A PICTORIAL PAIN KILLER.
PUCK is what the erstwhile Artemous Ward would call a
"yewmerous" paper, and is published solely for the
benefit of bad barbers. When you take your seat in the
butcher's shambles he provides you with a copy of Puck
because its jokes are so excruciatingly painful that it
pulls your piligerous annex out with a stump-extractor
and rubbed aqua fortis into your face with a bath brick,
the physical ill would be forgotten in the mental agony. I
never saw anybody but a barber purchase a copy of Puck
not any son of Adam reading it outside a "tonsorial
parlor." Should the Populists carry the country and barbers
be tabooed Puck's mission on earth would be ended
—unless it could persuade dentists to adopts it as an
anæsthetic, and sheriffs to read it to condemned criminals
to make them yearn for death. The last time I was shaved
the razor pulled so dreadfully that I sought refuge in this
pictorial pain-killer's editorial page. I there learned,
much to my surprise, that the rise in the price of wheat
had killed the silver cause; also that W. J. Bryan had
"said, in that pose of easy omniscience for which he
became remarkable, that `a bushel of wheat and an ounce of
silver were ordained by nature to become equal each to
the other'—`wheat cannot rise unless silver rises.' " If
W. J. Bryan said that, even in his salad days, he's a hopeless
damphool, unfit to be pound-master, much less president;
but I'll pay two-bits for incontestable evidence that
he ever made such an idiotic remark. My private opinion
is that the malice of Puck's mendacity is equalled only by
its awkwardness. It is possible that its editor mistakes
falsehood for fun. Or he may have heard somewhere the
statement he parrots and really supposed it true, for a
man capable of conducting so
jejune a journal might
easily believe anything. Another article in his paper says
that Cardinal Wolsey managed all "Bluff King Hal"
divorce business, while the fact is that his hostility to that
feculent old tub of tallow's matrimonial crimes was the
efficient cause of his downfall. As a historian
Puck is
about as reliable as Mark Twain's acerbic old sea captain;
hence his asservations anent Bryan's utterances should
be taken with considerable chloride of sodium. Every man
who knows as much about political economy as a terrapin
does of the Talmud is well aware that a rise in the price
of one commodity simultaneous with the decline in price
of another commodity has nothing whatever to do with
the currency question. Those who cackle about a rise
in wheat synchronously with the fall of silver make a very
indecent exposure of their own ignorance. If I had a
ten-year old boy who was such a hopeless idiot I'd drown
him as not worth honest grub, then seek a surgeon and
make sure that I'd never again inflict the world with
progeny cursed with cretinism. Wheat went up and silver
down, as Mr. Bryan recently explained to the satisfaction
of every man possessing an ounce of brains, simply
because the demand for the one was increased by foreign
crop failures, the demand for the other decreased by
Anglo-Cleveland skull-duggery. "Law of supply and
demand," bawls
Puck and all the other journalistic puppets
of an impudent plutocracy. You miserable little hiccius
doctius, do you expect to deceive an intelligent people
with that kind of howl, while the trade in wheat is left
untrammeled and the demand for silver arbitrarily limited
by law? Suppose that while the world's wheat fields were
producing abundantly the leading nations should prohibit
their people purchasing any more of that cereal for food
production; would any macrocephalous donkey ascribe the
decline in the price of wheat to "the immutable law of
supply and demand?" When silver is placed on an
equality with all other commodities; when the people are
permitted to freely employ it as they please, then will the
natural law of supply and demand apply to the white
metal, and New York editors cease to jabber financial
nonsense with the stupid persistence of a poll-parrot
praising its own personal pulchritude. The editor of
Puck
should avoid political economy as a subject a trifle too
large for the knot on the end of his neck, and confine
himself to his threadbare specialty, that of belittling the
Jews with his watery wit and atribilarious art. The only
funny thing I find in his paper is its solemn "notice to
publishers" that all its raccous rot is copyrighted, that
infringement will be "promptly and vigorously prosecuted."
The editor who would steal from
Puck would walk
through Stringfellow's fruit farm to crib a wilted cabbage
leaf from a blind cow. The best things in
Puck scarce
rise to the dignity of Slob Snots' milk-sick drivel in the
Gal-Dal, while Texas has a hundred country editors pulling
a Washington hand press and building stallion poster,
who could write brighter things if they were drunk—or
dead. "Promptly and vigorously prosecuted" O the
devil! Why don't you say that you'll have any fool who
attempts to father your hand-made yermer sent to an
insane asylum to be treated for prolapsus of the intellect?
