Platt also resigned, thus earning the sobriquet of "Me too," which he was to bear through life. Neither was returned. Two Half-Breeds, Warner Miller and E. C. Lapham, were chosen, and Conkling retired to private life. Platt, patient, suave and skilled at intrigue, bided his time-making and unmaking public officials to be returned to the Senate in 1896.*

During the beginning of the party difficulties Nast had said but little. Factional quarrels seldom appealed to him.

In May, however, while the fight over Robertson was still on, he gave vent to his feelings in a picture of Conkling and Blaine tugging in opposite directions at the Presidential Chair. A little later, Conkling as a bellweather, with Platt as the tail, comes galloping back to New York, with this line of advice below, "Let him alone, now he's come home."

For whatever may have been

Nast's disgust with

the situation as a

THE SPOIL-ED

NEW YORK (meaning business): "I know what you DO want!"

Roscoe Conkling was a great lawyer, and President Arthur, in 1882, offered him a place on the Supreme Bench, which he declined. He was a talented, spectacular strong-headed man. He was also a patriot, and it is to his credit that he made no money out of politics. He died in the great blizzard of 1888, and his statue stands today in Madison Square.

whole, he could not but disapprove of the Conkling-Platt determination to control or destroy the party because of a personal grievance. Conkling and Platt as two unruly boys about to be chastised significantly follows this, and then that great cartoon series, so often used since in idea, the "Lost Head." The first of these was a small picture, showing Conkling walking proudly away from the Capitol, his head lying behind him in the

road-a street gamin trying to attract the Senator's attention to his loss. In the next picture, General Grant, who had returned from Mexico for the purpose, is making a futile effort to set the lost head in its proper place. The body of Conkling stands stiffly erect, and Grant cannot reach high enough to put the head in place. No line was put under this picture, but immediately after its publication, an up-state editor wrote to the artist that his little girl, seeing the picture over his shoulder, had remarked: "Papa, why doesn't he stoop a little?"

Certainly no title could have been more appropriate, and this childish comprehension of his idea pleased the cartoonist more than all the notice which the picture had attracted.

But far more attention and vastly more condemnation was aroused by a picture which appeared on the first of July. Matters by this time had become sufficiently disturbing. The breach

in the party was widening every moment and the hope of reconciliation was waning dim. It became known that Vice-President Ar

thur had recently

made a trip to Al

ling and Platt, sup

"I did not engage you, Vice-President ARTHUR, to do this kind of work."

(See also reference, page 486)

posedly for the purpose of winning them back to the Administration. Nast launched a protest in one of his severest cartoons. "Out-'shining' Everybody in Humiliation at Albany " showed the Vice-President polishing the shoes of Conkling and Platt. It naturally awoke a storm of denunciation from such journals as had a grievance against Nast, regardless of party. Yet the picture was eminently true. Arthur had been humiliated to a degree which Nast, then, did not even guess. As had happened so many times, he had pictured better than he knew.

The picture was the more disturbing because of what immediately followed its appearance, for on Saturday, July 2, came the tragic end-the assassination of President Garfield by Charles J. Guiteau, a crack-brained office-seeker, whose disordered intelligence had been over-wrought by party difficulties and dissensions. Doubtless he began by believing that the life of Garfield stood between him and political appointment. His statements indicated that he had persuaded himself that Garfield's removal was necessary to the preservation of the party. Later he claimed that the Lord had commanded him to commit the deed. He professed to be a "Stalwart of Stalwarts."

"I am a Stalwart and want Arthur for President," he said when arrested.

He was, in fact, a wretched human creature of debased and deformed intellect.

Nast had been none too friendly to Garfield, but the tragedy appalled him and filled him with sorrow. He portrayed Liberty with two stains at her threshold. A smaller picture was entitled, "The Biggest Blot on Our Spoils System-Office or Death."

Anxious days followed. A whole nation forgot all feuds and bickerings in waiting for bulletins that told of a strong man's battle for life.

As the summer waned it became evident that the President could not survive. Nast's cartoon, a fine double page, entitled,

"God Save the President," was published but a few days before the end, which came September 19. A front page, entitled, "After All," was a noble expression of the nation's grief.

George William Curtis in his editorial estimate of Garfield says, "He was a statesman much more than he was a party leader "-a conclusion which is likely to stand the test of time.