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EDITORS' NOTE-BOOK.

THE DEAD PRESIDENT.

The country pauses in its business activities to mourn the loss of its Chief Magistrate. It hushes the voice of its merry-makings, and stills even the murmur of its private griefs to voice the utterance of its public sorrow and gather in the lessons of its great calamity. We have seen everywhere its lowered flag, and noted in every town and hamlet the mourning emblems which are the inadequate pageantry that speak the universal

North and South, and beyond the seas, all peoples join in tender and heartfelt memorials of sympathy and regret. Patriotism demands the hour to render the tribute of its grateful memories and the homage of its tears; and religion brings its consolations, and turns the current of its counsels to hallow the solemn and pathetic suggestions of the time.

A life of successive conquests and greatening honors is fulfilled, too soon, too sadly, and painfully cut off; but, patient and courageous and cheery to the end, let us thankfully recognize the successful course whose untimely ending we deplore, and deplore just because that course was worthy such success.

It is time the strain should be ended; time for him whose fortitude and persistent hopefulness seemed indeed unconquerable, time for the country which has been learning so fast the great lessons Providence had appointed it through all these burdened weeks. So far as outward conditions go, it may be reckoned for him a fortunate and not untimely end. His place in history is secure. He had completed the circle of outward honors in the gift of his country. It remained only to be seen whether he had attained the fuller grace of filling the highest position well. The household and the nation mourn; but he rests in the grateful and endeared remembrance of men, and in the peace of the Christian's trust.

And it is well for the anxious heart of the country to rest, albeit in the shadow of its bereaved hope and longing. The shock of the news of assassination has largely passed by; the fears from its repeated horror for the future of the country have subsided in the uprising of that universal moral sentiment that proves the heart of the nation sound; the dread of sinking back to the

level of vulgar partisanship in the conduct of public affairs is partly lightened by the good conduct of all men and parties in the presence of this calamity, and partly lost in gratitude for the way in which this trial has touched the public conscience with a new sense of the enormity of the system of political greed and rewards; the wonderful flow of tender and hearty sympathies has bound the sections of the land together, and together to purposes of nobler and better political action in the future; the lessons of sickness and deferred hope, and of the patience and courage and long waiting upon the undisclosed secrets of nature and Providence have been learned out; and, now that the end is come, we have but to confirm these lessons to our hearts anew, to commend ourselves and our country to the Good Spirit in whose leading we and it are forever secure, to express our profound sympathy for the bereaved household that has come so inevitably to share the nation's interest and veneration, and then to turn to our duties public and private again, ready for the next burden, the next lesson, the next service of effort or endurance life claims of us, in the order that is all divine in its sunshine and its sadness.

Indeed, the people in their outflowing sympathies and their pitiful regret have in reality been mourning the common misfortunes of humanity. In the languishing of the President and the long agony of his household, they have beheld the disasters of all men and the griefs of all households for the common bereavements of life. The high station of the sufferer and the enforced publicity lifted the whole tragedy, with its shock and suffering and endurance, into the sight of the world; and the sympathies that proximity and complete knowledge always deepen and intensify have been stirred to their depths. It was not only a good man shot, it is not even a beloved President dead; but all the good lives untimely ended, and all households called to pass through such trials, are mourned and prayed for in the one great sorrow so brought before the country. This representative quality of sorrow is not less really true, because unconsciously true. This universal human element is not the least interesting aspect of this tragedy, nor the least profitable for us to contemplate. It gives, indeed, a new sacredness to the expression of the general grief, to feel that it is not by virtue of what is exceptional and accidental, but because it is typical and illustrative of universal human life, that it has opened the foun

tains of universal human tenderness, pitiful sympathy, and loving

sorrow.

A remarkable thing in the career of General Garfield was his thorough adequacy for every successive position he achieved. As a teacher, as a soldier and commander of men, as a congressman and leader of the House of Representatives, as a candidate and President meeting the people and their demands, he never fell below the occasion, and always won the same confidence and admiration from those about him that he commanded from the members of his household and the community in the midst of which he lived. How varied, apt, and excellent were the little speeches which he scattered along his journeys after he became the central figure in the attention of the American people, showing the man of large and ready resources, of fine perceptions, and wide and abounding sympathies.

Mr. Garfield was our first scholar President for a long period; with the exception, perhaps, of John Quincy Adams, the most scholarly of all our Presidents. He was a hard student all his life, and made it his rule to master all knowledge bearing upon his calling, whatever that for the time might be. And the many Vocations he successively filled made his life constantly arduous, and insured with his studious habit a wide and ever-growing culture. And yet he was not, like many men of scholarly habits, separated in sympathy or genius from the great body of the people. He held his gifts and his acquirements ready for the service of the time, and for the practical conduct of affairs. He was at once a man of culture and a man of the people, devoting his hard-won mental discipline and resources to the varied service of the public exigencies, and the intelligent and sagacious leadership of the causes of patriotism and the national weal. His course was not the only one in which high culture may serve civilization and humanity; but it was in substance and spirit. a course which it would be hopeful and reassuring to find the educated men of America emulating in greatly increased numbers. "To serve the present age" in its largest and most permanent interests where most its service is defective - is not only the practical call of religion, but the most urgent and honorable obligation of intelligence, culture, and privilege. The dignity, ability, and confidence thus brought into the public service tend to confound greedy partisans, and upset the proj

ects of shallow demagogues. In the devotion of trained ability and capacious brains to the public service of this country, General Garfield's career, like that of Mr. Gladstone to England, is a piece of public good fortune, such as both countries will more and more appreciate the more often the growing sense of public duty among men of large abilities and attainments permits the world to enjoy it.

But more important to be dwelt on now, is the strengthened sense of moral forces and their rightful dominance, which the character and course of General Garfield have emphasized and furthered. We need intelligence and capacity in public and political life; but, above all, we need integrity, moral elevation, and magnanimous manhood. Whether he was wholly flawless, or would have proved completely wise and firm, no man need inquire to-day, in view of the undoubted fact that the high moral quality of his character is patent in his course from the beginning to the end; and that the confidence of those who knew him best was as great for the future, that must now remain unfulfilled, as for the past they had watched from the beginning. General Garfield, like his predecessor, was a man of high standards of moral conduct and of administration; and it is not the least of his services to the American people that these standards, lifted to new reverence by the sorrow and indignation for his fate, will make the people more dissatisfied with lower and looser ones henceforth. The magnanimous purposes his character and intentions indicated form, henceforward, the normal demand of the political intelligence and morality of the country upon its public men.

The story of his career we cannot follow without admiration for the qualities which secured his so rapid advancement, nor without new enthusiasm for the country in which the possibility of such advancement is assured. The persistence, selfdenial and diligence that marked his early struggles; the tenderness, magnanimity, and devotedness which have pervaded his intimate relations, and lent such grace and power to his public utterances and actions; the geniality, painstaking, heartiness, and high-mindedness that endeared him to pupils and comrades; the readiness for duty and intrepidity of service that characterized his career as a soldier,— all these qualities, in their happy combination, form a character, and exhibit themselves in a course of life singularly winning and inspiring, and make his

character specially impressive in its moral aspects now that its lessons are touched with the pathos of his fate.

We can, too, claim for religion the reverence and Christian consecration of General Garfield's character; and may ascribe much to it doubtless for the purity of his habits, the strength and nobility of his purposes, and not less the fortitude and cheerfulness of those lingering hours of suffering and waiting in the shadow of death,- brightened again in the record of his patience and courage. His confessed but quiet piety is another instance that the strongest and highest among us live, and feel the need of living, as children before God in dependence and trust. He was a thoroughly religious man, not in the sense of stern and narrow pietism, but of pervading reverence and elevation of spirit. The Church that won and kept his faith and loyalty was one of those dishonored by the dogmatists, founded on the Christian gospel, without formal creed or pretentious ecclesiasticism. It is a mark of progress that it does not even occur to Orthodoxy to doubt the adequacy of such creedless evangelicalism. But we care more to note the lesson that piety honors the strong man no less than the gentle woman and the little child; and that, if the sincerity of doubt is honorable in its frank avowal, the instinct of faith and the intelligence of Christian conviction are lovely in the crowning grace and dignity they impart to character.

And, as with genuine religion always, General Garfield's whole career and character, pervaded and elevated by his Christian faith, becomes practical and religious in its suggestions and inspirations, teaching us that true manhood, as it rises toward its completeness in reverence, conscientiousness, and the full consecration of all its unfolded powers, is at once the best fulfilment of the Christian standard, and the supreme gift that God can make to the world, or that any man can make to his age. Our dead President was, in his qualities and achievements, a grand type of American manhood, a high example for the emulation of the young American manhood of to-day. We see in his course how the worthiest ends of life are those that are dutiful, unselfish, magnanimous; that opportunity is best used, that culture is noblest and most progressive, that success in life is most real and assured, when a man fits himself for use, feels the supreme control of conscience, and serves the large ends of humanity; that the strategic conditions of large growth for the

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