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The Ring was broken. The Boss fled to Spain, a fugitive from justice. He was arrested in Vigo on the charge of "kidnapping two American children." This curious charge was explained by the fact that he was identified by a Spanish policeman from an old Nast cartoon that showed the Boss as a Tammany policeman collaring two small ragamuffins, labeled "Lesser Thieves." The Boss died in New York's Ludlow Street jail. In his luggage was every Nast cartoon ever drawn of him.
Thomas Nast invented most of the vocabulary of the U. S. political cartoon. He invented the figure of gaunt Uncle Sam, the Tammany Tiger (a reference to the tiger painted on the dashboard of Boss Tweed's old fire engine, now in the Museum of the City of New York), the Democratic Donkey and Republican Elephant. No other U. S. cartoonist has ever equaled his power, the strength of his line. Out of fashion for ten years before he died, he accepted the post of U. S. consul at Guayaquil, Ecuador from President Roosevelt, died at his post of yellow fever. Last week Critic Henry McBride had this to say of his exhibition:
"The force of statement and finish of workmanship are not to be matched anywhere in present day caricature. . . . One wonders why this should be, and one wonders also if the showing of Nast's work in a museum may not key up our draughtsmen to bolder expression. It certainly will key up the collectors."
* At the close of the War the U. S. attempted to collect damages from Britain for the destruction of Union merchantmen by Confederate commerce raiders built in British yards. The C. S. S. Alabama was the most successful.