The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and LettersBrown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
History
The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield: Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and Letters
Brown, E. E. (Emma Elizabeth)
Garfield, James A. (James Abram), 1831-1881; Presidents -- United States -- Biography
Let us not boast at the funeral of our dead. Such a temper would be
doubly odious in the presence of such expressions of hearty sympathy
from governments of every form. But we should be unfaithful to ourselves
if in asking for this man a place in the world's gallery of illustrious
names we did not declare that we offer him as an example of the
products of Freedom. With steady and even step he walked from the
log-cabin and the canal-path to the school, to the college, to the
battle-field, to the halls of legislation, to the White House, to the
chamber of death. The ear in which the voices of his countrymen, hailing
him at the pinnacle of human glory had scarcely died out, heard the
voice of the dread archangel, and his countenance did not change. Is not
that country worth dying for whose peasantry are of such a strain? Is
not the Constitution worth standing by under whose forms Freedom calls
such men to her high places? Is not the Union worth saving which gives
all of us the property of countrymen in such a fame?
IV.
HON. JAMES G. BLAINE'S EULOGY.
MR. PRESIDENT: For the second time in this generation the great
departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the
Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered
President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the
passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his
great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors
which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born.
Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled
to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land.
"Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it
as it has been exhibited where such example was last to have been looked
for, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by
revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw, rather, a
decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; not so much an example of
human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime, as an
infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his
character."
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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