PUCK, December 7th, 1887.
There is a marvelous pregnancy of significance in this cartoon; as we can not but see when we think that, at the re-assembling of Congress in December, 1887, one of the first questions it had to confront was the question of the Surplus. The revenues of the government, especially those coming from customs duties, were so vast that an enormous, useless, cumbersome and dangerous surplus was steadily piling itself up in the United States Treasury. It was the expectation of the people that Congress would pass laws reducing the customs duties. But the only tariff legislation made by Congress between that date and the appearance of this book has tended to increase rather than to lower these duties. And yet, as these pages go to press, the latest report of the Secretary of the Treasury announces that this surplus is so nearly wiped out that, unless the new administration takes measures to the contrary, there will be a deficit within a year. This is a curious, definitive accounting of a four years’ test of a peculiar latter-day theory of political economy. It is not wonderful that a practical people insisted on the abandonment of the experiment.
RESTLESS NIGHTS.
PUCK, March 16th, 1887.
That Mr. Cleveland during his first term was the object of more newspaper criticism than a President usually receives was due to a combination of circumstances. He was the first Democratic President elected in a quarter of a century; he was elected in part by Republican or Independent votes, and he had incurred the enmity of a faction of his own party. Nor were his ideas of the duties and responsibilities of government calculated to please a certain numerous and noisy class of Democratic politicians who were “out for the spoils.” On March 16th, 1887, Puck commented thus upon the situation:
“It is pretty hard for a practical politician and a strict party-man to toil away, day after day, editing a great paper and moulding public opinion at two or three cents per daily mould, and to see public opinion doing its own moulding all the time, in just the way it should not. It is disheartening—it is hard on a truly great editor. And yet to such misery are some of our most prominent moulders subjected. They toil unceasingly to show to President Cleveland the error of his ways—giving the public an incidental glimpse—and the more they show it to him, the less he sees it—and the less the public sees it. He goes on and does his work as he promised to do it, and the public seems to be thoroughly well pleased with him. But it is hard on the moulders.”
