Bearing a message all could understand."
The tolling of the bells in every city, town, and village throughout the
country announced the sad tidings of the President's death. The whole
world stopped to shed a sympathizing tear, and among the first
expressions of condolence received by Mrs. Garfield was the following
telegram from Queen Victoria:--
"BALMORAL.
"Words cannot express the deep sympathy I feel with you. May
God support and comfort you as He alone can.
(Signed) THE QUEEN."
To Minister Lowell the Queen telegraphed as follows:--
"With deep grief I and my children learn the sad but not
unexpected news of the fatal termination of the sufferings
of the President. His loss is a great misfortune. I have
learned with deep sorrow that the President has passed
away."
Smalley, the correspondent of the New York _Tribune_ writing from London
said,--
"It was about four o'clock in the morning of Tuesday, by English time,
that President Garfield died. An hour later the news was here, and some
of the morning papers published it in a few late copies of their morning
edition. It was known in the provinces at the same moment, and published
in the same way. Before I say anything about the feeling it evoked in
high places and with the general public, I should like to mention what
occurred in the town where I was staying; Whitby, a fishing town and
small seaport which is also a watering-place on the northeast coast of
Yorkshire. At this season Whitby is the rendezvous for herring-fishers,
and its little harbor is crowded with boats hailing from ports all the
way from Pentland Firth to Penzance; Penzance itself sending a large
contingent. The fishermen are a simple folk, leading a hard life,
untaught, and as free from any concern on shore in the general affairs
of the world as any body of men that could be got together. But when
they heard that President Garfield was dead they one and all hoisted
their bits of flag at half-mast, and so kept them during the day. They
held no meeting, passed no resolutions. I suppose not a man among them
could have made a speech or drawn up a formal declaration of sorrow.
They acted with no concert of any kind. Their way of life makes them all
rivals and often enemies. Hartlepool has nothing to say to Lowestoft,
Sunderland quarrels with Arbroath, and Whitby itself keeps but ill terms
with any of its many guests. But somehow they agreed for this once. The
boats that lay in the river above the bridge, next the railway station,
were the first to hang out their signal of grief. Those in the port
below soon followed. Not long after, without anybody being able to say
how the news spread, the fleet at anchor outside the harbor one by one
ran up their ensigns, hauled them half down, and there made them fast
for the day.
"Amid the innumerable demonstrations of sorrow to be seen and heard
these last two days all over England, I know of none which more truly
indicates the essentially popular character of the regret which the
President's death has excited.... An English friend who was shooting ten
days ago over a Yorkshire moor told me that, as the scattered line of
sportsmen were pushing through the heather in silence, the gamekeeper
met him some yards away, turned and asked: 'Can you tell me, sir, how
President Garfield is?' There on that lonely hillside, three thousand
miles and more distant from the sufferer, in the early morning, beneath
a sun which was not yet shining upon the President, breathing an air he
never breathed, this Yorkshire peasant, who had spent his life without
so much as hearing the President's name till a few weeks before; who
knew not the letters of which it was formed; who knew about grouse and
guns and dogs and the weather, and nothing else whatever; whose interest
in life never went beyond the stone hut in which he slept and ate, and
the stretch of furz-clad upland which lifted itself against the western
sky,--he, like the fishermen, had come to think or to feel that, somehow
or other, the life or death of that far-away martyr concerned him too.
It is easy to say that beneath the shooting-jacket and the jersey beats
the same human heart. No doubt it does. But what was it that set it
beating in unison with so many millions of others like it with sympathy
for the President? Lord Palmerston said he never knew what fame was till
he heard of the Tartar mothers on the steppes of Russia in Asia
frightening their children into quiet with some queer travesty of his
dreaded name. Yorkshire is not so remote as Russian Asia, indeed, but
the friendly concern of the gamekeeper was surely a truer measure of
real fame than the ignorant terror of the Muscovite mother. I know I
thought when I heard it that the President who lay dying would have
valued such a proof of the universality of the interest in him not less
than those expressions of it--certainly not less genuine--which came
from much higher quarters."
[Illustration: Francklyn Cottage, where the President died.]
Said another writer:--
"The American people cannot fail to be deeply impressed by the
multitudinous expressions of sympathy which have come from foreign
lands. It was to be expected that there would be the usual and formal
messages from the various rulers, but it is something of quite a
different sort, and something altogether beyond precedent which we are
witnessing. From all the governments of Europe, and from those of the
Orient as well, and from our nearer neighbors, Canada and Mexico, words
of sympathy and condolence have come. But beyond all this, and more
precious, are the manifestations of popular feeling in countries other
than our own, and especially in Great Britain and Canada. We hear of
public and private buildings draped in mourning, of mourning-flags upon
English Cathedrals, of the tolling of bells in English and Canadian
churches, of English and French journals with mourning borders. The
Queen sends a warm, womanly message of sympathy to the widow; and the
English Court puts on mourning for a week. And all these world-wide
demonstrations of grief, sincere, spontaneous and universal, are called
out by the death of this uncrowned republican of our Western world, a
man born of the people, schooled in hardship, but strong and noble in
all that pertains to true manhood. Such a spectacle as this, such
tributes as these from foreign potentates and peoples whose ideas and
methods of government vary so widely from ours, should not pass without
being heeded, and the lesson which they convey should be laid to heart.
It is true, as one of the leading English journals has well expressed
it, that a common sorrow unites the ocean-sundered members of the
English race to-day more closely than it has ever been since 1776, and
that there is scarcely an Englishman in a thousand who did not read of
President Garfield's death, with a regret as real and as deep as if he
had been a ruler of their own."