"Amid the innumerable demonstrations of sorrow to be seen and heard these last two days all over England, I know of none which more truly indicates the essentially popular character of the regret which the President's death has excited.... An English friend who was shooting ten days ago over a Yorkshire moor told me that, as the scattered line of sportsmen were pushing through the heather in silence, the gamekeeper met him some yards away, turned and asked: 'Can you tell me, sir, how President Garfield is?' There on that lonely hillside, three thousand miles and more distant from the sufferer, in the early morning, beneath a sun which was not yet shining upon the President, breathing an air he never breathed, this Yorkshire peasant, who had spent his life without so much as hearing the President's name till a few weeks before; who knew not the letters of which it was formed; who knew about grouse and guns and dogs and the weather, and nothing else whatever; whose interest in life never went beyond the stone hut in which he slept and ate, and the stretch of furz-clad upland which lifted itself against the western sky,--he, like the fishermen, had come to think or to feel that, somehow or other, the life or death of that far-away martyr concerned him too. It is easy to say that beneath the shooting-jacket and the jersey beats the same human heart. No doubt it does. But what was it that set it beating in unison with so many millions of others like it with sympathy for the President? Lord Palmerston said he never knew what fame was till he heard of the Tartar mothers on the steppes of Russia in Asia frightening their children into quiet with some queer travesty of his dreaded name. Yorkshire is not so remote as Russian Asia, indeed, but the friendly concern of the gamekeeper was surely a truer measure of real fame than the ignorant terror of the Muscovite mother. I know I thought when I heard it that the President who lay dying would have valued such a proof of the universality of the interest in him not less than those expressions of it--certainly not less genuine--which came from much higher quarters."
[Illustration: Francklyn Cottage, where the President died.]
"The American people cannot fail to be deeply impressed by the multitudinous expressions of sympathy which have come from foreign lands. It was to be expected that there would be the usual and formal messages from the various rulers, but it is something of quite a different sort, and something altogether beyond precedent which we are witnessing. From all the governments of Europe, and from those of the Orient as well, and from our nearer neighbors, Canada and Mexico, words of sympathy and condolence have come. But beyond all this, and more precious, are the manifestations of popular feeling in countries other than our own, and especially in Great Britain and Canada. We hear of public and private buildings draped in mourning, of mourning-flags upon English Cathedrals, of the tolling of bells in English and Canadian churches, of English and French journals with mourning borders. The Queen sends a warm, womanly message of sympathy to the widow; and the English Court puts on mourning for a week. And all these world-wide demonstrations of grief, sincere, spontaneous and universal, are called out by the death of this uncrowned republican of our Western world, a man born of the people, schooled in hardship, but strong and noble in all that pertains to true manhood. Such a spectacle as this, such tributes as these from foreign potentates and peoples whose ideas and methods of government vary so widely from ours, should not pass without being heeded, and the lesson which they convey should be laid to heart. It is true, as one of the leading English journals has well expressed it, that a common sorrow unites the ocean-sundered members of the English race to-day more closely than it has ever been since 1776, and that there is scarcely an Englishman in a thousand who did not read of President Garfield's death, with a regret as real and as deep as if he had been a ruler of their own."