[From the London Evening Standard, April 27, 1865.]

The startling news which was yesterday received from America is such as to throw into the shade even the tremendous catastrophe of the fall of Richmond and the surrender of Lee’s army. Mr. President Lincoln has been assassinated, and is dead. Mr. Seward has been stabbed, and is reported in a hopeless state. Mr. Andrew Johnson is President of the United States. The blow is sudden, horrible, irretrievable. Never, since the death of Henry IV by the hand of Ravaillac—never, perhaps, since the assassination of Cæsar—has a murder been committed more momentous in its bearing upon the times. In the very height and plenitude of his triumph—at the moment when all his hopes seemed fulfilled, all his labors rewarded, when the capitulation of his most powerful enemy had placed within his grasp that prize of empire for which he had so long and so earnestly striven, Abraham Lincoln was smitten to the earth by a dastardly assassin, who shot him through the head from behind. The commander of armies that the Macedonian or the Roman might have envied; the leader in the most gigantic struggle of the nineteenth century; the ruler, or likely soon to be the ruler, of the most populous, and, in the opinion of many, the mightiest nation in the modern civilized world; the man who [Page 379] had risen from low estate to a power as vast as was ever wielded by a mortal, whose recent success has astonished and bewildered the universe, is now reduced to some poor six feet of common clay. All the texts and sermons of the mutability of human affairs, and the instability of life, pale into insignificance before this tremendous commentary. Much as we have condemned the attitude of the American people during this civil war, and though we have, from the first, opposed the policy and censured the acts of the late President of the United States, we must sympathize with the nation which is widowed by this sudden bereavement. Now that he is dead, the good qualities of the unfortunate Lincoln seem to come into the foreground. We remember his honesty and his manliness; we do justice to his consistency; we give him all praise for the spirit of conciliation which he has shown; for his refusal to be borne along by the sanguinary counsels of his friends; we make some allowance for his frequent and untimely levity; we almost excuse his obstinacy in the prosecution of the war. Such, we are persuaded, will be the sentiments of every right-minded Englishman; and they will be shared in by the vast majority of the confederate people. The men who shot Lincoln and Seward were probably lunatics, or men who had been crazed by their misfortunes in this terrible war. There is no reason to suppose that there was any southern conspiracy to take away the life of the only man in the northern government who was disposed to deal leniently with the South. The confederates, as a nation, are too magnanimous to plan or approve of such a cowardly method of revenge. Booth, who killed Lincoln, when he jumped upon the stage and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” made an unworthy use of the proud motto of the State of Virginia. The wretched murderer has been caught, it is said, and will doubtless soon meet with the fate which he so richly deserves. But the most ignoble means may work a stupendous result. The dagger or the bullet, in the hand of the feeblest worm in human shape that crawls the earth, may alter the fate of nations or turn the tide of time. The unfortunate President, shot as he was through the brain, went unwarned and unprepared to his account. No portents accompanied the deed—no omens foretold it. No soothsayer bade him beware of the fatal 14th of April. He is gone; the pilot is gone. His country is left to toss in the sea of a dismal anarchy, a revolution of which no man can presume to foretell the issue. * * * *