This ass with the unpronounceable name was probably more insane than usual this week or two back, and may get back upon his bearings by and by, but he was over the sanity-border when he shot the President.  It is possible that it has taken him the whole interval since the murder of the King of Italy to get insane enough to attempt the President’s life.  Without a doubt some thousands of men have been meditating the same act in the same interval, but new and strong interests have intervened and diverted their over-excited minds long enough to give them a chance to settle, and tranquilize, and get back upon a healthy level again.  Every extraordinary occurrence unsettles the heads of hundreds of thousands of men for a few moments or hours or days.  If there had been ten kings around when Humbert fell they would have been in great peril for a day or more—­and from men in whose presence they would have been quite safe after the excess of their excitement had had an interval in which to cool down.  I bought a revolver once and travelled twelve hundred miles to kill a man.  He was away.  He was gone a day.  With nothing else to do, I had to stop and think—­and did.  Within an hour—­within half of it —­I was ashamed of myself—­and felt unspeakably ridiculous.  I do not know what to call it if I was not insane.  During a whole week my head was in a turmoil night and day fierce enough and exhausting enough to upset a stronger reason than mine.

All over the world, every day, there are some millions of men in that condition temporarily.  And in that time there is always a moment —­perhaps only a single one when they would do murder if their man was at hand.  If the opportunity comes a shade too late, the chances are that it has come permanently too late.  Opportunity seldom comes exactly at the supreme moment.  This saves a million lives a day in the world—­for sure.

No Ruler is ever slain but the tremendous details of it are ravenously devoured by a hundred thousand men whose minds dwell, unaware, near the temporary-insanity frontier—­and over they go, now!  There is a day—­two days—­three—­during which no Ruler would be safe from perhaps the half of them; and there is a single moment wherein he would not be safe from any of them, no doubt.

It may take this present shooting-case six months to breed another ruler-tragedy, but it will breed it.  There is at least one mind somewhere which will brood, and wear, and decay itself to the killing-point and produce that tragedy.

Every negro burned at the stake unsettles the excitable brain of another one—­I mean the inflaming details of his crime, and the lurid theatricality of his exit do it—­and the duplicate crime follows; and that begets a repetition, and that one another one and so on.  Every lynching-account unsettles the brains of another set of excitable white men, and lights another pyre—­115 lynchings last year, 102 inside of 8 months this year; in ten years this will be habit, on these terms.