Sinister Sorrow.

Dead or alive, all's one to me, with mischievous persons; but alas! how very grievously all's two to me, when they are helpful and noble ones. -John Ruskins


No person of proper human feeling would insult a sincere mourner standing at a grave. Doubtless there are many mourners in this hour of what is called "the nation's sorrow" who, however mistaken, are honest in their grief. This article is not for them. Indeed, to a certain extent we share their sorrow. Garfield died manfully after weeks of patient suffering, as many another man dies every day. With all of these victims we have sympathy in their suffering, for all of them respect in their fortitude; with and for Garfield as much as the rest, and no more. Nor to those deluded persons who are led to shed dutiful tears by an idolatrous worship of rulers and government have we a word to say to-day. True, it is Liberty's main purpose to sooner or later convict them of their error; but, cherishing the error honestly, let them respect its forms.

Our indignant denunciation is of the heartless scoundrels whose tool Garfield has been, who, with sinister purpose, have put in operation all this machinery of woe, hoping thereby to intimidate or bribe the late president's successors into following his example. Garfield died manfully, we said above. Did he live manfully? That is the main question. He appears to have been a amiable friend, a good husband and father, and a hard though rather superficial student. But his was not the stuff of human grandeur. A man who, at twenty-five or thirty, writes sophomoric poetry, preaches, prays, and sings pennyroyal hymns in Christian conventicles, and who, in his maturer years, consorts largely and lovingly with priests and indulges in their religious gush, is not the kind of man that is apt to do much helping the world onward. In the composition of such men putty is a large ingredient; and so it was with Garfield. All his later life he has been led by the nose by designing villains, schemers against the people's product. He has helped them, more or less innocently, more or less guiltily, yielding to their preferred temptations and sometimes betraying the people's trust. A very convenient man for our purposes, think the schemers. His place must not be left vacant. Other must be tempted into it. So, taking advantage of undue respect for the office which he chanced to hold, at their bidding word goes forth.

Toll the bells! Fire the minute-guns! Bestow riches on his family. Bear his body through the country with funeral pomp and circumstance! Hang upon the outer walls the gloomy trapping of woe! And all is promptly done. The commercial world responds in a spirit of rivalry, each member of it trying to advertise his interests by surpassing his neighbor in the ostentation of sorrow. Preachers fill the air with lamentations, and poets sing the martyr's praises for a price. Messages of condolence and grief pass back and forth under the ocean between the crowned heads of Europe and uncrowned despots of America, Victoria, William, and Alexander recognize instinctively that, in the death of a president no less than in that of a king, a fellow tyrant falls. The kindred of oppressors feel for each other. And by this manufactured manifestation a public sentiment is created to shield them a little longer in their grinding of the oppressed. How long shall this thing last? Let the victims abandon their prayers, wipe away the blinding tears, and look with undiminished eyes straight into the nature of these plots and plotters. A clear vision is all that's needed. The rest will follow.