One idea has ever dominated Mr. Rogers in his work. He has battled resolutely for one great object-common honesty-something more needed to-day than ever before in our public life. We think it is quite safe to say that no less than eight-tenths of his cartoons have to do with graft, corruption and the betrayal of the people in the interests of privileged wealth. He has been the uncompromising, determined and tireless foe of all forms of civic dishonesty. His ideal of statecraft is high, and his realization of the fact that there is a cancer at the vitals of the nation, eating away the fabric of free government, destroying public morality and draining the resources of the millions, is so keen that his pictures speak volumes. In the columns of one of the greatest news-gatherers of the world. and one of the most negative editorial papers of the age, Rogers' pictures are the most virile moral note present-the note that more than aught else compels the reader to take cognizance of the grave per

Mr. Rogers' cartoons are usually calculated to provoke a smile, even when the picture cuts as a keen lance into a loathsome mass of corruption in the body politic. The artist believes that this is the most effective method of driving home the truth he seeks to impress on the public mind. On this point he recently said:

"My general idea of a cartoon is to hit cleanly and without undue exaggeration either in the idea or the drawing. If one can make a cartoon that the side ridiculed must laugh at in spite of themselves, then he has made the best kind of a cartoon and the most effective."

We are not altogether convinced that Mr. Rogers' conclusions are sound. We incline to think that it was some of the most brutally savage of the cartoons of Nast that compelled the citizens of New York to take cognizance of the wholesale and systematic corruption of the Tweed Ring. So we believe that when Davenport was with the New York Journal and American, making his powerful but brutal and somber cartoons, he was a greater power for moral progress than any other cartoonist of that day. There are times when the bludgeon is more effective than the rapier. Still, each method has its place and serves its purpose in the hands of men of high ideals and strong convictions.

II.

"The idea of drawing came to me as about the first thing I can remember. My mother was a skilful artist and taught me the simple elements of drawing at the same time that I learned my letters," remarked Mr. Rogers recently when in a reminiscent mood and in reply to a question from us. "I remember," he continued, "when I was fourteen years old I drew a number of small cartoons on wood, and an engraver in Dayton, Ohio, engraved them for a syndicate. So far as I know these were the first cartoons to be syndicated in the daily papers. They were drawn with a pen directly on the block."

In answer to the question, "What artist or art work exerted the greatest influence on you during your childhood?" Mr. Rogers replied:

"The first real impetus given to my ambition came at about this time, when a friend loaned me an excellently engraved set of Hogarth's works. The sturdy honesty of his characterization appealed to me at once and has been an inspiration ever since."

Mr. Rogers was born in Springfield,

Rogers, in New York Herald.
BEGINNING TO BE AFFECTED BY THE ALTITUDE.

Ohio. His father was a prominent lawyer at a bar conspicuous for the ability and brilliance of its practitioners. Among the men of marked ability who were frequently opposed to or associated with the elder Rogers in cases before the Ohio

circuit courts were Salmon P. Chase, Thomas Corwin, John Sherman and Samuel Shellabarger. At the time of his death, which occurred when he was only forty-four years of age, he was on the bench.

"I have always felt," said Mr. Rogers, "that my deep interest in public questions was a direct inheritance from him."

From the high-minded father, imbued with the sturdy spirit that marked so many of the strong men of the meridian period of the last century, the artist early learned to honor and respect fidelity to public trust and to abhor dishonesty and venality in every form, and especially when the corruption affected those in public life; for the elder Rogers had ever striven to impress his son with the idea. that a public office was a trust doubly sacred in character: it was a position in which the honored individual had been confided by trusting citizens with their own interests, in the faith that they would be administered for the true benefit of those he was chosen to represent, while at the same time fidelity to the trust was imposed by the high demands of democratic government. So long as the people's representatives spurned all forms of

Bogata, in New York Herald,

THE BLACK HORI CAVALRY" IS IN POSSESSION.

bribery, remaining faithful in the service of the people, the Republic would be the great moral and political beacon-light in the world of government. These great truths were impressed on the mind of the son ere the father died. They have lived in his imagination and are the vital moral power behind his pen.

In 1872 Mr. Rogers took up illustrating as a profession, and in 1873 he became a member of the staff of the New York Daily Graphic. Later he entered the employ of Harper's Weekly, where he contributed a number of excellent drawings, and in 1880 he drew a cartoon, during the Hancock campaign. It made an instantaneous hit. Since then, though he has made hundreds of drawings depicting passing events and illustrating stories, his cartoons have been in such

Many of Mr. Rogers' most effective cartoons have been directed against the riot of dishonesty that has made Albany almost as notorious a seat of corruption as Harrisburg has been since the publicservice corporations and privileged interests of Pennsylvania gained complete control of the Republican political machine of the Keystone State. The battle between the friends of New York State,

who strove to save the splendid forests of the Adirondacks, and the paper-trust

whose lobby was so perniciously active in Albany, called forth some telling cartoons fixing cleverly in the public mind the responsibility where it belongedwith the legislators at Albany and the rapacious trust.

The insurance scandals have served in recent months to show, as did the railway investigations of several years ago, how completely the most powerful and corrupt financial magnates of the great corporations control the legislature, through the bosses, the lobby, and by the selection of service tools as candidates for the legislature. Severa veas ro, in the railway investigation. Jay Gouid desembed how he paid Sberally to secure the e

nation and election of representatives that would be favorable to the Erie Road. He contributed liberally to the fund for the election of any persons who would wear the Erie collar. In Republican districts, he declared, he was a Republican; in Democratic districts he was a Democrat; in doubtful districts he was doubtful; but, he added, "I am an Erie man all the time." And in that brutally frank confession the voters of America had given to them one of the master-keys to the amazing phenomenon of the systematic betrayal of the people by those sworn faithfully to represent their inter

ests.

Mr. Platt recently confessed in the insurance investigation how he received contributions from the great insurance companies and admitted that the taking of the money implied a moral obligation to the insurance harpies; not to the policyholders, it should be remembered, as the old safeguards that protected them were removed by the legislature at the instigation of the Wall-street insurance cormorants and gamblers who wanted to use the trust-funds of the policy-holders recklessly and wastefully, and who were ready to contribute vast sums to what is popularly known as the "yellow dog" fund, to debauch the people's servants and render themselves immune from punishment.

Naturally enough the insurance revelations afforded an admirable opportunity for Mr. Rogers' pen.

In a lighter vein are other cartoons, such as the one representing Uncle Sam pointing to the Monroe doctrine and addressing England and Germany, warning them that it is a live wire.

Another humorous cartoon that was very widely copied at the time was called forth by President Roosevelt assuming the entire management of the Republican nominating convention, when he indicated his choice for temporary chairman and permanent chairman and the general management of the convention, and when it was stated that he carefully scrutinized Mr. Black's fulsome eulogy of the president in his nominating speech, before it was delivered. Mr. Rogers hit off this matter in a cartoon representing Mr. Roosevelt as the whole convention from start to finish.

Several of his best cartoons have been directed against America's great gambling world and trust spawning-ground, Wall street. A typical drawing of this class was entitled "Undigested Securities" and was called forth by the famous remark of J. Pierpont Morgan when defending such notorious water-logged corporations as the ill-starred ship-trust.

In 1902, when President Roosevelt

appeared to be desirous of having the