CHAPTER XL.

National Day of Mourning.--Draping of Public Buildings and Private Residences.--Touching Incident.--Tributes to Garfield.--Senator Hoar's Address.--Whittier's Letter.--Senator Dawes' Remarks.

Monday, September 26th, the day when the funeral rites were celebrated at Cleveland, was appointed by President Arthur as a national day of mourning. The public buildings throughout the country and many private residences were draped with mourning, while beautiful and appropriate emblems of the nation's sorrow were seen in almost every window. A touching incident is told of a poor colored washerwoman at Long Branch who tore up her one Sunday gown, a cheap black gingham, and hung it about her door. When remonstrated with, she said, quietly,--

"He was my President, too." It would take volumes to give any adequate collection of the many beautiful tributes to Garfield delivered in the pulpit, from the forum, and through the public press, but from them we select a few.

At Mechanic's Hall in Worcester, Senator George F. Hoar spoke as follows: "I suppose at this single hour there is deeper grief over the civilized world than at any other single hour in its history. Heroes, and statesmen, and monarchs, and orators, and warriors, and great benefactors of the race, have died and been buried. There have been men like William the Silent and his kinsmen of England, and men like Lincoln, whose death generations unborn will lament with a sense as of personal bereavement. But in the past the knowledge of great events and great characters made its way slowly to the minds of men. The press and the telegraph have this summer assembled all Christendom morning and evening at the door of one sick-chamber. The gentle and wise Lincoln had to overcome the hatred and bitterness of a great civil war. It was the fortune of President Garfield, as it was never the fortune of any other man, that his whole life has been unrolled as a scroll to be read of all men. The recent election had made us familiar with that story of the childhood in the log cabin, of the boyhood on the canal boat, of the precious school time, of the college days at the feet of our saintly Hopkins, of the school-teacher, of the marriage to the bright and beautiful schoolmate, of the Christian preacher, of the soldier saving the army at Chickamauga, of the statesman leading in great debates in Congress, and of the orator persuading the conscience and judgment of Ohio, and, through her, saving the nation's honor and credit in the great strife for public honesty, of the judge determining the great issue of the title to the presidency, of the loved and trusted popular leader, to whom was offered the choice of three great offices, Representative, Senator, and President at once. We know it all by heart, as we know the achievements of the brief and brilliant administration of the presidential office and the heroic patience and cheer of that long dying struggle, when every sigh of agony was uttered in a telephone at which all mankind were listening. No wonder the heart burst at last. While it was throbbing and pulsing with fever and pain, it furnished the courage which held up for seventy-nine days the sinking hopes of a world. This man touched the common life of humanity, touched its lowliness, touched its greatness, at so many points. His roots were in New England puritanism, were in the yeomanry of Worcester and Middlesex. He grew up to manhood in Ohio. The South had learned to know him. Her soldiers had met him in battle. When he died she was making ready to clasp the hand he was holding out to her returning loyalty. The child in the log cabin knows all about the childhood so like his own. Scholarship mourns the scholar who was struck down when he was hastening to lay his untarnished laurel at the feet of his college. Every mother's heart in America stirred within her when the first act of the new President was to pay homage to his own mother. The soldiers and sailors of England, the veterans of Trafalgar and Waterloo, join his own comrades in mourning for a hero whom they deemed worthy to be ranked with the heroes who held out the livelong day with Wellington, or who obeyed Nelson's immortal signal. The laborer misses a brother who has known all the bitterness of poverty and the sweetness of bread earned by the sweat of his brow. The Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and sovereign of Cyprus and Malta and Gibraltar and Canada and Jamaica, knew her peer when she laid her wreath, last Friday, on the coffin of a king. The last we heard of him in health he was playing like a boy with his boy. As our friend said in the pulpit yesterday, the saints of mankind, when they saw him, knew the birthmark of their race, and bowed their heads. The American people have anointed him as the representative of their sovereignty. Washington and Lincoln came forward to greet him and welcome him to a seat beside their own. I say there is deeper grief at this hour over the civilized world than at any other single hour in history. It seems to me that the death of President Garfield is the greatest single calamity this country ever suffered. I have no doubt there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men who would gladly have bought his life with their own, but we shall dishonor our dead here if, even while his grave is open, we allow ourselves to utter a cry of despair. It is true of nations, even more than of man, that "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." Our republic was planted in sorrow. One-half of the pilgrims died at Plymouth the first winter, and yet not one of the original colony went back to England. Is there any man now who would they had not died, or wishes they had found summer and plenty and ease on the coast of Massachusetts? Could we celebrate Yorktown with the same lofty triumph without the memories of Valley Forge and the death of Hale and Warren? I think even the widow who goes mourning all her days will hardly wish now that our regiments had come home from the war with full ranks. God has taken from us our beloved, but think what has been brought into this precious life. Fifty millions of people, of many races, of many climes, the workman, the farmer, the slave just made free, met together to choose the man whom they could call to the presidency among mankind. God took him in his first hour of triumph and stretched him for seventy-nine days upon a rack. He turned in upon that sick-chamber a Drummond light that all mankind might look in upon that cruel assay, and see what manner of men and what manner of women Freedom calls to her high places. He revealed to them courage, constancy, cheerfulness, woman's love, faith in God, submission to his will. Into what years of Europe, into what cycles of Cathay were ever crowded so much of hope and cheer for humanity as into the tragedy of Elberon? Your prayers were not answered; the bitter cup has not passed from you, but, so long as human hearts endure, humanity will be strengthened and comforted, because you have drunk it."

* * * * *

The following letter, from John G. Whittier, was read at the funeral services of President Garfield, held in Amesbury:--

DANVERS, MASS., 9TH MO., 24, 1881. W. H. B. CURRIER.

_My Dear Friend_,--I regret that it is not in my power to join the citizens of Amesbury and Salisbury in the memorial services on the occasion of the death of our lamented President. But in heart and sympathy, I am with you. I share the great sorrow which overshadows the land; I fully appreciate the irretrievable loss. But it seems to me that the occasion is one for thankfulness as well as grief. Through all the stages of the solemn tragedy which has just closed with the death of our noblest and best, I have felt that the Divine Providence was overruling the mighty affliction--that the patient sufferer at Washington was drawing with cords of sympathy all sections and parties nearer to each other. And now, when South and North, Democrat and Republican, Radical and Conservative, lift their voices in one unbroken accord of lamentation; when I see how, in spite of the greed of gain, the lust of office, the strifes and meanness of party politics, the great heart of the nation proves sound and loyal, I feel a new hope for the republic. I have a firmer faith in its stability. It is said that no man liveth and no man dieth to himself; and the pure and noble life of Garfield, and his slow, long martyrdom so bravely borne in the view of all are, I believe, bearing for us, as a people, "the peaceable fruits of righteousness." We are stronger, wiser, better for them.

With him it is well. His mission fulfilled, he goes to his grave by the lakeside, honored and lamented as man never was before. The whole world mourns him. There is no speech nor language where the voice of his praise is not heard. About his grave gathers, with heads uncovered, the vast brotherhood of man.

And with us it is well also. We are nearer a united people than ever before. We are at peace with all; our future is full of promise; our industrial and financial condition is hopeful. God grant that, while our material interests prosper, the moral and spiritual influence of this occasion may be permanently felt; that the solemn sacrament of sorrow whereof we have been partakers may be blest to the promotion of the "righteousness which exalts a nation." Thy friend,

JOHN G. WHITTIER.

Said Senator Dawes:--

"Garfield was indeed a great man. This will be the judgment of those who knew him personally and of history. This tragedy prevents the corroboration of that judgment by results; for he had but just entered upon the work for which his preparation and development had fitted him and has finished nothing but a life of great promise and expectation. His growth has been a wonderful study to those who were by his side during its progress. It was constant to the last moment. The last year had turned it into an altogether new and untried channel. It had been begun and carried on until that time in quite a different direction. He had never had executive experience, and a modesty and distrust, rare in minds conscious of great power, led him to hesitate and shrink from what was before him. His first remark to a long-tried friend on taking his hand after the Chicago convention was this: 'I fear I am no man for this place; I have felt that I could reasonably count on six years more of labor and study and growth in the new and larger opportunity already secured to me in my accustomed field, but this is an untried sphere to me, and I dread the experiment.' The short time he has been permitted, however, to labor in this new field has yet been long enough to bring out great qualities and high purposes that the nation can ill spare. He was conscious of great powers carefully trained, but he lacked confidence to take hold of new things. His mind did not work quickly, though it did surely. Always feeling the ground under every step he took, he never ventured his foot where he could not, by some process of reasoning, however slow, satisfy himself that he knew what was under him. Hence the man who was a great leader in battle, and of unflinching personal courage, and better fitted than any contemporary to demonstrate and defend a political principle, had not yet come to be a safe political leader in a sudden emergency, where there is no time for logic or processes of reasoning, but action must follow instinct and first impression. At such times he distrusted himself and left to others, with not a tithe of his real power, the guidance of political movements. As free from political as from personal guile, he was too confiding and open-hearted to be safe in the hands of men less scrupulous and less selfish.

"Those who saw him enter public life, and were with him to the end, have in mind a wonderful growth, and have in admiration, also, a wonderful character, personal, mental and moral, ever charming, sure to be instructive and always exemplary. In private intercourse with those he loved he was as simple and trusting as a child, as tender and affectionate as a woman, and as true and valiant as a knight. One of the most touching scenes, illustrative of what manner of man he was, will never be forgotten. The great cares of state had well-nigh worn him out; the wife of his love lay lingering between life and death, and he had been going from official labor and responsibility to her bedside night after night, and, for the last two, had scarcely closed his eyes. The report had gone out that Mrs. Garfield was dying; a near friend called to inquire. Coming out of the sick-room, and grasping his hand, the President begged him to sit down, and there this greatest of all public men unbosomed himself like a broken-hearted woman. Dwelling with surprising tenderness upon the love and beauty of his married life, and the noble character of her who had made it what it was, he exclaimed, with great emotion, 'I have had in this trial glimpses of a better and higher life beyond, which have made this life I am leading here seem utterly barren and worthless. Whatever may come of this peril, I fear that I shall never again have ambition or heart to go through with that to which I have been called.' To human view he has not been permitted to finish the work for which he was fitted and to which he aspired, but he has left valuable material for the study and instruction of public men, covering a greater range of topics, a more thorough investigation, and sounder conclusions than have been left by any one so constantly active in the daily and current demands of public life. Let us thank God for such a life, of such infinite value to the republic. Its example, its teachings, its ambitions, its lofty aspirations and high resolves, and its demonstrations of what man can make of himself, have no parallel in history, and will have no measure in their beneficent effect upon those who shall hereafter honestly study them. He dies loved, admired and mourned before all others, but not yet fully appreciated. His loss is irreparable, his lesson invaluable."