Wednesday and Thursday the reports were so assuring that all danger seemed past; but, as it turned out afterwards, there was not a moment from the hour of the shooting when the fatal processes of dissolution were not going on.  Not only did the resources of surgery and medicine fail most miserably, but their gifted prophets were unable to foretell the end.  Bulletins of the most reassuring character turned out absolutely false.  After it was all over, there was a great deal of explanation how it occurred and that it was inevitable from the beginning; but the public did not, and does not, understand how the learned doctors could have been so mistaken Wednesday and so wise Friday; and yet 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.”