Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism of the only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections, Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty of the journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims as well as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put upon me, and closing with the knife grinder's retort--

Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass.

In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue. Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, he had said: "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leave it where you and Morrison had put it in the platform."

We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who later along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate.

One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue. Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before the bloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a hero like William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States, he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.

Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by both parties.