CHAPTER XLVII

CHRONICLES-DOMESTIC AND POLITICAL

"Another stocking to fill" was the Christmas greeting of 1879-80. The picture showed Santa Claus bending over the crib of the "new baby "-the new baby being a late arrival in the Nast household, the first for eight years. It was a boy this time, Cyril, born August 28, 1879, and it is said that the baby in the crib is a true likeness, while the features of Santa Claus are not unlike those of the proud and happy father.

The new baby completed the family, and with the beginning of 1880 the fortunes of the Nast household had reached their highest point. The artist still owned the Harlem property, which had a valuation of thirty thousand dollars, the price for which it was eventually sold. He had accumulated another sixty thousand dollars in Government securities, while the beautiful Morristown home and its rare contents were all his own. Solely by the combined work of head and hands, the young man who less than twenty years before had begun married life with an unpaid-for piano, had acquired no less a fortune than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars-an amount considered rather large in that day. Well for him if he had remained content with his success, doing such work as agreed with his convictions, living on such income, whatever it might be, as his work and investments provided. Not that his income had

appreciably decreased, for it still averaged considerably more than twenty thousand dollars a year-five thousand of which was the annual retainer from Harper Brothers, while something more than an equal amount came from his securities. The remainder was the additional received for drawings, and while it had become somewhat less than it had been prior to the death of Fletcher Harper, it was still a very considerable sum, and sufficient to many needs.

But the artist grew ever more restive as he found it more difficult to express himself fully in the pages so long identified with his individual utterances; and the idea of a paper of his own-an endowed journal in which every man who had something to say, and the ability and courage to say it-a paper uncontrolled by any party or policy-became more and more a dream which he resolved to make real.

But those to whom he spoke of an endowed paper, while they frequently expressed enthusiasm, were reluctant to invest in such an enterprise. Theoretically it seemed a good idea. Commercially it did not appear promising. With a total lack of business judgment himself, the artist was impatient with these kindly but financially reluctant friends, and resolved to acquire through speculative investments sufficient capital eventually to start the paper on his own account. For the money itself he did not care, beyond the comforts that it would buy. His sole desire for increased fortune was that he might undertake the publication of a journal wherein he could do battle for those social and political reforms which seemed to him so needful in the city and nation of his adoption. Two things he did not realize. First, that the public-so much larger, wealthier and less primitive than in those days following the Civil War-had grown careless of reform and preferred to be entertained-that the time for a paper of the sort he dreamed, if it had not gone by, was at least rapidly waning. Second, he did not understand that

men in the guise of friendship could seek, for their own petty profit, to divest him of his hard-earned savings. Like his old hero, Garibaldi, he was a master in his own field-a field of action and of honor. Also like Garibaldi, he was guileless and easily played upon by those who through friendship won their way to his confidence or appealed to his moral and patriotic impulses. The lesson of his childhood-learned of the pet lamb in the field back of Landau-he had long since forgotten. He remembered only that once, through a friend's advice, he had bought the Harlem

savings-those pre

cious Government

securities-into va

STRANGER THINGS HAVE HAPPENED

rious channels, al- SENATOR BAYARD "Hold on, and you may walk over the sluggish animal up

there yet."

luring streams of (In this cartoon the Donkey and Elephant symbols first appear together,

bearing their respective labels)

Pactolus that sparkled by and brought no returning tide. He did not lament over these earlier losses. He had earned the money once-he could do so again. Neither did he learn wisdom, or become distrustful of mankind in general. It was only at last in his final years, when the day of his power and fortunes had passed by, that he ever became suspicious-and, sometimes, as may be readily supposed, even of those who wished his welfare and were his friends in truth. It is one of the curious phases of human perception that this man, whose eyes rarely failed to penetrate a public sham, was likely to be sadly lacking in his estimate of personal friends.

66

In Harper's Weekly the presidential year opened with the attempted adjustment of an election complication in Maine. The matter is of no general importance now, but it resulted then in a personal protest to Nast from Senator Blaine, who had been caricatured as a plumed" Indian, seeking to straighten out matters with a war-club. As already mentioned, Blaine had been deeply humiliated by the Chinese cartoons, to which he could make no satisfactory answer. Now, it seemed to him, he might protest with reason, for he had gone to Maine in an attitude of peace rather than of war.

My Dear Mr. Nast:

Washington, D. C., Jan. 31, 1880.

I am perhaps as willing a victim as ever was caricatured for the entertainment of the public. But, of course, I do not like to be totally and inexcusably misrepresented on an important issue. Having spent seventy anxious days and nights in Maine, for the express purpose of settling all our troubles, without violence or the slightest infractions of the law, I do not quite see the justice of painting me as an Indian with a war-club, anxious to strike and only prevented by the interposition of George Chamberlain. I would be glad as a matter of mere personal curiosity to learn any fact or rumor or hearsay that justified you in thus presenting me. If I was ever widely known for any public act or policy, it was for precisely the reverse of that which you present.

I have always had a strong belief in your sense of right and justice, and I leave you to do what seems meet and proper in your eyes. Very sincerely,

J. G. Blaine.

What reply Nast made is not recorded, but concerning the cartoon it may be said that it was less effective and individual than any preceding work, very unlike Nast in idea, and it is possible that Blaine did not complain without reason.

Senator Daniel W. Voorhees, of Indiana, the " Tall Sycamore of the Wabash," began to make his appearance in the cartoons of '79 and '80 as a silver statesman, and later we find him repelling the exodus from the South of colored laundresses who have advanced upon the "great unwashed" Democracy of his own state.

It was about this time that Henry H. Lamb, Acting Bank Superintendent, be

gan to look into the

matter of savings

banks voting large gifts and salaries to trustees, and making other illegal and unnecessary use of funds. In the course of his investigations Superintendent Lamb found a copy of Nast's letter of resignation, written in 1869, and applied to him for further particulars. Nast replied, giving additional details. With

THE INVASION OF INDIANA