Politics

AS the time for the Presidential conventions draws near, newspaper readers are beginning to be reminded of their political duties ; and it becomes obligatory upon the great editorial body to issue a series of manifestoes, urging their subscribers to stand by or rally round some one ; to nail the colors to the masthead, and fight the ship to the last; to keep their fire until they see the whites of the enemies’ eyes, and so on.

One of the most singular of these buglecalls (to use the term by which they are commonly known in the profession) with which we have ever met was lately issued by the late collector of the port of Phila-

delphia, in his Washington newspaper. We ought perhaps to say that the design of this bugle-call is to assist the administration party. According to Colonel Forney, it seems that at the time of the nomination of General Grant in 1867, by himself, Mr. Justice Cartter, and Senator Thayer, General Grant’s chief of staff, who conducted the negotiations with the nominee, wished to know what was to become of General Grant “ after his second Presidential term, what indeed during his administration ? He is receiving from seventeen to twenty thousand dollars a year as general of the armies of the Republic, —a life salary. To go into the Presidency at twenty-five thousand dollars a year for eight years is, perhaps, to gain more fame ; but what is to become of him at the end of his Presidency ? He is not a politician. He does not aspire to the place. Eight years from the 4th of March, 1869, he will be about fifty-six years old. Of course, he must spend his salary as President. England, with her Wellington, her Nelson, and her other heroes on land and sea, has never hesitated to enrich and ennoble them through all their posterity. Such a policy is in accordance with the character of the English government; but in our country the man who fights for and saves the Republic would be a beggar if he depended upon political office; and, mark it, if Grant takes anything from the rich, whose vast fortunes he has saved, after he is President, he will be accused as the willing recipient of gifts.”

The moral of this story is, that when we elect a man to office we at the same time unconsciously encourage others to tear him to pieces. What public character can escape calumny ? Our best candidates for office are not saints, our best representatives and senators in Congress are not divinities. President Washington, when he closed his second term, was regarded as a usurper, and the end of his administration declared a great national relief. If we establish an angelic standard for our public men, we are not only sure to fail, but perhaps to end in making an hereditary monarchy necessary to govern and subdue a dissatisfied people.

The bugle-call, managed in this manner, is not likely to prove a success. It may satisfy the intellect, but it cannot be expected to fire the heart. The bugle-call in times past has always taken the form of a stirring appeal. The citizen has been adjured by his altars and fires, by the memories of his ancestors, by his hatred of tyranny and oppression, by his love of liberty and right. His sentiments of honor, of patriotism, of justice, have been appealed to. Colonel Forney is, we believe, the first American statesman who has discarded these traditions, and urged the American people to re-elect a President on purely economical grounds. In this he seems to us to make a mistake. We certainly are a commercial people, and have a keen sympathy with the love of money ; but we doubt whether even in America a President can secure a re-election by showing that he went into the Presidency at a loss, and needs a term of eight years in order to enable him to “cover.”

The replies of the friends of the administration to the charges made against the President have been from the first, considered merely as replies, singularly ineffective. The official reply to the charge of nepotism was that, instead of having appointed twenty-four relatives to office, the President had only appointed twelve. But the difficulty with this method of meeting the accusation was that it did not go far enough. Obviously the question was not whether the number of these appointments had been exaggerated, but what the proportion was between the whole number of appointments actually made and the whole number of relatives. If the President has two thousand relatives clamorous for office, the appointment of twelve (it may possibly have been eleven) was not very large. On the other hand, if he has only thirteen relatives who seek offices, and are eligible under the Constitution, the appointment of twelve shows a different spirit. To have made its reply complete, the official organ in New York ought to publish not only a complete list of all the relatives of the President and Mrs. Grant, but at the same time furnish full information on the other points we have indicated. To the most serious charge of all, that of these family appointees, several were incompetent to discharge the duties of their offices in a fit and honest manner, one of them being the notorious Casey of New Orleans, no reply has been made. The country has as yet been spared hearing by way of official answer that these indecent appointments were not in reality four in number, as had been reported, but only three. In the second place, the charge that, in the face of repeated remonstrances, the President has allowed an obscure and impudent adventurer to amass a fortune by a systematic system of plunder, under the protection of the authorities of the government, it was replied that the general-order system would soon be modified. And it has been modified, and no one knows today whether Leet retains the control of it or not. To the charge that the President took no interest in the most important political question of the day, that of civilservice reform, it was replied that a board of eminent men had been appointed to consider the subject, and that the President would be guided by their conclusions. Their report was made, and adopted by the President, and a great flourish of trumpets was made over this reform, which might quite as easily have been introduced three years before ; and it had hardly been adopted when it was announced that the rules would be temporarily suspended whenever the administration thought proper. And lastly, to the charge of presenttaking, the reply made is, that the whole matter was talked over in 1867 by Colonel Forney, Mr. Justice Cartter, and Senator Thayer and General Grant’s chief of staff, and it was decided that, as General Grant has saved the rich a great deal during the war, it was only fair that he should get some of it himself.

All these accusations, however, are merely matters of detail. Those who distrust the administration have an underlying ground of complaint, which it would require a great deal to remove. It has often been repeated, but repetition does not weaken its force. It is, that when General Grant was elected, four years ago, it was the popular belief and understanding that he would bend all his energies to the work of purifying the government,—of redeeming it from the corruption into which it has fallen, of assisting those whose object it is to make politcal life in America once more respectable and honorable. Instead of doing this, he has allied himself with the very men whose names are by-words throughout the country for those vices which he professed his desire to root out; he has lent his warm assistance to petty factions warring, not for any political objects, but for the control of plunder, and he now demands his re-election on the strength of these services to the country.

IF Mr. Thomas Nast could have died when the Tammany Ring did, he would have ended his career with a reputation unequalled in the history of political caricature. In the opinion of many people, the author of the vigorous cartoons in Harper’s Weekly divided with the New York Times the honor of the overthrow of Tweed and his confederates. His fame, too, unlike that of most caricaturists, was not confined to his own country: spreading at once to England, it outshone itself, and the name of Nast was coupled in admiring comparisons with those of “H. B.,” of Gilray, and even of Hogarth. Mr. Nast, however, survived the Ring, and in his new character as caricaturist of the anti-administration senators seems likely to ruin the reputation which Tammany brought him. There are many indications that he has not now the hold he had six months since either on the popular sense of humor or the popular indignation. Doubts are beginning to be expressed of his artistic power. He is criticised for the want of what might be called parabolic significance in his cartoons. He is taken to task for their want of delicacy, and worst of all for their want of point. In one of his recent cartoons he has represented the members of the “ Senatorial Cabal ” in the character of Roman statesmen conspiring the murder of Cæsar, and he has been much criticised for the absurdity of a comparison between what was by common consent a patriotic act of self-devotion and what he wishes to have considered a low intrigue for place. In short Mr. Nast, having tasted the sweets of popularity in art, is now probably doomed to know the bitterness of the opposite.

The merits of his pictures, however, remain the same, whichever side he draws for, and their great cleverness and effectiveness we have no desire to dispute. But Mr. Nast, judged from any point of view, is by no means a great caricaturist. From the time of his first caricatures he has always had one great defect, which is perhaps most observable in the picture we have just alluded to, but which may be seen in dozens of others. With all his ability, his draughtsmanship, and his grasp of character, he continually fails in expressing in his caricatures the precise idea he wishes to convey, or rather, to speak more correctly, fails adequately to conceive his idea himself. In one of his cartoons published during the war upon Tammany, called, if we remember right, “ The Tammany Tiger loose,” this is quite apparent. The scene represents an amphitheatre with Tweed as imperator, and Sweeny and the rest of the gang near him as spectators, looking down upon the arena, in the middle of which is the Tammany tiger glaring over the prostrate figure of Liberty. Now this picture either means nothing at all, or it means that there is no hope for New York, — certainly not the feeling which Mr. Nast wished to excite. Tweed and his fellow-spectators are calmly enjoying the scene, while the tiger has nothing in the world to do but to finish what remains of the life of Liberty, if any of it is left, and as to this the candid observer cannot help entertaining the gravest doubts. It was a picture which, except for the caricatured faces, might almost have better been published for private circulation among the members of the Ring themselves. It was no doubt effective. But it was effective in spite of itself. The mental associations connected with the Roman amphiteatre are those of irresistible power, irresistible cruelty. The victim in the arena never survived, the bloodthirsty spectators always took their fill of the cruel spectacle. The Roman games were simple slaughter for the amusement of the Roman people. But the people of New York and the Ring were not, at the time this cartoon was drawn, in any such relation to each other. They were in a state of open war, and it was not the business of caricature to represent them in the relation of master and slave, or, to speak more correctly, of master and murdered slave. Not that Mr. Nast ought to have introduced any suggestion of hope or escape into this picture ; that would have been ridiculous. But the picture itself ought never to have been drawn. It may be urged in reply to this criticism that the people of New York are not classical enough to be affected by such considerations. But this does not really meet the question. An artist is governed quite as much by the laws of his subject as by the ignorance of his audience.

It is however rather of the caricature as a political weapon than of Mr. Nast’s merits as an artist that we have to speak. The future of political caricature, in view of its recent successes in this country, is a subject of not a little interest. Are we not on the eve of a great extension and development of this method of political warfare ? Hitherto in modern communities caricature has been confined to the pages of illustrated journals. There are many indications that it will soon leave those narrow limits and take a wider range. In ancient times, before the existence of types, the spirit of caricature had other means of finding expression ; in Greece it took possession of the theatre. “ Political events, such as those of the Peloponnesian War, and magnificent projects of universal empire, like that which drove the Athenians out of their senses at the time of the Sicilian expedition, were brought upon the stage in the most amusing manner, and often with more effect than followed the political discussions in the Ecclesia. Grand schemes of revolution and reform, of annexation and re-annexation, and wild speculation of any and every kind, which were constantly coming to the surface of the seething caldron of Athenian life, were dramatized with infinite wit and unsparing ridicule. Public men were brought upon the stage by name ; and the actors, by the aid of portrait masks and costumes imitated from the dresses actually worn, represented in the most minute particulars the personages themselves. Socrates, whose strange person and grotesque manners offered irresistible temptations to the wits of the comic stage, is said to have been present when he was brought out in the play of ‘ The Clouds,’ and to have stood up before the audience with imperturbable good-humor, that they might compare the original with the mimic semblance on the stage.A large part of the function of the comic theatre consisted in discussing dramatically, and with all the liveliness that art and sarcasm could lend, and all the force that party passion inspired, the measures and men that occupied the public attention for the moment.” It is proverbially dangerous to draw parallels between ancient and modern societies. Three months since who would have dared to suggest the reappearance in any modern city of the Vetus Comœdia ? And yet it has reappeared on the French stage. Lest we should be suspected of over-subtlety in the comparison, we give the account as it is given by a native of the country : “ The fashion now in Paris is against the men of the 4th September, consequently Sardou has promptly made a new piece against them, under the name of ‘ Rabagas.’ This personage is a type composed half of Emile Ollivier and half of Gambetta : he is the lawyer, the politician par excellence, who flatters the passions of the multitude, but only wants to get into power and to find himself in the gilded drawinging-rooms of royalty, —in what the English call the cold shade of aristocracy. The scene is in Monaco, and the present Duke of Valentinois, the Prince of Monaco, is actually brought on the stage in a truly Aristophanic manner. I hear that the Duke wrote a letter to Sardou, which is much to his credit, in which he simply objects to his being called familiarly Florestan on the stage.” The play contains, among other political hits, a “transparent allusion to the scenes in the Hôtel de Ville on the 4th September, the 31st October, and the 18th March,” which was cheered with fury. The Duke, the representative of royalty, appears as a dissolute old man, who keeps a mistress in his own palace, and makes her the companion of his daughters, who receives secretly in her apartments one of the officers of the guards. Every liberal appears as a charlatan ; the Bonapartists have taken the theatre of the Vaudeville for their head-quarters, where they cheer telling phrases for ten minutes at a time. In short the play is a great political success.

If we were a dramatic people, if we had any stage or theatre, it would be difficult to imagine a better field than America offers for the reintroduction of this old form of comedy. Nowhere in the world are the vices of public men greater, nor the contempt in which they are held more genuine ; nowhere in the world is the law of libel more completely a dead letter, or political life more extraordinary. What an admirable character for the comic drama is offered by General Butler, with his military campaign before Richmond, his powdership, his descent upon Gloucester, his entrance into political life on the credit of his military failures, his management of the Impeachment, his barrel full of telegrams, his reconciliation with Grant, his repudiation campaign in the fifth district, under the banners of an anti-repudiation party, and last but not least his domestic campaign for the governorship, and his final acquiescence in the will of the majority, and the announcement of his determination to “ carry on the war against sin and corruption inside the ranks ” of his party. When we think, too, of his admirable make-up on the stage, it is impossible not to regret that he cannot go down to posterity immortalized by ridicule. The career of General Sickles, beginning in the very dregs of society, and working his way up by the processes we all know to the position of a distinguished reformer, — the ministerial and commercial adventures of General Schenck, — to say nothing of such delightful incidents as the occupation of Chicago by the satrap Sheridan, or such magnificent opportunities as that afforded by the management of the Alabama claims, in which last case the eminent men of two nations might be brought on to the stage, —all these are subjects which lend themselves so easily to dramatic caricature, that we cannot surrender them without a sigh.