et
the explanation is simple,--medicine is an art and surgery far
from an exact science. No one so well as the doctors knows how
impossible it is to predict anything with any degree of assurance;
how uncertain the outcome of simple troubles and wounds to say
nothing of serious; how much nature will do if left to herself,
how obstinate she often proves when all the skill of man is
brought to her assistance.

On Friday evening, and far into the night, Herald Square was
filled with a surging throng watching the bulletins from the
chamber of death. It was a dignified end. There must have been a
good deal of innate nobility in William McKinley. With all his
vacillation and infirmity of political purpose, he must have been
a man whose mind was saturated with fine thoughts, for to the very
last, in those hours of weakness when the will no longer sways and
each word is the half-unconscious muttering of the true self, he
shone forth with unexpected grandeur and died a hero.

Late in the evening a bulletin announced that when the message of
death came the bells would toll. In the midst of the night the
city was roused by the solemn pealing of great bells, and from the
streets below there came the sounds of flying horses, of moving
feet, of cries and voices. It seemed as if the city had been held
in check and was now released to express itself in its own
characteristic way. The wave of sound radiated from each newspaper
office and penetrated the most deserted street, the most secret
alley, telling the people of the death of their President.

Anarchy achieved its greatest crime in the murder of President
McKinley while he held the hand of his assassin in friendly grasp.

Little wonder this country was roused as never before, and at this
moment the civilized world is discussing measures for the
suppression, the obliteration, of anarchists, but we must take
heed lest we overshoot the mark.

Three Presidents--Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley--have been
assassinated, but only the last as the result of anarchistic
teachings. The crime of Booth had nothing to do with anarchy; the
crime of half-witted Guiteau had nothing to do with anarchy; but
the deliberate crime of the cool and self-possessed Czolgoscz was
the direct outcome of the "propaganda of action."

Because, therefore, three Presidents have been assassinated, we
must not link the crimes together and unduly magnify the dangers
of anarchy. At most the two early crimes coul