That disaster cannot be averted by Grover Cleveland, the head of the Democratic party, finding a foreign market for a few more shiploads of our products. And never should the oppressed of other lands find an enemy here to take their bread. Pinching nature has not made wolves of this people that they should go and show their teeth among the cabins and hovels of Europe. Theirs is but a crust now, and a judgement should wither the hand that would take it from them. This disaster cannot be averted by Thomas B. Reed, the idol and recognized leader of the Republican party, forcing the producers of those few ship loads of products to consume them themselves. The whole could be dropped to the bottom of the sea, or sold for their value a hundred fold, and it would not stay the doom of the Republic one swing of the pendulum. This disaster cannot be averted by Robert G. Ingersoll - another idol - advising the millionaire to be extravagant. Or by taking the labor-saving machinery away from the people, and keeping them longer at their toil, as this humbug has suggested. - This Is The Age Of Beef. Our leaders are incompetent. Argument here is needless. We have plenty of everything, and plenty of hunger at the same time, which shows mismanagement. Our leaders, therefore, must be incompetent. Nor should the blame of this be charged to the people. Statecraft, like the prescribing of medicine or the practice of law, is a profession, and the unlearned in their ways is at the mercy of the quacks of all three. When none but quacks offer their services to the State a selection must be made, and the people cannot be held to account for choosing quacks when there was nothing to choose from but quacks. Whatever physical characteristics distinguishes the genius of leadership from the ordinary man; whether it is long legs or short; long nose or pug; big heads or little, one thing is certain - history tells you on her every page that leadership is never found in combination with beef. Cleveland and Reed! How they stew and swelter in positions they cannot fill. How these Jonahs have grown till they have become the whale itself. How their fat will spot the pages to come, and float on the sea where the Republic went down. And Ingersoll - let us not forget Ingersoll - the thumber over of past woes, whose five hundred dollar opera ticket identifies the class to which he now belongs, and proves his success as a fifteenth century reformer. The people made and keep up the acquaintance of this man by way of the ticket office, but instead of considering him as they would any other footlight performer, who had struck a paying vein and was working it for all it was worth, and who can only be heard at so much per ticket, they have come to look upon the character he has been acting as the man himself, and their friend who would make their cause his own.