“We address ourselves to the newly crowned Alexander the Third, reminding him that he must be just. Russia, exhausted by famine, worn out by the arbitrary proceedings of the administration, continually losing its sons on the gallows, in the mines, in exile, or in wearisome inactivity caused by the present _régime_,--Russia cannot longer live thus. She demands liberty. She must live in conformity with her demands, her wishes, and her will. We remind Alexander the Third that every violator of the will of the people is the nation’s enemy and tyrant. The death of Alexander the Second shows the vengeance which follows such acts.”
These accusations were only partly true. Alexander, on ascending the throne, had honestly tried to introduce reforms, abolish abuses and pave the way for a progressive, liberal government. But his liberal policy did not satisfy the Nihilists. And when in self-protection he fell back on the former policy of repression, the Nihilists began a war of reprisals, and finally murdered the Czar.
The North-American Republic had lived eighty-nine years before political assassination made its entrance into its domain. From 1776 to 1865, a period occasionally as turbulent, excited and torn by political discord and strife as any other period in history, political assassinations kept away from its shores, and appeared only at the close of the great Civil War between the North and the South, selecting for its victim the noblest, gentlest, most kind-hearted of Americans who had filled the Presidential chair.
Sixteen years later, on July 2, 1881, the second political assassination took place in the United States, resulting in the death of President James A. Garfield, after months of intense suffering from a wound inflicted by a bullet fired by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker. By removing the President this man hoped to restore harmony in the Republican party, which, in the state of New York at least, had been disturbed by the feud between James G. Blaine and Roscoe Conkling. Guiteau imagined that President Garfield had become an interested party in this feud by appointing Mr. Blaine his Secretary of State. His was the act of a vindictive madman.