The Life, Speeches, and Public Services of James A. Garfield, Including an Account of His Assassination, Lingering Pain, Death, and Burial

of the President himself upon the death of Lincoln, reverent alike toward heaven and, as is his wont, toward his fellow-men, "God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives." And God grant, is the fervent prayer of Massachusetts, that our now stricken President may rise from his wounds to the renewed love and loyalty of his people, and to the yet better administration of their affairs. So shall our chastisement work our welfare. Yes, while President Garfield's administration had not yet worked out of port into the open sea, nevertheless this sudden peril of his life has reawakened us to the great, undoubted nobility of his life, his services, and his character. Whatever else was true, in him a great American heart throbbed at the centre of government. There may have been question of some of his personal selections, but the nation's relation to other nations has suffered nothing in dignity or right, its material and financial interests have been secure, and the frauds that had been suffered to fester in its flesh have been put to the curing and stern knife of excoriation.

And yet, when the rumor came, as it came at first, that Garfield was dead, we called up less the President than the man. What a graceful tribute to our government of the people it is that, North, South, East, and West, not a true citizen is there whose heart did not go out with the sympathy and tenderness of comradeship! It is one of our own number that has been stricken down. It is the poor boy of our own youth, bare of foot and weighted with poverty, lifting his eyes through humble toil to the heights of American education and opportunity. is our own classmate, revisiting the college halls and classic scenes of his youth to lay the wreath of his great glory at the feet of his alma mater, and to read in the loving eyes of his wife and children the hon

est pride that comes from the hand-clasp and congratulations of those who knew and loved him in early days. It is the comrade of our own veterans, who fought with him at Chickamauga. It is our

own tribune, who, on the floor of Congress, upon the platform, in many a brave and inspiring word to his countrymen, young and old, has spoken so nobly for humanity, for equal rights, for honest money, for high ideals and systems of political service, and for the national advancement. And it is to the wife and mother, not of the President, but of one of our own number, that our tenderest sympathies go forth as we recall the ripe and bending years of the one, whose brow is still happy with the inauguration kiss of her boy, and whose life spans at once the Western pioneer's cabin and the White House, a tragedy at either end, - or recall the devotion of the other from school-days till now, who has alike brightened his simple Western home, and to-day, in this terrible crisis, sitting at his bedside, stands for the heroism of American womanhood.

Amid these halls for the education of American youth, most earnestly do I claim that such a crime is utterly un-American, as shocking and irrelevant as the monstrosities that now and then sully the fair perfection of nature herself. All the more for that reason the contrast brings out the normal placidity and security of our freedom. Grief and pity and sorrow are ours, but with them come the lesson and the duty, to stand closer, to raise the standard higher, to rise above the meanness of wrangle and selfish plundering, to scatter the miasmatic fog of fanaticism with common sense and good example, and to live more for ourselves by living less for ourselves and more for our fellow-men and country. I offer the prayer which is in all your hearts, and which is breathed by the whole Commonwealth, from

Greylock's top to the pebbles upon the beach at Provincetown, - prayer for the restoration to health and duty, and for the return another year to these beautiful scenes, with which his name and memory will be forever associated, of Williams' foremost graduate, Massachusetts' distinguished descendant, and the nation's beloved President, James A. Garfield!

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