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.