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.” [Illustration] 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,