ident and Mr. Blaine walked unattended through the waiting-room of the railway station on that fatal July morning, Garfield would not have been stricken down; and had it not been the custom for the President, on all public occasions, freely to shake hands with large crowds of people, or had such hand-shaking been conducted under proper regulations and precautions, McKinley would have been alive to-day.

These considerations strongly confirm the view that the number and frequency of our national tragedies are not due to the prevalence of a spirit of assassination, but spring from our over-confidence and want of caution; and that the most effective remedy lies in keeping, as far as possible, suspicious persons at a safe distance from the President.

If the real cause of these oft-repeated catastrophes be traced to this source, the situation must be recognized and met by the exercise of the same intelligence, common sense, and sound judgment which have ever characterized the American people in dealing with grave public matters.

The sentimental notion that, because we are a democracy and the people have been accustomed freely and on all occasions to meet their Chief Magistrate, it would be unrepublican and savor of royalty to impair this time-honored custom, must not stand in the way where the life of the President is at stake.

If the universal experience of other civilized peoples, confirmed by our recent history, teaches that the safety of the Head of the State is dependent upon surrounding his person with proper safeguards, it is folly for this country to ignore this fact on the imaginary ground that we are a chosen people, and an exception to all ordinary laws.

The conditions which might have rendered it reasonably safe for the President to mingle openly with the people in the early days of the Republic are changed, and we must adapt ourselves to the new environment. There is a great difference between a sparsely settled country, consisting largely of agricultural communities, with slow and difficult means of communication, and a country inhabited by many millions of people of different nationalities, with the railway, the telegraph, and the telephone, and with the conflicting social forces of the latter part of the nineteenth century. In a few days, his coming having been freely advertised, the President may travel from ocean to ocean, and come in contact with a third of the population of the country; and the same facilities for the annihilation of space and time are afforded the would-be assassin. "New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth."

The bill recently reported to the United States Senate from the Judiciary Committee by Senator

Hoar is certainly a movement in the right direction. By section 7 of the bill, "The Secretary of War is authorized and directed to select and detail from the Regular Army a sufficient number of officers and men to guard and protect the person of the President of the United States without any unnecessary display." If this provision should be supplemented by the appropriation of a sum of money, to be at the disposal of the President for the purpose of securing additional police protection, it would be a further aid.

It is said that the President of the French Republic does not attend public meetings, speak from the platforms of railway cars, move around in an approachable and conspicuous way at fairs and expositions, or hold open levees for the shaking of hands.

As supplementary to the above legislation, if the President should exercise, so far as practicable, the same precautions, the risk would be still further reduced. The visible guard surrounding the President of itself would have a tendency to prevent these attacks. It is a somwhat significant fact in this connection, that no assault has ever been attempted upon the President in the White House, where reasonable precautions are taken.

The situation does not demand that our Chief Magistrate shall travel from place to place with

the military pomp of some European rulers or with the gorgeous pageantry of Queen Elizabeth; but it does demand that he shall be accompanied by reasonable safeguards, appropriate to the simplicity and dignity of republican institutions.

Since the death of President McKinley, the thoughts of the people and of Congress have been mostly occupied in the consideration of measures for the prevention of these attempts rather than in the means for guarding against their fatality. The difficulty of preventing attempts through legislation, except in the particular already mentioned, is that the subject in a large measure lies beyond the control of laws. When we consider the class of persons who commonly make these assaults, it will be found that the laws have little deterrent effect upon them. Let us take, for illustration, this country and England.

Of the ten attacks upon the lives of English rulers since 1789, four were by persons pronounced insane; three by persons unknown, who fired from a distance; and two of the remaining three, from the nature of the assaults, were seemingly by persons acting under the impulse of some imaginary wrong. In the case of the six assaults on Queen Victoria, three were manifestly by insane persons; and it is questionable if more than one out of the six was by a person of sound mind.

In this country we find that the would-be assassin of President Jackson was pronounced hopelessly insane by a jury after five minutes' deliberation, that the assassin of President Garfield is universally admitted to have had an unbalanced mind, and that the medical world is now divided on the subject of the sanity of the slayer of President McKinley. The conclusion reached by Dr. Channing, after careful investigation of this person's life, habits, and antecedents, raises a strong doubt, at least, respecting his mental condition. Dr. Channing's diagnosis indicates mental impairment, which assumed the form of delusions; the exciting causes of the act being the reading of anarchistic literature and attending anarchistic meetings. The assassin of President Lincoln alone forms an exception to the general type. In that instance the attack was the outcome of a political conspiracy.

We find, then, that in England these assaults have been largely mad attempts; and that in this country there have been two mad attempts, a third in the nature of a mad attempt inspired by anarchistic teachings, and a fourth the outgrowth of political strife. It is plain that no laws would have checked the insane Lawrence, who imagined that he had been wrongfully deprived of the crown of England; or the conspirator Booth; or the unhinged Guiteau, who, brooding over his failure to obtain office, be