The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1901-09-17
REPREHENsIBLE POLICIES

The universal expressions of regret
and horror over the assassination of
President Mckinley and the unstinted
praise which have filled the public press
sufficient to shut the mouth of partisan
rancor. But such seems not to have been
the effect. During the week when Mr..
Mckinley was bravely fighting for life
certain Republican sycophants, with the
evident purpose to curry favor with the
excitable, began a malicious attack upon
the opposition press at the door of which
they attempted to lay the blame of the
presidents assassination
Taking as text the remarks of DIR,
Hamilton, an expert on mental disease,
that the publication of anarchistic litera-
ture and the deliberations of societies
Instituted for the relief of the oppressed
are menace to law and order, by put
ting into the heads of half-cracked peo-
pie pernicious ideas which they i'm
mediately proceed to act upon, the Mil
waukee Sentinel, a paper recently pur
chased for partisan purposes, and now
run in the interest of the so-called Re-
publican stalwarts of Wisconsin, leads
off with an editorial charging the Demo-
cratic press in general, and the Demo-
cratic cartoonist in particular, with in
direct responsibility for the act Of
Czolgosz.
The argument leading to the above
named conclusion is as follows:
ut is a shameful truth that there is
or was, abroad in this country a vul-
gar and distorted conception of the char
a ainao, ana nd personality of President Nc
carlcatures published in newspapers
which descend to the level and pander to
the tastes Of the class of readers to
which which, roughly speaking, Czolgosz be-
longs In these pictures the president
mas been constantly held UP to popular
hatred or ridicule, sometimes as an ogre
or bloated Nero or Caligula STEPPED In
pohtical crime; sometimes as gro
teSque dwarf in charge of a grotesoue
nurse supposed to be his mentor and the
keeper of his conscience, but always as
a hateful or ludcrous figure symboli-
charges and aSpersionS of his political
opponents. That these pictorial Ear
guments" have struck home in unframed
minds, incapable of grasping their inher-
ent abSurdity, there can be no doubt
1t is not too much to say that there
are thousands of people who have grown
to regard these indecent cartoons as ac-
tual presentations of the character and
tendencies of President Mckinney"
1t would seem that these pictorial
arguments have not only struck home in
unframed minds but also in such
minds as guide the editorial policy of the
Sentinel. The manifest attempt is to
make political capital out of the past
campaigns, by Selling upon time when
the public is in a more or less hysterical
condition over a most dastardly deed.
The Sentinel knows, if it knows any
thing, that the caricatures of Mr.. Nc
Kinley had no more to do with the act
/ of Czolgosz than did the caricatures of
! Abraham Lincoln in Punch with the act
| of j. Wilkes Booth or the Morey letters
! with the assassination of Garfield.
| The attempt of the Sentinel to inject
| the poison of low politics into the sacred
| precincts of the sick room of the dying
president, is as reprehensible, if not more
SO, than the unfeeling remarks of Sena-
tor Wellington. 1t shows a lack of the
finer instincts of the we'll bred gentle
man and in it's place the possession Of
dastardly thirst for a political ad-
vantage which it is willing to secure by
working upon the already inhamed pub
| lie opinion.
This remarkable editorial 1--WE should
perhaps use stronger term) concludes
with the following:
That crime they must, for obvious
reasons, deplore with even exceptional