IMPORTANT LESSONS FROM THE AWFUL TRAGEDY.

BY E. E. COOPER.

EDWARD E. COOPER.

For twenty-five years following Emancipation and the new opportunities which that great event brought, many of the brightest minds the colored race has produced had been endeavoring to solve the perplexing and important problem of how to make a newspaper, published in the interest of the colored people, a profitable business enterprise. The number of such newspaper ventures whose managers failed to solve the problem mounts well up into the hundreds.

In the early spring of 1893, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, fresh from conquests in race journalism in Indianapolis, came to Washington and established "The Colored American," a weekly newspaper whose circulation last year was put down at 12,000 copies per week, and numbers among its readers residents in every clime where our flag floats. Mr. Cooper interpreted the "want" for such a newspaper.

His first venture in journalism was "The Colored World," published at Indianapolis. This was quite a success, but he gave it up to accept a position in the Railway Mail Service. On leaving the Mail Service be again embarked in journalism and established "The Indianapolis Freeman," an illustrated weekly. This was a new feature. "The Freeman" quickly jumped into great popularity and soon gained national fame. Having made "The Freeman" a success, he decided to go to Washington for a larger field of endeavor. Mr. Cooper is undoubtedly the best all-around newspaper man the colored race has yet produced.

Edward E. Cooper was born near the little town of Smyrna, Tenn., and attended the old barracks school for colored children on Knowles Street, Nashville, south of the Nashville and Chattanooga depot; which school afterwards became the nucleus of Fisk University. He began life selling papers, etc., on trains; then worked on a farm two years. He next went to Indianapolis, attended the public schools and graduated from the high school. In 1883, he married Miss Tenie Jones, one of the most cultivated young ladies of Paris, Ky.

Mr. Cooper freely acknowledges that his wife has been the balance-wheel in his life that has brought him what success he has gained.

We stand in the shadow of a national sorrow.

In an hour of national pride and jubilation, with the eyes of the world upon the greatest republic since the eagles of Rome overspread the earth, in the fullness of his powers and the prime of his usefulness, the Chief Magistrate of the Republic was stricken down by the hand of an assassin. It is meet here that I should refer in the opening of my address to this third assassination in the history of our country, for the purpose of illustrating the short story that I have to tell you and to point a moral and adorn a tale which may not be without value to us. For it is true that

William McKinley was the incarnation, not only of the possibilities of the humblest American boy who, by diligence, integrity and devotion to the best interests of the country, rose by steady strides to the highest dignities in the gift of the people, but he was also the embodiment of that grand sweep of American business genius which has spread over the world, and promises to predominate it. If this man who now rests from his labors with his honors full upon him represented anything, it was the logic of business development in its largest and best sense, for, as Governor of Ohio and member in Congress and President of the United States, his name is indissolubly associated with the commercial promotion, protection and expansion of American trade.

He was not only a great executive and a great legislator, but, when yet a youth, when the great Republic was in the agony of possible dissolution, he heroically shouldered a musket and went to the front as a private to preserve the union of the states bequeathed to us by the noble fathers and the heroism of the American revolutionary soldier in that memorable struggle, the first victim of which was Crispus Attucks, the lineaments of whose personality have been chiseled in marble and will stand a monument upon Boston Common, to show a "Man's a man for a' that and a' that," and that the rank is but the guinea's stamp.

Ah, well, we faithful hearts and true, who were never false to a friend, who have always loved the flag, even when the flag waved not over us, who fought with Washington at Valley Forge and with Perry at Lake Erie, with Jackson at New Orleans, with Shaw at Fort Wagner, and with Butler at New Market Heights, who went up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt and the immortal Rough Riders and followed little Joe Wheeler in Luzon, who, although a Southern brigadier, as a reconstructed unionist in a reunited country showed in Cuba and Manila that he had the same regard for a black soldier as for a white one when he was loyal to the flag and faithful to his country, are here to mourn our loss. This great heart that loved his country and gave his life to it and for it is stilled in death!

The assassin! What of him? It is a matter of notorious fact that he was so obscure in the life that he had led and had contributed so little to the public weal in the place where his hands found labor that he was utterly unknown and went down to the quicklime that consumed his miserable remains, to the chaos from which we all spring, stigmatized with at least two cognomens and with the reputation of having contributed nothing to the wealth of the Republic or the happiness of mankind. There are millions of him in Europe and America who keep in perpetual jeopardy the splendid civilization evolved out of the tumult of Egypt and Rome and the Dark Ages. And the very genius of logical business development sprung out of the bosom of Moroe on the Nile and of Tyre where ancient Afro-Phoenicians ruled the blue waters of the adjacent seas and of the lordly Egyptians, who were African in their fiber, historians to the contrary notwithstanding, were the founders of the commercial spirit that dominates the world to-day. More than that, they laid the basis of our literature and of our philosophy. As Lord Byron hath beautifully said:

Now, Cadmus was a black African slave captured in war; so was Aesop, the world's greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the grandest of Rome's lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-day of Russia; so was Alexander Dumas the first, the greatest, not only of French novelists, but of novelists of all times and the infinite storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honore De Balzac and Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.

But of this vile assassin, Leon Czolgosz, why do I make this exordium here upon the violent taking off of the President beloved by all the people, and my animadversion upon the character of the man who lifted his hand against the supreme representative of the greatest Republic upon earth and the most prosperous nation? It is an incident in the life of government that the supreme head of it shall be subject to the vicissitudes of its maniacal, fanatical and criminal classes, those who live by their wits or those who dream of a condition of society unattainable, as human nature is constructed, such as Edward Bellamy has pictured in "Looking Backward." I wish it distinctly understood that I refer to this matter simply to draw attention to the fact that Czolgosz, the obscure assassin of the highest representative of the logic of business development in this country, is inseparably linked as the Siamese twins to the mobocrat, and that any effort made to root out the anarchist in this country will fail, and should fail, unless the mobocrat is rooted out at the same time.

It is written in the stars. God has said, "Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people."

And what business development can we have when the dark shadow of anarchism and mobism overshadows the land like the dark cloud that covered the children of Israel in their confusion, when in their perversion they had turned their faces from the God of their destiny? No, there can be no business development in this country while our laws are so lax as to allow irresponsible individuals or organizations to clog the wheels of industry or to waste unnecessarily the red blood that gives life to a virile human form. I say, with our grand President, throttle the anarchist that would shoot a President or a successor to a President. Yes, but if you leave the Southern mobocrat to shoot John Jones, an unknown entity, the element of anarchism remains pregnant in the body politic and is liable at any time to show its venomous head.

Who could have told when the whole nation was hopeful that a John Wilkes Booth lurked reluctant in the body politic to cut down the wisest and the most humane and the most lovable of all the Presidents? Ah, my friends, you can't protect the President of the United States from the assassin, and leave unprotected in any corner of the republic its meanest citizen, because, as Alexander Pope has wisely said, "We are all but links of one stupendous chain. Break a link of that chain and the power of that chain is destroyed."