THE TRAGIC END.
I should like to end my story here, and feel that it was complete. I
should like with my countrymen to be still looking forward with interest
to the successful results of an administration, guided by the
experienced statesman whose career we have followed step by step from
its humble beginnings. But it can not be.
On the second of July, in the present year, a startling rumor was borne
on the wings of the lightning to the remotest parts of the land:
"President Garfield has been assassinated!"
The excitement was only paralleled by that which prevailed in 1865, when
Abraham Lincoln was treacherously killed by an assassin. But in this
later case the astonishment was greater, and all men asked, "What can it
mean?"
We were in a state of profound peace. No wars nor rumors of war
disturbed the humble mind, and the blow was utterly unexpected and
inexplicable.
The explanation came soon enough. It was the work of a wretched
political adventurer, who, inflated by an overweening estimate of his
own abilities and importance, had made a preposterous claim to two high
political offices--the post of Minister to Austria, and Consul to
Paris--and receiving no encouragement in either direction, had
deliberately made up his mind to "remove" the President, as he termed
it, in the foolish hope that his chances of gaining office would be
better under another administration.
My youngest readers will remember the sad excitement of that eventful
day. They will remember, also, how the public hopes strengthened or
weakened with the varying bulletins of each day during the protracted
sickness of the nation's head. They will not need to be reminded how
intense was the anxiety everywhere manifested, without regard to party
or section, for the recovery of the suffering ruler. And they will
surely remember the imposing demonstrations of sorrow when the end was
announced. Some of the warmest expressions of grief came from the
South, who in this time of national calamity were at one with their
brothers of the North. And when, on the 26th of September, the last
funeral rites were celebrated, and the body of the dead President was
consigned to its last resting-place in the beautiful Lake View Cemetery,
in sight of the pleasant lake on which his eyes rested as a boy, never
before had there been such imposing demonstrations of grief in our
cities and towns.
These were not confined to public buildings, and to the houses and
warehouses of the rich, but the poorest families displayed their bit of
crape. Outside of a miserable shanty in Brooklyn was displayed a cheap
print of the President, framed in black, with these words written below,
"We mourn our loss." Even as I write, the insignia of grief are still to
be seen in the tenement-house districts on the East Side of New York,
and there seems a reluctance to remove them.
But not alone to our own country were confined the exhibitions of
sympathy, and the anxious alternations of hope and fear. There was
scarcely a portion of the globe in which the hearts of the people were
not deeply stirred by the daily bulletins that came from the sick couch
of the patient sufferer. Of the profound impression made in England I
shall give a description, contributed to the New York _Tribune_ by its
London correspondent, Mr. G.W. Smalley, only premising that the sympathy
and grief were universal: from the Queen, whose messages of tender,
womanly sympathy will not soon be forgotten, to the humblest
day-laborers in the country districts. Never in England has such grief
been exhibited at the sickness and death of a foreign ruler, and the
remembrance of it will draw yet closer together, for all time to come,
the two great sections of the English-speaking tongue. Were it not a
subject of such general interest, I should apologize for the space I
propose to give to England's mourning:
"It happened that some of the humbler classes were among the most eager
to signify their feelings. The omnibus-drivers had each a knot of crape
on his whip. Many of the cabmen had the same thing, and so had the
draymen. In the city, properly so called, and along the water-side, it
was the poorer shops and the smaller craft that most frequently
exhibited tokens of public grief. Of the people one met in mourning the
same thing was true. Between mourning put on for the day and that which
was worn for private affliction it was not possible to distinguish. But
in many cases it was plain enough that the black coat on the
workingman's shoulders, or the bonnet or bit of crape which a shop-girl
wore, was no part of their daily attire. They had done as much as they
could to mark themselves as mourners for the President. It was not much,
but it was enough. It had cost them some thought, a little pains,
sometimes a little money, and they were people whose lives brought a
burden to every hour, who had no superfluity of strength or means, and
on whom even a slight effort imposed a distinct sacrifice. They are not
of the class to whom the Queen's command for Court mourning was
addressed. Few of that class are now in London. St. James' Street and
Pall Mall, Belgravia and May Fair are depopulated. The compliance with
the Queen's behest has been, I am sure, general and hearty, but
evidences of it were to be sought elsewhere than in London.
"Of other demonstrations it can hardly be necessary to repeat or enlarge
upon the description you have already had. The drawn blinds of the
Mansion House and of Buckingham Palace, the flags at half-mast in the
Thames on ships of every nationality, the Stock and Metal Exchanges
closed, the royal standard at half-mast on the steeple of the royal
church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; the darkened windows of great
numbers of banking houses and other places of business in the city
itself--of all these you have heard.
"At the West End, the shops were not, as a rule, draped with black. Some
of them had the Union Jack at half-mast; a few the Stars and Stripes in
black with white and black hangings on the shop fronts. The greater
number of shop-keepers testified to their association with the general
feeling by shutters overhanging the tops of the windows, or by
perpendicular slabs at intervals down the glass. Some had nothing; but
in Regent Street, Bond Street, St. James' Street, and Piccadilly, which
are the fashionable business streets of the West End, those which had
nothing were the exception. The American Legation in Victoria Street,
and the American Consulate in Old Broad Street, both of which were
closed, were in deep mourning. The American Dispatch Agency, occupying
part of a conspicuous building in Trafalgar Square, had nothing to
indicate its connection with America or any share in the general
sorrow.
"In many private houses--I should say the majority in such streets as I
passed through during the day--the blinds were down as they would have
been for a death in the family. The same is true of some of the clubs,
and some of the hotels. The Reform Club, of which Garfield is said to
have been an honorary member, had a draped American flag over the door.
"To-day, as on every previous day since the President's death, the
London papers print many columns of accounts, each account very brief,
of what has been done and said in the so-called provincial towns. One
journal prefaces its copious record by the impressive statement that
from nearly every town and village telegraphic messages have been sent
by its correspondents describing the respect paid to General Garfield on
the day of his funeral. These tributes are necessarily in many places of
a similar character, yet the variety of sources from which they proceed
is wide enough to include almost every form of municipal,
ecclesiastical, political, or individual activity. Everywhere bells are
tolled, churches thrown open for service, flags drooping, business is
interrupted, resolutions are passed. Liverpool, as is natural for the
multiplicity and closeness of her relations with the United States, may
perhaps be said to have taken the lead. She closed, either in whole or
in part, her Cotton Market, her Produce Markets, her Provision Market,
her Stock Exchange. Her papers came out in mourning. The bells tolled
all day long.
"Few merchants, one reads, came to their places of business, and most of
those who came were in black. The Mayor and members of the Corporation,
in their robes, attended a memorial service at St. Peter's, and the
cathedral overflowed with its sorrowing congregation. Manchester,
Newcastle, Birmingham, Glasgow, Bradford, Edinburgh were not much behind
Liverpool in demonstrations, and not at all behind it in spirit. It is
an evidence of the community of feeling between the two countries that
so much of the action is official. What makes these official acts so
striking, also, is the evident feeling at the bottom of this, that
between England and America there is some kind of a relation which
brings the loss of the President into the same category with the loss of
an English ruler.
"At Edinburgh it is the Lord Provost who orders the bells to be tolled
till two. At Glasgow the Town Council adjourns. At Stratford-on-Avon the
Mayor orders the flag to be hoisted at half-mast over the Town Hall, and
the blinds to be drawn, and invites the citizens to follow his example,
which they do; the bell at the Chapel of the Holy Cion tolling every
minute while the funeral is solemnized at Cleveland. At Leeds the bell
in the Town Hall is muffled and tolled, and the public meeting which the
United States Consul, Mr. Dockery, addresses, is under the presidency of
the acting Mayor. Mr. Dockery remarked that as compared with other great
towns, so few were the American residents in Leeds, that the great
exhibition of sympathy had utterly amazed him. The remark is natural,
but Mr. Dockery need not have been amazed. The whole population of Leeds
was American yesterday; and of all England. At Oxford the Town Council
voted an address to Mrs. Garfield. At the Plymouth Guildhall the maces,
the emblems of municipal authority, were covered with black At Dublin
the Lord Mayor proposed, and the Aldermen adopted, a resolution of
sympathy.
"In all the cathedral towns the cathedral authorities prescribed
services for the occasion. I omit, because I have no room for them,
scores of other accounts, not less significant and not less affecting.
They are all in one tone and one spirit. Wherever in England, yesterday,
two or three were gathered together, President Garfield's name was
heard. Privately and publicly, simply as between man and man, or
formally with the decorous solemnity and stately observance befitting
bodies which bear a relation to the Government, a tribute of honest
grief was offered to the President and his family, and of honest
sympathy to his country. Steeple spoke to steeple, distant cities
clasped hands. The State, the Church, the people of England were at one
together in their sorrow, and in their earnest wish to offer some sort
of comfort to their mourning brothers beyond the sea. You heard in every
mouth the old cry, 'Blood is thicker than water.' And the voice which is
perhaps best entitled to speak for the whole nation added, 'Yes, though
the water be a whole Atlantic Ocean.'"
In addition to these impressive demonstrations, the Archbishop of
Canterbury held a service and delivered an address in the church of St.
Martin-in-the-Fields, on Monday. Mr. Lowell had been invited, of
course, by the church wardens, and a pew reserved for him, but when he
reached the church with his party half his pew was occupied.
"The Archbishop, who wore deep crape over his Episcopal robes, avoided
calling his discourse a sermon, and avoided, likewise, through the
larger portion of it, the purely professional tone common in the pulpit
on such occasions. During a great part of his excellent address he
spoke, as anybody else might have done, of the manly side of the
President's character. He gave, moreover, his own view of the reason why
all England has been so strangely moved. 'During the long period of the
President's suffering,' said the Archbishop, 'we had time to think what
manner of man this was over whom so great a nation was mourning day by
day. We learned what a noble history his was, and we were taught to
trace a career such as England before knew nothing of.'
"Among the innumerable testimonies to the purity and beauty of
Garfield's character," says Mr. Smalley, "this address of the Primate of
the English Church surely is one which all Americans may acknowledge
with grateful pride."