Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/437

Rh the opinion that those calamities would have ultimately come had Henry IV. not been murdered. The stabbing or strangling to death of Russian Czars resulted only in changes of persons. The dynamite bomb which killed Alexander II. left Russia substantially in the same condition in which it had found it. Neither can it be said that the assassinations of Republican Presidents in the United States and in France produced any effects of lasting consequence. That of Abraham Lincoln certainly did not save the Southern Confederacy from collapse, and those of Garfield and of Carnot brought about virtually only the substitution of one chief magistrate for another.

Without underrating the influence exercised by great men upon the course of events, and leaving aside speculations as to what possibly might have happened had the bloody deeds in question been committed at different periods or under different circumstances, and taking into consideration only the facts as they are recorded, it may be said that the murders of political potentates, for the accomplishment of whatever ends they may have been designed, were, as a rule, mere ineffectual atrocities. In some cases the evident purpose for which those acts of violence were intended served to make them intelligible. The tyrannicide who imagined the deliverance of his countrymen from usurpation or oppression, and the religious fanatic who schemed to help or avenge his church can be understood. Their motives had a simple and logical application to an actual state of things, and they aimed at the accomplishment of immediate and definite results. In some historic cases the character and the motives of the perpetrators distinguished their acts so much from common crime, that the criminal nature of the deeds was almost wholly overlooked in popular judgment. But of late years we are startled by a class of assassinations which can be explained only upon theories