NAPOLEON’S RETREAT.
PUCK, November 19th, 1890.
Subsequent events have proved that there was no mistake made in attributing the Republican defeat of 1890 to the effect of the McKinley Bill. Puck of November 19th, in enumerating various possible causes for the turn-over, says to the Republicans: “Do not distress yourselves to decide which sort of cake gave you the stomach-ache. You have eaten all the sorts that there were. Any one would have been enough.” Further, the editorial tells the leaders of the defeated party that they have passed “a bill, the like of which could not be drawn up elsewhere, unless it were in Bedlam, than in the Fifty-first Congress. It is called the McKinley Bill; but it ought to be called ‘A Bill to Raise Prices and to Make Life Harder for Everybody except a Few Prosperous Manufacturers.’ So mad a production was this bill that it actually put a tariff tax on tin-plates—something that every man, woman and child uses—not because any tin-plates are made in this country, but because some day, some man, somewhere, might wish to think of making them! And on top of all that, to add gratuitous insult to wanton injury, you raise the price of tobacco, so that every man can have a daily reminder that you don’t care how hard you make life for him. Do you think of anything calculated to irritate and enrage the citizen which you have forgotten to treat him to? Do you wonder that you will sit in the next House with a total representation hardly more than half the size of the Democrats’ clear majority? Nobody else wonders. If the Democrats, after they have been long in power, become half as arrogant, selfish and neglectful of duty as you became, they will be turned out of their places, too, if the people have to fill their seats with Farmers’ Alliance candidates.”