"PEEVISH SCHOOLBOYS, WORTHLESS OF SUCH HONOR"

(Senators Logan, Morton, Cameron and Carpenter annoyed. Tipton, Schurz, Fenton, Conkling and others in the distance)

CHAPTER XXXIV

NEW SYMBOLS, AND CÆSARISM

Financial dissensions now divided and weakened both parties, and the Greenback leaders did not fail to receive punishment from Nast, who had little patience with their theories concerning the circulating value of stamped paper based on a pledge which did not exist a promise never meant to be fulfilled.

In the Weekly for May 23, 1874, is a small cartoon entitled "Inflation is as Easy as Lying."" Capital is tearing the dollar into two parts to pay Labor, the latter personified in the square cap and apron we have learned to know so well in the cartoons of to-day. The labor symbol he had made use of earlier in the year (Feb. 7) in a small cartoon, entitled "The American Twins," but the idea of dividing the dollar, which has since done duty in a hundred forms, was here used for the first time.

The faces of Logan, O. P. Morton, Simon Cameron, and Matthew H. Carpenter often appeared in the inflation pictures, and these statesmen were considerably annoyed in consequence. "Little Nast thinks he can teach statesmen how to run the government!" Logan growled one day. "Anybody might think he runs it himself! "

"Never mind, Logan," said Colonel Chipman, consolingly, "it is a distinction to be really caricatured by Nast. Just think what it would be to be indicated by a tag."

Curtis, with whom Nast was on terms of great amity at this moment, wrote an editorial defence of the inflation caricatures, while Nast portrayed the "Greenback" group as " Peevish Schoolboys, Worthless of Such Honor," though it is doubtful if they ever discovered the point of "honor" in his attentions. It was in 1874 that Nast began a series of pictures in defence of the Regular

Army and Navy against those parsimonious legislators who sought to gain credit with their constituents by reducing the expense of maintaining the country's defenders. Such economists were quite willing that the uneasy Indians should be quieted, and that the nation's dignity and commerce should be

cared for on the

"THERE IS NOTHING MEAN ABOUT US" UNCLE SAM-"What Congress proposes to reduce our Army and Navy to."

high seas, but they saw an opportunity of personal aggrandisement in offering bills to reduce public expenditures, and it mattered little to them that soldier and sailor went poorly clad and meanly fed.

Nast symbolized the heroes on sea and shore as the "Skeleton Army and Navy," reduced by the farce of "Retrenchment " until they had become a reproach to the government they protected. These pictures brought many and grateful letters from officers who were battling Indians in the sage-brush of the frontier, or cruising the high seas, afar from home and kindred.

It was just at this time that Nast drew his only picture against Grant. It came as the result of a reappointment by the President of Alexander R. Shepherd as Governor of the District of Columbia, and the overwhelming rejection of the nomination by the Senate. Shepherd,

sums in the improvement of the capital, and it was generally believed that he had made a personal profit from these expenditures. As a result, the government of the District had been reorganized, and the President's reap

pointment of the

'Don't let us have any more of this nonsense. It is a good trait to stand man who had made

by one's friends; but-"

this step necessary

was regarded as indiscreet, despite the fact of his implicit faith in Shepherd-a faith which later years are said to have justified. Lavish and even extravagant Shepherd may have been, but it is not now believed that he profited by the money he spent, while to him personally is due the fact that Washington, " from an ill-paved, ill-lighted, unattractive city, became a model of regularity, cleanliness and beauty. Yet the truth of this could not be known then, and for the President-already held

66

Grant. The Tribune of July 10 printed a column editorial welcoming the artist as the latest recruit to the ranks of Inde

pendent Journalism," which

General Butler had characterized as having "a forty jackass mud-throwing power."

Perhaps on the strength of the anti-Grant cartoon, and the fact that Nast had taken his family for a brief trip abroad, the Herald felt safe in renewing its noisy cry of Cæsarism, and its

• Blaine.

protests against a third term-an honor which Grant, at that time, neither sought nor desired.

But if Mr. Bennett believed that the cartoonist had forsaken the Administration he was not long deceived. "There it is again" (a block despatched hastily from London), was one of Nast's most humorous burlesques of the Cæsarism scare, and "Cæsarphobia" was an effective summary of the situation. In this picture, the Herald owner, as Nick Bottom, is prancing about Grant, the Lion, and saying to him " Do you insist on running for a third term? Do you insist on being a Cæsar? Answer quick, or-or-or I'll bray!" Later, when the Tribune joined

in the cry, Mr. Bennett was depicted as mounted on the

"Third Term Hobby," insisting that Whitelaw Reid should be content with riding behind. These were really remarkable caricatures, notably good-humored, and doubtless enjoyed as much by the subjects of them as by the public. Henry Watterson, in the Courier-Journal himself opposed to Grant and inclined to echo the Third Term cry-referred