Fifty Great Cartoons

Charles Wesley once said, “There is no reason why the devil should have all of the best tunes,” and it is equally hard to conceive why he should have all of the best pictures. There is probably no phase of art which Satan has tried harder to control than that of painting. He has sought to corrupt literature, music and oratory, but even if he meets defeat in each of these quarters, he will be fully resigned, if it remains in his power, to make the pictorial artist his ready slave; for well the arch spirit of evil knows that it is pictures that catch the eye, fasten the attention, quicken the imagination and enthrall the soul.

For years and years the pen of the caricaturist was in the exclusive service of the secular and humorous press. There it often did good work as the champion of social and political reform. Nast, Gillam and Beard, in their several fields of pictorial journalism, have laid the nation and the world under deeper obligations than it will soon be able to repay. One of that famous trio, however, not being content with his success in merely amusing men, or at best in directing their thoughts to the foibles of politics, and society, sought to enlarge his usefulness by consecrating his pen and his genius to the betterment of the religious conditions of the race and hoped thereby to bring men to a better understanding of themselves and their Maker.

It was Frank Beard, who, first among the great artists, used the pen of caricature as a champion of Christian living and Christian reform. He could have found no better opportunity to exercise his talent and distribute its effects broadcast than in the pages of The Ram’s Horn, that wonderful weekly paper which far and near is now known as “the miracle of modern journalism.” For nearly three years Mr. Beard has given The Ram’s Horn a full page cartoon each week and it is Fifty of the Best of these Pictures which now appear in the pages of this volume.

The highest hopes of Mr. Beard and of The Ram’s Horn will be accomplished if, by the publication of these pictures, stronger emphasis is laid upon the fact that Christ is the foundation of the church, and good citizenship is the foundation of the state, and that the only great foe to the former is Unbelief, and as for the latter no good citizenship is possible so long as it remains in an unholy league with the licensed saloon.