How many countries can join with us in the community of a kindred sorrow!  I will not speak of those distant regions where assassination enters into the daily life of government.  But among the nations bound to us by the ties of familiar intercourse—­who can forget that wise and mild autocrat who had earned the proud title of the liberator? that enlightened and magnanimous citizen whom France still mourns? that brave and chivalrous king of Italy who only lived for his people? and, saddest of all, that lovely and sorrowing empress, whose harmless life could hardly have excited the animosity of a demon?  Against that devilish spirit nothing avails,—­neither virtue nor patriotism, nor age nor youth, nor conscience nor pity.  We can not even say that education is a sufficient safeguard against this baleful evil,—­for most of the wretches whose crimes have so shocked humanity in recent years were men not unlettered, who have gone from the common schools, through murder to the scaffold.

The life of William McKinley was, from his birth to his death, typically American.  There is no environment, I should say, anywhere else in the world which could produce just such a character.  He was born into that way of life which elsewhere is called the middle class, but which in this country is so nearly universal as to make of other classes an almost negligible quantity.  He was neither rich nor poor, neither proud nor humble; he knew no hunger he was not sure of satisfying, no luxury which could enervate mind or body.  His parents were sober, God-fearing people; intelligent and upright, without pretension and without humility.  He grew up in the company of boys like himself, wholesome, honest, self-respecting.  They looked down on nobody; they never felt it possible they could be looked down upon.  Their houses were the homes of probity, piety, patriotism.  They learned in the admirable school readers of fifty years ago the lessons of heroic and splendid life which have come down from the past.  They read in their weekly newspapers the story of the world’s progress, in which they were eager to take part, and of the sins and wrongs of civilization with which they burned to do battle.  It was a serious and thoughtful time.  The boys of that day felt dimly, but deeply, that days of sharp struggle and high achievement were before them.  They looked at life with the wondering yet resolute eyes of a young esquire in his vigil of arms.  They felt a time was coming when to them should be addressed the stern admonition of the Apostle, “Quit you like men; be strong.”

The men who are living to-day and were young in 1860 will never forget the glory and glamour that filled the earth and the sky when the long twilight of doubt and uncertainty was ending and the time for action had come.  A speech by Abraham Lincoln was an event not only of high moral significance, but of far-reaching importance; the drilling of a militia company by Ellsworth attracted national attention; the fluttering of the flag in the clear sky drew tears from the eyes of young men.  Patriotism, which had been a rhetorical expression, became a passionate emotion, in which instinct, logic and feeling were fused.  The country was worth saving; it could be saved only by fire; no sacrifice was too great; the young men of the country were ready for the sacrifice; come weal, come woe, they were ready.