Davenport's Conception of the Trusts.
Of equal importance are the various series in lighter vein through which Mr. Opper aims to lead people to the same way of thinking politically as the paper which he serves. Long years of labor and constant production do not seem to have in any way drained his power of invention, for no sooner has one series done its work, and before the public has become sated with it, than an entirely new line of cartoons is introduced. Mr. Opper, as well as Mr. Davenport, has had his fling at and drawn his figure of the Trusts, and to place the two figures side by side is to contrast the methods and work of the men. Mr. Opper's purpose seems to be, first of all, to excite your mirth, and consequently he never fails to produce a certain effect. When you take up one of his cartoons in which the various stout, sturdy, and well-fed gentlemen typifying the different Trusts are engaged in some pleasant game the object of which is the robbing, or abusing of the pitiable, dwarfish figure representative of the Common People, your first impulse is a desire to laugh at the ludicrous contrast. It is only afterwards that you begin to think seriously how badly the abject little victim is being treated, and what a claim he has upon your sympathy and indignation. In those series which are designed entirely along party lines, such as "Willie and his Papa," this method is even more effective, since it begins by disarming party opposition.
Of such men, and the younger draughtsmen of to-day, much more might be written with sympathetic understanding and enthusiasm. But most of them belong rather to the century that has just begun rather than that which has lately closed, and a hundred years from now, whoever attempts to do for the twentieth century a service analogous to that which has here been undertaken for the nineteenth, will find an infinitely ampler and richer store of material, thanks to this group of younger satirists in the full flood of their enthusiasm, who are valiantly carrying on the traditions of the men of the past—of Leech and Tenniel, of Daumier, and Philipon, and Cham and André Gill, of Nast and Keppler and Gillam, and who have already begun to record with trenchant pencil the events that are ushering in the dawn of the new century.
THE END