It is this subordination to law, this reverence for its majesty, this reliant faith in its methods and results, that constitute the bulwark of our liberties, and make the American people capable of self-government.
Orange Jacobs
The Public Record
Orange Jacobs was an American lawyer, newspaper publisher, and politician. His career in government centered on the Territory of Washington, for which he served as a delegate to the U.S. Congress, chief justice of the territory's supreme court, mayor of Seattle, and other roles.
gutenberg.org
Passion has never but once in our history crystalized into revolution.
Passion may triumph for an hour, but the sober-second-thought of the masses is sure to assert itself.
They put their trust in and found their hopes upon a liberty regulated by law.
The American people, yea the Anglo-Saxon race, are believers in law and order.
This we know, that the time elapsing between the assassin's shot and the lamented death of his victim has been sufficient for the supremacy of reason and the subjugation of passion so far as to prevent any immediate dire results to free…
A word may vent it, and fill all this fair land with the lava of blood and ashes.
For, mark you, fellow-citizens, there is a smothered volcano of wrath and vengeance in the great popular heart upon such occasions.
The popular frenzy which developed itself in mobs in many sections of our country, on the reception of the tidings of Lincoln's death, is but the logical sequence of the assassin's stroke at civil liberty and popular rights.
If the will of the majority is defeated in this manner, popular government will not long survive.
Such assassinations are extremely dangerous to liberty and constitutional government.
The shot meant the annihilation of delegated power, and as such reached the fountains of popular vitality.
The blow struck not the President alone; it reached in its rebound the popular heart of America.
His highest duty under the Constitution, and by the delegation of the people, was to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and Government established by the Revolutionary Fathers.
As President he possessed no powers but those freely delegated to him by his fellow-citizens.
Patriots in this mournful hour can brook no sympathy for the damning deed--can bear no manifestation of joy for the bloody work of the assassin.
Unbelief and astonishment were succeeded by wordless sorrow, and this was mingled with emotions of patriotic vengeance.
We have, in time of our greatest need, lost one of our greatest statesmen and purest patriots.
Garfield, the popular idol of the nation, is no more.
We have assembled to honor the memory, to revere the character, and recount the living virtues of a fallen patriot and statesman.
FELLOW CITIZENS:--In arising to address you on this occasion I feel my own inability to do the subject justice; and the hollow impotence of human language to express the sentiment of national woe.
You seek one of yourselves to speak for you; one who not only, like the lamented dead, thinks as the people think and feels as the people feel, but one who belongs to this local community and who shares our own peculiar shade of sorrow.
No death in our history, save possibly that of Lincoln, so generally and profoundly filled the hearts of the American people with sorrow as did the death of Garfield.
I thought possibly that Jim's philosophy had a touch of sarcasm, and a good deal of truth in it.
I told them in the jargon, or Esperanto, that they had paid the debt they owed to the whites and that they were free to go to their homes to see their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters and friends.
Politicians like Orange Jacobs
