a man of noble impulses, and Bates would not pursue it long.  He preferred to go into voluntary exile at Des Moines, Iowa; and in that glorious Republican harvest-field he accomplished a great and good work, which being done, symmetrized and concinnated, he returned to this Gomorrah of Mugwumpery and identified himself with that sterling trade journal, the Hide and Leather Criterion.

Next November the two surviving members of the old guard of three will march, arm in arm, to the polls, and will then and there cast their individual votes for the nominees of the Republican party—­it matters not whether they be statesmen or tobacco-signs, so long as they be nominees.

As the blasts do but root a tree more firmly in mother earth, so have the trials to which we Republicans of the Daily News have been subjected for the four years riveted us all the more securely to the faith.  We have been forced in the line of professional duty to turn humorous paragraphs upon the alleged insincerity of our beloved political leader, but every paragraph so turned shall eventually come home d.v. (and we hope d.q.) to roost, like an Ossa, upon the Pelion of Infamy, which shall surely mark the grave of Mugwumpery.  Every poem which we persecuted defenders of the faith have been bulldozed into weaving for the regalement of our persecutors shall be sung again when the other shore is reached, and when the horse and the rider are thrown into the sea.  Never for a moment during the trials of these four years have we doubted (and when we say “we,” Bates is included)—­never have we doubted that there was a promised land, and that we should get there in due time.  What we have needed was a Moses; to be candid, we still need a Moses; and we need him badly.  We care naught where he comes from—­it matters not whither, from the New York Central or from the Western Reserve or from Dubuque, so long as he be a Moses, and that kind of an improved Moses, too, that will not fall just this side of the line.

O brother Republican, what rewards, what joys, what delights are in store for us twain!  Lift up your eyes and see in the East the dawn of the new day.  Its warmth and its splendor will soon be over and about us.  And, mindful of our martyrdom and contemplating its rewards, with great force comes to us just now the lines of the inspired Watts, wherein he portrays the eventual felicity of such as we: 

    What bliss will thrill the ransomed souls
      When they in glory dwell,
    To see the sinner as he rolls
      In quenchless flames of hell.

Never did a cheerful sinner extract such entertaining enjoyment for himself and his friends from a fictitious martyrdom as Field did from these political tribulations.  That he never lost his waggish or satirical interest in politics is evidenced by the following parody on his own “Jest ’fore Christmas,” written in December, 1894, being at the expense of the then mayor of Chicago: