Mr. Conkling’s resignation to the Senate, in hope of re-election under circumstances which would have made such a triumph a severe rebuke to President Garfield, proved to be, as most people foresaw, the end of his political career. But, at the time, there were plenty of people to applaud his act and to liken his resignation to a “bombshell” thrown into the Senate. It was a sort of fireworks bombshell that destroyed nothing but itself, but it made a great noise for the moment. Mr. T. C. Platt chose at the same time to pop his toy balloon, and probably thought that it made part of the noise.
PUCK’S POLITICAL HUNTING GROUND.—HOW HE HAS MADE GAME OF THE POLITICIANS.
PUCK, January 14th, 1885.
The first cartoons were doubtless chalked on dead walls, and even when the art reached a higher development, sticking to walls remained the cheapest and most convenient method of publication. It is often a test of a cartoon’s worth to-day—its suitability as a wall-decoration. It is a natural and simple impulse that moves us to pin on the wall the picture that has pleased us. Readers of Puck who travel much in this country can not but notice how many people delight in pasting and pinning their favorite cartoons to the walls of their offices and workshops, and even of their dwelling-houses. A really popular cartoon is always sure of these humble but well-meant honors; and, curiously enough, experience has shown that next to the really telling “hit,” a playful, familiarly puzzling trifle like “Puck’s Political Hunting-Ground,” if it is conceived with some grace and prettiness, is the most certain of this sort of popular favor. This particular picture was, no doubt, made attractive to many by the simple puzzle afforded by the faces of the animals. As, however, the passing of time must make some of these faces unfamiliar, it may be well to offer the following key—first calling attention to the fact that all the personages introduced were at the moment, in one way or another, at odds with fortune—except the late Mr. Jay Gould, who is figured as a bird of prey (in a general way, and with no over-particular ornithological accuracy) comfortably bearing off a lamb. The fact that this one figure of success is quite unconscious of the attempts of Puck’s water-dog to catch him, may be supposed to show the usual disregard that Wealth entertains for Wit:
The fox, of course, is the ingenious Mr. James G. Blaine. The hyena, ex-speaker Kiefer, and the next animal of doubtful breed “Star Route” or “Soap” Dorsey. The paw and the head seen in the reeds behind the dog belong to Brady. The lineaments of Ben Butler may be discerned in the head of the frog, and the nature of the beast in the distention of the belly thereof. At the other end of the cartoon, General Grant’s features, without distortion or caricature, fit the head of the dead lion. Next to him “Secor” Robeson lies in the similitude of a dead boar, incapable of mischief for all his glaring eye-balls. In the foreground, Roscoe Conkling lies a dead pouter pigeon. (Caricaturists frequently showed Mr. Conkling as a pouter pigeon, but most of them carried the analogy too far and made a frail, spindle-shanked thing of him. In this picture the thickly feathered legs and stout frame of the bird do not bely its sturdy original.) The owl is the late John Kelly—and a powerful and accurate owl he was, too, in his time! The pendent monkey is T. C. Platt, who was at that time suffering from one of the temporary eclipses which flecked the pathway of the political adventurer with appropriate forecasts of oblivion.
