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Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, Vol. 2 (of 4).—1857-1874

by Charles L. Graves · English · Gutenberg #45003 · 630,833 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, Vol. 2 (of 4).—1857-1874

Author: Charles L. Graves


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND, VOL. 2 (OF 4).—1857-1874 ***

MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND VOL. II. OF IV.


Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have
been retained as printed. Words printed in italics are noted with
underscores: _italics_.


[Illustration: QUEEN HERMIONE

PAULINA (Britannia) unveils the statue: "'Tis time; descend; be stone no
more!"

_Winter's Tale, Act V., Scene 3._

_Reproduced from the Cartoon by John Tenniel._]




MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND

By

CHARLES L. GRAVES

IN FOUR VOLUMES

VOL. II.--1857-1874

  CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
  London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
  1921

_Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"_


CONTENTS


PART I

THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK


THE AGE OF NON-INTERVENTION

THE ROAD TO REFORM

THE CHURCHES

EDUCATION

INVENTIONS, NOVELTIES AND FORECASTS

LONDON


PART II

THE SOCIAL FABRIC


THE COURT

GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE

CLASS DISTINCTIONS

WOMEN

LITERATURE

DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS

FASHION IN DRESS

SPORT AND PASTIME




PART I


THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK




MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND




THE AGE OF NON-INTERVENTION

    "Whether splendidly isolated or dangerously isolated, I will not
    now debate; but for my part I think splendidly isolated, because
    this isolation of England comes from her superiority."


These words were used by Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, but they were
prompted by a retrospect of the Victorian age, and may serve as a motto
for the policy which governed England in her relations with foreign
countries in the period surveyed in this volume.

There was serious friction with France in the early days of the Empire
owing to the distrust of the Emperor's warlike preparations and his
manipulation of the opportunities presented by his assistance of Italy
in 1859. In the war of North and South in America, England as a whole
"backed the wrong horse," and English diplomacy mishandled the
obligations of our neutrality. We were on the verge of war over the
_Trent_ case, and the slackness of the Government in failing to detain
the _Alabama_ burdened the country with a costly legacy of moral and
intellectual damage--to say nothing of pecuniary loss.

Popular sentiment was strongly anti-Prussian in the war on Denmark in
1864; misgivings of Prussian aggression were heightened by the crushing
defeat of Austria in 1866 and the French _débâcle_ in 1870. Yet the old
diplomacy, whatever its shortcomings, kept us out of European wars. The
Court as well as the Government strove hard for peace in 1859; the
Queen's influence was successfully exerted to prevent interference on
behalf of Denmark in 1864, which had been foreshadowed in a menacing
message to Austria from Lord Palmerston. After the defeat of the
Austrians at Sadowa in 1866, Disraeli justified abstention from
unnecessary interference in European politics, on the ground that
England had outgrown the European Continent, and was really more of an
Asiatic than a European power. With Gladstone the restraining motive was
economic rather than anti-imperialist, though his distrust of a
"spirited foreign policy" became more pronounced in later years. But
under Liberals and Conservatives alike, non-intervention in European
wars remained the unbroken rule, and the only serious military
operations undertaken between 1857 and 1874 were those involved in the
suppression of a great revolt within our own dominions. The Chinese
quarrel was the only cloud on the horizon in the beginning of 1857.
Parliament was dissolved as the result of the vote of censure passed in
the Commons, but Palmerston was returned with a strong majority, and the
pacificists under Cobden lost their seats, _Punch_ expressing the hope
that Cobden might be "master of himself though China fall."

The war with China was not a glorious page in our annals: it remained in
abeyance during the Mutiny and was not concluded till 1860. Indirectly
it was one of the means of saving India by the diversion of the troops
intended for the Far East, and already at Singapore, to the relief of
Bengal at the urgent summons of Lord Canning, the Governor-General of
India. The first mention of the outbreak in _Punch_ followed close on
the tragedy of Meerut early in May. In his "Essence of Parliament" we
read:--

    Lord Ellenborough delivered an alarmist speech about the mutinies
    in our Indian Army. Among other terrors, he was hideously afraid
    that Lord Canning, the Governor-General, had been taking some step
    which showed that he thought Christianity a true religion, but this
    damaging accusation was happily explained away. Lord Lansdowne was
    almost sure that Lord Canning could not so far have misconducted
    himself.

The charge was capable of complete disproof, but unluckily, as with the
greasing of the cartridges, the Sepoys were unconvinced. A fortnight
later _Punch_ realized that the time for levity was passed:--

    An Indian debate followed, but it is no subject for light
    treatment, for while members were droning about cotton, and Mangles
    [the Chairman of the East India Company] was puffing the Company as
    having done miracles for India, news was hurrying over the sea that
    native regiments were in mutiny, had seized Delhi, and murdered all
    the Europeans there, without distinction of age or sex. It is a
    good time to be erecting a Shropshire memorial to Clive, if only to
    remind England that she once had a man who knew not only how to
    gain, but how to keep Oriental conquests.

[Illustration: THE BRITISH LION'S VENGEANCE ON THE BENGAL TIGER]

[Sidenote: _Heroes of the Mutiny_]

The issue of July 25 is full of the bustle of preparation, the hurried
dispatch of Sir Colin Campbell to take command, and the embodying of the
militia. It should be noted that one of the very first of the Mutiny
cartoons revealed a disposition on the part of _Punch_ to recognize that
the mischief was deep-seated and had its origin largely in the arbitrary
methods of the East India Company. On August 15 there appeared the
picture of "The Execution of 'John Company,'" with _Punch_ blowing up
the offices in Leadenhall Street, and fragments labelled "avarice,"
"blundering," "nepotism," "supineness," "misgovernment," etc., flying
from the mouth of a gun. But there was no hesitation in _Punch's_
support of the most drastic measures for stamping out the mutiny. The
word of the moment was "Cry Havelock! and let slip the dogs of war." On
August 22 appeared the cartoon "The British Lion's Vengeance"--on the
Bengal Tiger seen crouching over the bodies of an English woman and
child. On September 12 Britannia is shown smiting down the mutineers; in
the same number, however, in the lines "A word to the Avenger,"
reprisals are deprecated: "Spare the Indian mother and her child." On
October 10, under the title "O God of Battles, steel my soldiers'
hearts," the Queen is shown kneeling with widows and orphans in mourning
garb, while a week later Sir Colin Campbell is drawn in fetters of red
tape--his greatest difficulty in India.

At home, while _Punch_ welcomed the recruiting from drapers' shops, and
the filling of their places by women, he noted the snobbery of certain
tradesmen who thought they would lose caste by enlisting. He also
recognized that the appeal for recruits was seriously prejudiced by the
callous treatment of ex-service men in the past.

Throughout the Mutiny _Punch_ was hostile to Canning, and his
"Clemency," representing him as unduly tender to the mutineers and
invariably interfering on their behalf. This criticism reaches its
height of injustice to the statesman who uttered and acted on the noble
maxim "I will not govern in anger," in the mock proclamation which
appears in the issue of October 24. There was probably better ground for
the imaginary conversation between the Duke of Cambridge, as
Commander-in-Chief, and Lords Lucan and Cardigan, in which the two
latter noblemen sneer at the services of Havelock. This disparagement,
be it noted, was not confined to the Crimean cavalry commanders; Mr.
Gladstone declined to vote for the grant of a pension, and was in
consequence associated by _Punch_ with the Manchester School, whose
pacificist organ, the _Star_, had been savagely burlesqued in the issue
of October 31. Meanwhile the tide had turned in the war by the capture
of Delhi and the first relief of Lucknow. The toll of heroic lives among
our leaders had been heavy--Henry Lawrence, Nicholson and Havelock at
the end of the year--but _Punch_ was true to his old democratic
instincts in recording the exploits of all ranks. He was eloquent in his
appeal for the assistance of Miss Salkeld, sister of Lieutenant Salkeld,
who lost his life in the blowing in of the Kashmir gate at Delhi. But he
does not forget Salkeld's humbler associates, who with him "rushed upon
death to make way for the bayonets of England when the great stronghold
of treason was stormed":--

    Let it not be forgotten, when Salkeld's noble deed is told, and
    thought is taken for those whom he loved, that other gallant men
    met death in the same proud exploit. Sergeant Burgess sprang
    forward, took the match from Salkeld when he was struck, and firing
    the train, fell mortally wounded. Sergeant Carmichael had already
    perished in an attempt to fire the fuse. Surely England has a
    heart warm enough, and a purse deep enough, to do all that money
    can do in memory of such men as those whose names are thus set
    before her.

In the first month of 1858 we read the fine tribute to Havelock:--

    He is gone. Heaven's will is best:
    Indian turf o'erlies his breast.
    Ghoul in black, nor fool in gold
    Laid him in yon hallowed mould.
    Guarded to a soldier's grave
    By the bravest of the brave.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Strew not on the hero's hearse
    Garlands of a herald's verse:
    Let us hear no words of Fame
    Sounding loud a deathless name:
    Tell us of no vauntful Glory
    Shouting forth her haughty story.
    All life long his homage rose
    To far other shrine than those.
    "_In Hoc Signo_," pale nor dim,
    Lit the battle-field for him,
    And the prize he sought and won,
    Was the Crown for Duty done.

Lucknow was recaptured in March, 1858, but the pacification of Oudh by
Sir Colin Campbell, now Lord Clyde, and the clearance of Central India
by Sir Hugh Rose, afterwards Lord Strathnairn, occupied the whole of the
remainder of the year: indeed, order was not completely restored till
the close of 1859, or more than a year after the rule of "John Company"
had been abolished and its executive powers transferred to the Crown.

[Sidenote: _John Bull's Foreign Policy_]

The process begun under Palmerston was completed by the Derby-Disraeli
administration after long and acrimonious debates and recriminations,
cabals and intrigues, in the course of which _Punch_ vehemently assailed
the East India Company, disgraced but impenitent, for its misdeeds,
Bright for his impracticable independence and pro-Indian sympathies;
Ellenborough and Canning; Palmerston and Disraeli. Palmerston in
particular had fallen from favour because of the Conspiracy Bill
introduced after the Orsini attempt to assassinate the French Emperor.
The plot had been hatched in London, but _Punch_ bitterly resented the
notion of making this a ground for depriving England of her position as
the "sanctuary of Europe," and held that Palmerston had brought defeat
on himself by knuckling down to Louis Napoleon. The fury of the
_Moniteur_ against England's alleged harbouring of criminals only
excited _Punch's_ derision. Relieved from the Indian tragedy, he was now
free to revert to his old inveterate distrust of Louis Napoleon, and to
preach for years to come the need of a strong navy. The lines on "John
Bull's Foreign Policy" in the autumn of 1858, addressed to the Peoples
of Europe, frankly admit that self-interest mingles with his love of
Liberty:--

    To hold you down, your despots arm,
    And keep me always in alarm.
    Confound them!--they mean me no good;
    Abolish, well I know they would,
    My Constitution, if they could.

    I, too, must arm in self-defence;
    And armaments involve expense:
    Expense taxation means--my curse;
    Despotic power alone is worse:
    Your masters thus myself amerce.

    Oh, how I wish I could retrench!
    But I must keep pace with the French,
    And for the Russians stand prepared,
    The cost whereof I should be spared,
    To shake your yokes off if you dared.

    Rise, therefore, and your rights assert,
    Ye Peoples, trodden in the dirt.
    Strike for your freedom, nations brave,
    Whom monarchs absolute enslave:
    And so enable me to save.

So along with appeals to Lord Derby to make up his mind like a man to
Reform, we find repeated and even more urgent appeals to England to keep
up the Channel Fleet. The imposing display of force at Cherbourg by
Louis Napoleon in the autumn of 1858 only enhanced _Punch's_ misgivings
and prompted the suggestion of an alliance with the United States.
_Punch_ greeted Sir Francis Head's renewed scare-mongering about a
French invasion with ridicule, but he was more seriously impressed by
French pamphleteers and novelists who spoke of war with England as
inevitable.

The defeat of the Derby-Disraeli Government over their Reform Bill in
the spring of 1859 brought back Palmerston and Russell at a critical
time in the history of the struggle for Italian unity. Of that cause
both these statesmen were true friends, but the sympathy of England was
impaired by distrust of Louis Napoleon, and this nervousness and anxiety
as to his intentions is repeatedly illustrated in the pages of _Punch_.
Victor Emmanuel is shown as the Piedmontese farmer between the two
Eagles, Austria and France. Again the French Emperor's phrase "_L'Empire
c'est la paix_" is satirized in a cartoon showing him as a porcupine
bristling with bayonets. England's line should be one of extreme
watchfulness: "We'll keep our powder dry." On the eve of the outbreak of
the war between France and Austria _Punch_ gives his "Neutral Advice" in
the following lines:--

    Let France delight to go and fight
      If 'tis her folly to:
    Let Austria cry for "territory!"
      With that we've naught to do.

    Our shout must be "Neutrality!"
      To England peace is sweet;
    But, friends, that she may neutral be,
      LET'S MAN OUR FORTS AND FLEET.

[Illustration: THE FRENCH PORCUPINE

"L'empire c'est la paix"

He may be an inoffensive animal, but he don't look like it.]

[Sidenote: _Napoleon III and Cavour_]

After Magenta the share in the fighting between Italy and France is
symbolized in the fable of the Giant and the Dwarf: Victor Emmanuel was
to do all the fighting while France, forsooth, claimed half the honours
of war. No opportunity was lost of putting the worst construction on
Louis Napoleon's patronage of Savoy. His pacific statements are
constantly contrasted with his policy of aggrandisement. In the autumn
_Punch_ quoted the _New York Herald's_ tribute: "We are seriously of
opinion that if Louis Napoleon were not Emperor of the French, he would
have made a first-rate newspaper editor. His style is like that of the
American papers." The report that Cavour had retired in disgust inspired
a bitter attack on the two Emperors in July:--

    Count O'Cavourneen, the bubble is breaking,
      You've had the last scene, Solferino's red hill,
    The cannons no longer the echoes are waking,
      Count O'Cavourneen, what, Minister still?
    O hast thou forgot the diplomacy clever
      In which thou didst bear so distinguished a part,
    Thy vow to clear out all the Hapsbugs for ever?
      The vermin still linger, Cavour of my heart.

    Cavourneen, Cavourneen, the dead lie in numbers
      Beneath the torn turf where the living made fight;
    In the bed of My Uncle the Emperor slumbers,
      But Italy's Hapsbugs continue to bite.
    Well done, my Cavour, they have cut short the struggle
      They fired all the pulses of Italy's heart;
    And in turning thy back on the humbug and juggle,
      Cavour, thou hast played a proud gentleman's part.

[Illustration: MILITIA OFFICER: "Ah, this is Smithers! Why, you're
getting very fat, Smithers. Let's see--this is your fifth training,
isn't it?"

STOUT PRIVATE: "Yes, sir. After we was disembodied, sir, the Adj'tant he
took an' _reintestined_ me, sir!!!"

(_Note._--Militiamen, after serving four trainings, can be
"_Re-attested_" for another five years.)]

Italy and her friends were alike profoundly dissatisfied with the terms
of the Peace of Villafranca, by which Savoy and Nice were handed over to
the French Emperor, whose further "intentions" kept England in a simmer
of indignant anxiety for years to come. The scare of a French invasion
revived, the volunteer movement took on increased activity, and the
anxiety of financiers was revealed in the grotesque incident of the four
Liverpool brokers who wrote to Louis Napoleon asking him what his
"intentions" were. They were faithfully dealt with by _Punch_ in his
burlesque verses on "The Four Fishers"--who caught nothing, and in an
imaginary parallel letter to Queen Victoria.

[Sidenote: _The Invasion Scare_]

[Illustration: OUR RESERVES

CAPTAIN OF RURAL CORPS (calling over the Roll): "George Hodge!" (No
answer.) "George Hodge!--Where on earth's George Hodge?"

VOICE FROM THE RANKS: "Please, sir, he's turned Dissenter, and says
fighting's wicked."]

As for the invasion scare, _Punch_ treated it contemptuously in the
cartoons representing the French Emperor with a poodle at Calais facing
the British Lion at Dover, and the French Eagle drowning in mid-Channel.
These cartoons, by the way, and _Punch's_ support of the volunteer
movement in general, led the pacificist _Star_ to declare that "_Punch_
is a disgrace to the country in which it is tolerated." But _Punch_ was
not a panic-monger. While he vigorously upheld Lord Lyndhurst's plea for
a strong Navy, which John Bright vigorously opposed, he welcomed the
evidence of goodwill shown by a French publicist, M. Chevalier, who
vindicated England against the charge of Chauvinism, and maintained that
her attitude was merely defensive. As for the volunteers, _Punch_
commended their patriotism, resented the patronizing contempt of the
Regulars, and while ridiculing fancy costumes, was all in favour of a
rational uniform:--

    Some talk of Alexander,
      And some of Hercules,
    But John Bull's rising dander
      Needs no such aids as these.
    He shoulders his long Enfield,
      And at his drill appears,
    Till "ping-wing-wing," the bullets sing,
      Of the Rifle Volunteers.

    And when he is commanded
      To find himself in clothes,
    Like a trump unto his tailor
      For a uniform he goes.
    With his easy knickerbockers,
      And no stock his neck that queers,
    For a run, jump, stand, they're the boys to command,
      Are the Rifle Volunteers!

    Let the Horse Guards trust to pipe-clay,
      And General Routine,
    Till the Linesman's shakoed, belted,
      And pack'd to a machine;
    With winds and waists unfettered,
      And the use of eyes and ears,
    In wide-awake tile come the rank and file
      Of the Rifle Volunteers!

[Illustration: NO PLAYING AT SOLDIERS

COLONEL PUNCH (Inspector of Volunteers): "Look here, George, I want
those brave fellows to learn their duty."

H.R.H. COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF: "Of course you do, old boy, and so do I; and
I'll see that they _do_ learn it, too!"]

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Volunteers_]

[Illustration: "OUR RESERVES"--THE BATTLE OF AMESBURY

AIDE-DE-CAMP: "Good gracious, sir! Why don't you order your men to lie
down under this hill? Can't you see that Battery playing right on them?"

COLONEL OF VOLUNTEERS: "So I did, sir. But they won't lie down. They say
they want to see the Review!"]

In later years, when the menace of Napoleonic "intentions" ceased to
preoccupy the public, the attitude of _Punch_ towards the volunteers
became more critical and less sympathetic, but throughout 1860--allowing
for a little amiable chaff of the contrast between their physique and
their bellicose spirit--he lent the movement cordial support, applauding
the institution of cadet corps in schools, and the provision of
facilities to enable footmen and tradesmen to attend drills and be
instructed in rifle-shooting. The review in Hyde Park was duly
chronicled in a cartoon representing the Queen resting a rifle on
_Punch's_ head, and the poem in honour of the London Volunteers may be
set against the genial satire of Keene's zealous little captain leading
his men "through fire and water," or the references to the street boys'
catch-word "Who shot the dog?"

The year 1860 found England with the Chinese war still on hand; it was
not ended till the autumn, with the capture, destruction and looting of
the Chinese Emperor's Summer Palace at Peking as an act of vengeance for
the barbarous treatment of the British envoys. But India was completely
pacified, and Lord Clyde returned home to receive the laurel. The Prince
of Wales's visit to Canada was already decided on; Lord Lyndhurst was
still clamouring for a strong fleet; the Queen's speech promised the
introduction of another measure of Reform, nominally redeemed by Lord
John Russell's "nice little Bill" satirized by _Punch_ in March and
overwhelmed with ridicule on its withdrawal in June:--

    Amendments sore long time I bore;
      Parental love was vain;
    Till by degrees the House did please
      To put me out of pain.

Abroad the outlook was still concentrated on Italy and the progress of
her unification. In October, 1859, _Punch_ had hailed the coming of
freedom; but it was

                "no rosy dawn,
      No true Aurora; but a lamp
    Which in a moment may be gone,
      Extinguished by a tyrant's stamp."

He deplored the exigencies which confined England's aid to the mere
expression of goodwill to the brave men who were fighting for liberty.
But by the summer of 1860 events were moving apace. It was the time of
the famous Sicilian Expedition of Garibaldi, whom _Punch_ acclaimed as
the great champion of United Italy:--

    Honour to Garibaldi! Win or lose,
      A Hero to all time that Chief goes down,
    Whatever issue his emprise ensues,
      He, certain of unquenchable renown,
      Fights for a victor's or a martyr's crown.

[Sidenote: _Garibaldi and Lincoln_]

The flight of "Bombalino"--Francis IV, son of "Bomba," King of
Naples--is celebrated in a pæan on Garibaldi, the Irish Papal Volunteers
are ironically praised for their valour in "The Wake of the Irish
Brigade," and a cartoon "The Right Leg in the Boot at Last" shows
Garibaldi helping Victor Emmanuel to put his leg into the boot of Italy,
with the comment, "If it won't go on, Sire, try a little more powder."
_Punch_, we may add, condoled with Garibaldi on the report that Dumas
was to write his life, and recorded the description of him given by a
young English lady as "a dear old weather-beaten angel."

Savoy and Nice had been annexed to France, and Louis Napoleon's letter
to the Comte de Persigny, the French Ambassador in London, disclaiming
any aggressive intentions, revived _Punch's_ distrust. The cartoon of
August 11, 1860, represents the Emperor as a wolf in sheep's
clothing--with the heads of two little dead lambs, labelled Savoy and
Nice, peeping out--in the act of posting a letter to Mme. Britannia,
"care of M. le Comte de Persigny." But already the eyes of Europe were
beginning to be drawn across the Atlantic. The protest of South Carolina
is dealt with mainly in a light-hearted spirit, but with an ominous
anticipation of the sequel. The verses on "The Beginning of Slavery's
End" are wholly serious and entirely on the side of the North:--

    This is America's decision.
      Awakening, she begins to see
    How justly she incurs derision
      Of tyrants, while she shames us free;
    Republican, yet more slaves owning
    Than any under Empire groaning,
      Or ground beneath the Papacy.

Lincoln had been elected President, and apart from references to his
achievements as a rail-splitter, and the facetious suggestion that the
White House should be renamed "Lincoln's Inn," he is welcomed as an
honest man and with a respect which, all too soon, was replaced by the
spiteful calumny which did not cease until the tragedy of his untimely
end. The outbreak of civil war in the United States was immediately
followed by the proclamation of Britain's neutrality. _Punch's_
misinterpretation of the issues involved and his misreading of the
attitude of the cotton spinners of Lancashire is dealt with in another
section. The comments on Bull's Run and the burlesque correspondence
from Charleston are lamentably lacking in good feeling, and the report
that the Duc de Chartres and the Comte de Paris had joined the army of
the North only furnished _Punch_ with materials for disparaging the
French Princes and the cause they had espoused. The famous affair of the
_Trent_, involving the seizure of two Southern envoys on a British ship,
which brought England to the verge of war, is treated seriously, but
with a profound conviction of the justice of our claim. In the cartoon,
"Waiting for an Answer," Britannia is shown standing at the breech of a
great gun:--

    She waits in arms; and in her cause is safe
      Not fearing war, yet hoping peace the end,
    Nor heeding those her mood who'd check or chafe,
      The Right she seeks; the Right God will defend!

At home Reform had been indefinitely postponed; Lord John Russell had
gone to the Lords with an earldom, and _Punch_, lamenting the cooling of
his reforming zeal, recalls the analogies of Chatham, Pulteney, and
Holland, who, "to put on earl's ermine laid down their earlier fames."
Reorganization of the Navy and a large increase in the number of ships
were promised and taken in hand, and _Punch_ records his inspection of a
training ship at "Sherrysmouth" and the favourable impression created by
the discipline and spirit of all on board. Germany's desire for a fleet
is noted and treated with consistent ridicule. As an instance of her
activity "it is reported on the very best authority (not less than that
of Messrs. Searle, the great boat-builders of Lambeth) that a four-oared
cutter will be launched in a very few days." That was in September,
1861, and three weeks later _Punch_ appears in a cartoon as an old salt,
handing a toy yacht to a small but plethoric German with the remark:
"There's a ship for you, my little man; now cut away, and don't get in a
mess." This is followed up with a set of verses ending:--

    The moral, my dears, we all understand,
    All fat little Germans will stick upon land.

[Sidenote: _The Suez Canal_]

Nor was _Punch_ happier in his comments on the Suez Canal. In the
"Essence of Parliament" for May 6, 1861, he writes:--

    The Lords had a discussion about the Canal of the Future, that is
    to say, the impossible trench which M. Lesseps pretends to think he
    can cut through the Isthmus of Suez. The Government opinion upon
    the subject is, that if the Canal could be made, we ought not, for
    political reasons, to allow it, but that inasmuch as the Canal
    cannot be cut, the subject may, and the wise course is to let the
    speculators ruin themselves and diddle the Pacha. This seems
    straightforward and benevolent enough.

In Italy Victor Emmanuel had been declared King by the new Parliament,
but _Punch_ was not at all certain of the stability of his throne.
Cavour died on June 6, but the death of the greatest of Italian
statesmen is passed over with a brief though sympathetic reference. In
August we find _Punch_ uttering a serious warning to Victor Emmanuel, on
the ground that he had sold the cradle of his race, and expressing the
fear that Sardinia would be ceded to France as well as Savoy. This was
the year in which the crown of Greece was offered to Prince Alfred (the
late Duke of Edinburgh). _Punch_ declined it both for him and his next
brother, Prince Arthur (the Duke of Connaught). "Let the present King
(Otho) mind his own business better," _Punch_ advises. The Greek Crown,
it is derisively added, was not worth five bob. The offer, however, was
not definitely and officially refused until the following year.

The _Trent_ affair was settled, but throughout 1862 _Punch_ exchanged
his impartial unfriendliness to both antagonists for a distinct bias
against the North and Lincoln. For the moment his distrust of Louis
Napoleon was merged in disapproval of the Empress Eugénie for her
alleged interference in politics and support of the Papal pretensions.
The visit of the Japanese ambassadors in the summer inspired imaginary
dispatches, in which allusion is made to their interest in English
arsenals and factories. _Punch_, by this time, had at any rate learned
not to depict them as negroes, as he had done only a few years earlier.
The police-ridden condition of Poland excites his indignation; but he
is careful to disclaim sympathy with sentimental "National" movements,
maintaining much the same view as that expressed in his lines on "The
Nonsense of the Nationalities" three years before:--

    No more talk of national races,
      Panslavic, Hellenic, all stuff!
    Of rant, gestures wild, and grimaces
      On that point, we've had quite enough.
    John Bull you will vainly appeal to,
      That in his own person contains
    Both Saxon and Norman; a deal, too,
      Of Danish blood runs in his veins.

[Illustration: "UP A TREE"

(Colonel Bull and the Yankee 'Coon)

'COON: "Air you in arnest, Colonel?"

COLONEL BULL: "I am."

'COON: "Don't fire--I'll come down."]

The cultivation of the Welsh vernacular provoked _Punch's_ outspoken
hostility, as we notice elsewhere. And it is impossible to avoid the
conclusion that _Punch's_ strong sympathy with Poland in 1863 was in
part due to the fact that Russia, her oppressor, was the only
Continental nation friendly to the North in the American war. The
exploits of the _Alabama_ only tended to enhance English sympathy with
the South, and Mrs. Beecher Stowe's letter, in which she complained that
England was throwing her weight into the scale on the slave-owners'
side, was not favourably received; while _Punch_ considered it "bad
form" for Americans in London to celebrate Independence Day. It is
almost needless to say that Louis Napoleon's suggestion for a Congress
at Paris was treated with scant courtesy: any suggestion from that
quarter was sure to be regarded as suspect.

But the eyes of England and of Europe were diverted from the great
struggle in America, already at its height, by events nearer home. The
Fenian trouble had already begun in Ireland in 1863; the
Schleswig-Holstein controversy was working steadily up to the
arbitrament of war. It was of this "question" that Palmerston said that
only three men in Europe ever understood it, of whom one (the Prince
Consort) was dead; another (a Danish statesman) was mad, and the third
(he himself) had forgotten it. Palmerston was inclined to be
"interventionist," but was restrained by his colleagues and the
influence of the Queen. _Punch_ somewhat reluctantly acquiesced in the
view that non-intervention in foreign disputes was the best policy, but
his comments with pen and pencil reflect the extreme unpopularity of
Prussia. In May appeared the cartoon in which _Punch_ is shown
presenting Prussia with the Order of "St. Gibbet." In the same month he
bitterly protested against the bestowal of the Order of the Black Eagle
on Prince Alfred by the King of Prussia:--

    Black Eagle, murder's proper meed!
      Well doth its colour match the stain
    Of guilt, that dyes that coward's deed
      Who female slew and infant Dane,
    Black Eagles are for blackguards right,
      White feather who with black combine.
    No English Prince shall be a Knight
      Of such black Chivalry as thine.

The proclamation of General Falkenstein, commander-in-chief of the
Prussian troops in Jutland, regulating the scale of contributions to be
levied on Danish landlords, is quoted in the issue of June 4 as a
villainous edict, worthy of cut-throats and felons. Earlier in the year
_Punch_ had fallen heavily on Professor Max-Müller for his letter, "A
German Plea for Germans," in _The Times_. The Prussians and Austrians
were depicted, accurately enough in view of the sequel, as bandits
quarrelling over their spoil, and this free criticism was bitterly
resented throughout Germany. When Müller was tried and executed for the
murder of Mr. Briggs in the autumn of this year, the judge was accused
of anti-Prussian bias. Meanwhile _Punch_ found little worthy of comment
in the American war beyond the allegations of malingering among Federal
troops, and the report that Irishmen were induced to emigrate, with
promises of help, in order to furnish recruits for the Northern army.

[Illustration: THE AMERICAN GLADIATORS--HABET!]

The end of the American war came in 1865. Of its magnitude and of the
deeper issues involved; of the achievements of the heroes on either
side--Sherman and Grant and Farragut, Stonewall Jackson and Lee--_Punch_
showed himself strangely deficient in appreciation. The _amende_ to
Lincoln was handsome and complete, but it was not made until after the
assassination of the greatest of Americans:--

    Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
      To lame my pencil and confute my pen--
    To make me own this hind of princes peer,
      This rail-splitter a true-born King of men.

It is truly said that Lincoln lived through four long-suffering
years--years of ill-fate, ill-feeling, and ill-report--and lived to hear
"the hisses change to cheers, the taunts to tribute, the abuse to
praise," and took both with the same unwavering mood. Unhappily, as we
have seen, by the change in _Punch's_ view not being expressed until
Lincoln was dead, the tribute lost its grace.

The toll of great or eminent men taken by 1865 was heavy, and memorial
verses abound. Cobden, successively eulogized as a Free-Trader and
attacked and even execrated as a Pacificist, died in the spring, and
Lord Palmerston, the greatest of the Elder Statesmen, in the autumn. As
we have often had occasion to notice in this chronicle, _Punch_ had
alternated between admiration of Palmerston's nerve and dislike of his
Parliamentary opportunism. But no jarring note is struck in his eulogy;
there is nothing elegiac in the cheerful dactyls--after the model of Tom
Moore--in which he pays homage to Palmerston's wisdom, his courage, and
his humour, and skates over the thin ice of his masterly inactivity in
the cause of Reform:--

    We trusted his wisdom, but love drew us nearer
      Than homage we owed to his statesmanly art,
    For never was statesman to Englishmen dearer
      Than he who had faith in the great English heart.

    The frank merry laugh, and the honest eye filling
      With mirth, and the jests that so rapidly fell,
    Told out the State-secret that made us right willing
      To follow his leading--he loved us all well.

    Our brave English Chief!--lay him down for the sleeping
      That nought may disturb till the trumpet of doom:
    Honour claims the proud vigil--but Love will come weeping,
      And hang many garlands on PALMERSTON'S tomb!

[Sidenote: _General Eyre_]

Relations with France were improved in 1865, the year of the fiftieth
anniversary of peace with England, by the interchange of fraternal
visits between the Fleets, duly celebrated by _Punch_. The death of the
King of the Belgians, Leopold I, deprived Queen Victoria of one of her
greatest and most trusted friends. As for Germany, the acquisition of
Kiel laid the foundation of the naval policy formulated in the boast of
Wilhelm II: "Our future lies on the water."

At home the Fenian outbreak in Ireland was spreading, but _Punch_
refused to treat it as a serious menace, to judge from the burlesque
list of its supporters published in the autumn. Much more space is
devoted to the negro outbreak in Jamaica and the campaign against
General Eyre, which affords a curious parallel to the Amritsar riots and
the action of General Dyer. Eyre was much censured for his severity in
suppressing the rising; the agitation to bring him to trial was kept up
for three years by the Jamaica committee, of which J. S. Mill was a
prominent member; but _Punch_ defended Eyre throughout and heaped scorn
on the "fanatics" and "noisy quacks" who thought so much of the blacks
that they could not think of the whites. He admitted that the vengeance
had been terrible; that a great slaughter had been made; but held that
it had been justified by the needs of "a small white population, eight
times outnumbered by the negroes, and suddenly confronted by the foulest
horrors of savage warfare." The Grand Jury of Middlesex threw out the
Bill in 1867, confirming the view already expressed by the Shropshire
magistrates, but nevertheless Eyre was committed for trial a year later
under the Colonial Governors' Act. _Punch_ reprinted Eyre's speech in
Court, and never swerved from the firm conviction that he had saved
Jamaican society, white and black, by his promptness and resolution. He
compared his long martyrdom with that of Warren Hastings, and predicted
that Englishmen, who listen too much to noisy and gushing men, would in
time make amends. The result was inconclusive, for while Eyre's career
was ended by his recall, his legal expenses were paid by Government in
1872. He had undoubtedly saved the situation, but could not be acquitted
of excessive severity.

The second of the three wars which consummated the aggrandisement of
Prussia was brought to a speedy end in the summer of 1866 by the
"twelve days" campaign which culminated in the defeat of Austria at
Königgrätz (Sadowa). England, with Lord Russell as Premier, once more
stood aloof, but English hostility to Prussia, and, above all,
Bismarck--already recognized as the most formidable power in Continental
politics--made itself widely felt. _Punch_ expressed this general
resentment in his comments on the rumour that the Queen was to visit
Germany in the autumn. As a friend of Italy he could not disapprove of
the arrangement by which Venetia was annexed to her dominions; as the
unrelenting critic of Louis Napoleon he could not refrain from
disparaging his attitude of neutrality tempered by a hope of "picking up
the pieces." But England, though not embroiled in Continental disputes,
was not without her own troubles. The Russell Cabinet had fallen over
Reform, there had been riots in Hyde Park (of which we speak elsewhere),
and before the Derby-Disraeli administration came in, the Liberals had
been forced to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland in order to deal
effectually with what Mr. Gladstone did not hesitate to describe as the
wicked conspiracy of Fenianism. _Punch's_ summary of the proceedings in
Parliament on Saturday, February 18, and the historic session on Sunday,
19, when the Suspension Bill became law, is not without interest. J. S.
Mill supported the Government; Bright's speech in the character of the
candid friend was described by Gladstone as "containing what was in part
untrue, in part open to question, and generally out of place," a strange
inversion of their _rôles_ in 1886. It is noteworthy that the demand for
land legislation and the disestablishment of the Irish Church was heard
in the debate, and that the trouble in Ireland was largely ascribed by
the Government to the presence of Irish-Americans, released by the
cessation of the American war, who had come to Ireland to promote
Fenianism and were "regularly paid by somebody." They were "wanted," but
to make a general capture of these miscreants it was necessary to
dispense with the law which forbade arrest without warrant and
imprisonment without appeal to the judges. There is a distressingly
familiar ring about these arguments, and the reference to the fact that
the Fenians had already begun to murder.

[Sidenote: _Nascent Imperialism_]

To turn from the centre to the circumference, one may note a pleasant
hint of nascent Imperialism in the little geography lesson, doubtless
well needed, which _Punch_ gives his readers on December 1, 1866:--

    _Mr. Punch_ is pleased to see that a decoration has been given by
    the Queen to the Finance Minister of Victoria. Victoria is one of
    the Australian colonies, it is at the southern extremity of the
    continent, Melbourne is the capital, and the inhabitants are far in
    advance of England in regard to civilization--for instance, they
    have compulsory education. The Hon. George Vernon came over on a
    mission to our Government. Victoria wants an armour-plated ship,
    for which she will partly pay, and a training ship, and Sir John
    Pakington has assented. The Minister, for his various services to
    the colony, has received the Bath Cross. Should it not have been
    the Victoria Cross? This little goak is the bit of sugar with which
    _Mr. Punch_ rewards his readers for learning more than most English
    people know about one of our noblest colonies. If his readers are
    good, they shall have another colonial lesson some day. For we have
    other colonies besides Victoria.

Another lesson in geography had been suggested earlier in the year by
the final success of the _Great Eastern_ in laying the cable, a success
due as much to the enterprise of Cyrus Field, the American capitalist,
as to the genius of Brunel.

In 1867 there was a further recrudescence of Fenianism, and the
"physical force" men extended their operations to England. For this was
the year of the sinister attempt to blow up Clerkenwell prison, and the
rescue of Fenians from the prison van in Manchester, in which a
police-sergeant was shot, with, as a consequence, the execution of the
"Manchester Martyrs," funeral processions and celebrations, the echoes
of which have reverberated down to these days.

The Reform League expressed sympathy with the Fenians, and an English
lady of rank associated herself with their cause; but _Punch_ regarded
such support with unqualified contempt and even abhorrence. Real
military operations on a modest scale were conducted by England in one
of her small wars--that against the recalcitrant King of Abyssinia--and
an autumn session was held to vote supplies. It was suggested that Sir
Robert Napier, who commanded the expedition, was not at first
adequately rewarded, but he was raised to the peerage in the following
year as Lord Napier of Magdala. There seems to have been less divergence
of opinion over the protest that the cost of the war was entirely borne
by income-tax payers. Disraeli having succeeded Lord Derby as Premier,
and Mr. Ward Hunt having gone to the Exchequer, _Punch_ contented
himself with observing, _à propos_ of the new Budget, that the money for
the deficit of upwards of a million and a half "is, of course, to be
taken from the Middle Class, which never defends itself," and returned
to the charge on May 9 in his lines on "The Great Untaxed in their
Glory":--

    Napier came, saw, and conquered; the battle was o'er;
    There's an end of the war and of King Theodore.
    The prestige is recovered that England had lost,
    And the popular voice cries "A fig for the cost!"

    Lo, the tyrant's abolished, the captives are free!
    And there isn't a fraction to pay on our tea,
    Or our sugar: how sweet so cheap glory to win!
    No additional tax on tobacco or gin!

    Let us drink, then, success to Disraeli and Hunt,
    Who exempted the many from finding the blunt;
    And laid all the expense of the War on the few--
    For the Income-Tax payer will pay all that's due.

    Ah, tremble, ye tyrants, whom England can crush,
    At a price which her millions won't care for one rush;
    In the scale as a feather the money will weigh,
    For a national war when a part has to pay.

[Sidenote: _French and German Ambitions_]

Meanwhile the upper classes had been spending their money freely at the
great French Exhibition of 1867, that crowning manifestation of the art
and opulence, the magnificence and cynicism of the Second Empire, with
Schneider as high priestess of the revels, and all the rank and fashion
of Europe paying homage at her shrine. _Punch_, however, took a friendly
personal interest in the exhibition, for Leech's drawings were exhibited
there. The Federation of Canada, an event of first-rank importance to
the British Empire, with a Constitution framed mainly on the lines of
Lord Durham's Report in 1840, was overshadowed by the more spectacular
and dramatic events of the year 1867. Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby on
his resignation in February, 1868, and _Punch_ handsomely acknowledged
"the genius and perseverance" which, after thirty years of strife, had
thus been rewarded; but the new Premier only held office till December,
when the Liberals were returned with a majority of 112. The peerage
which he declined for himself, but accepted for his wife, who was
created Viscountess Beaconsfield, inspired a graceful tribute from his
old critic _Punch_. Parliament, before the prorogation in July, had been
mainly occupied with the battle over Gladstone's Irish Church
resolutions, which brought about the Government's downfall. It is worthy
of note that in 1868 it was the Militarism of France, not of Germany,
that excited _Punch's_ misgivings and animosities, to the extent of his
describing the Emperor's proposed Army Loan of 440 million francs as a
measure to establish a reign of "terror and preponderance." A map, which
was said to have been published by order of the Emperor, illustrating
French ambitions, gravely exercised _Punch_ later in a year which
witnessed the Revolution in Spain and the flight of the notorious Queen
Isabella, events which awakened little sympathy or interest in England.
Yet the eviction of Isabella opened the door to the Hohenzollern
candidature for the throne of Spain, the proximate cause of the war of
1870. But the seeds of conflict lay deeper--in the relentless diplomacy
of Bismarck, bound sooner or later to manoeuvre Napoleon III into a
position from which he could not escape without resort to the
arbitrament of war. In 1869 the celebration of the centenary of Napoleon
I and the proposed inauguration of a Constitutional _régime_ furnished
_Punch_ with material for some plain-spoken advice to Napoleon's
successor and namesake. Distrust of Louis Napoleon still dominated
_Punch's_ outlook on foreign politics and clouded his vision. Strange to
say the growth of the Prussian fleet is not only praised, but
welcomed:--

BRAVO, BISMARCK!

    John Bull used to laugh to scorn the idea of a Prussian Navy, and
    chuckled hugely when _Punch_ christened it for him "The Fleet of
    the Future." But lo, "the wheel of Time has brought about his
    revenges," and the Fleet of the Future is the Fleet of the Present!
    Prussia _has_ a fleet--and no chaff! A respectable force of steam
    ironclads, backed by a serviceable knot of unarmoured
    sailing-frigates and corvettes, with a first-class naval arsenal
    and dockyard, on the Jahde, is a very different thing from the
    solitary "gunboat on the Spree," which we used to poke our fun at
    twenty years ago.

    Britannia, through her _Punch_, rejoices to weave among her naval
    azures a new shade--Prussian blue; and will be glad, in all fair
    quarrels, to hail it alongside the true blue of the British
    man-o'-war's-man.

But the mood of welcome was tempered with misgiving, and the possibility
of an eventual naval war with Germany filled _Punch_ with gloomy
forebodings, which, in view of subsequent developments, approach to
something like prophetic strain:--

LINE OF BATTLE IN SMOKE

    We trust we shall ever preserve our friendship with the countrymen
    of Hans Breitmann. We allowed Denmark to be robbed of
    Schleswig-Holstein, and tolerated the total theft of Hanover; so
    that there seems to be no conceivable offence that can hook us into
    a war with Prussia and Germany. That view is a pleasant one to
    contemplate for thinking people, who, but for it, would be rendered
    very uneasy by the following statement in a _Times'_ leader on "The
    Cruise of the Lords of the Admiralty":--

    "It has been imagined that the introduction of steam-power would
    render naval tactics of extreme importance in any future
    engagements, but when on one occasion the ships were ordered to go
    into action, it was found that a few minutes sufficed to envelope
    the whole fleet in so dense a cloud of smoke that signals were no
    longer visible, and all that any vessel could do was to fire as
    rapidly as possible into the darkness around her."

    Now, those Deutschers are confoundedly clever fellows; particularly
    at chemistry. Gun-cotton, which was discovered by one of them, is a
    substance they are at work on perfecting. No doubt they will soon
    make it available, so as to supersede powder, for naval gunnery.
    Gun-cotton goes off without smoke. In the happily almost impossible
    event of a war with them, our ships, enveloped in smoke of our own
    clumsy making, would blaze away at theirs in the dark, at random,
    with useless guns of precision, whilst they would fire with
    unerring aim at the flashes of our guns, and the end of our first
    sea-fight with them would be, that the British would be sent to the
    bottom by the German Fleet.

[Sidenote: _Death of Lord Derby_]

The same month witnessed the passing away of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of
Debate," a statesman somewhat out of his element in a period of
non-intervention; a great country-gentleman, sportsman, and scholar.
_Punch_, whose memorial verses in these years did not err as a rule on
the side of brevity, compressed his tribute within the compass of a
sonnet, in which there is a happy reference to Lord Derby's love of
Homer and of children, for he was the patron of Edward Lear, the
laureate of the best, because the most unalloyed, nonsense:--

LORD DERBY

BORN, 1799. DIED, 1869.

    Withdrawing slow from those he loved so well,
    Autumn's pale morning saw him pass away:
    Leave them beside their sacred dead to pray,
    Unmarked of strangers. Calmer memories tell
    How nobly Stanley lived. No braver name
    Glows in the golden roll of all his sires,
    Or all their peers. His was the heart that fires
    The eloquent tongue, and his the eye whose aim
    Alone half quelled his foe. He struck for Power,
    (And power in England is a hero's prize)
    Yet he could throw it from him. Those whose eyes
    See not for tears, remember in this hour
    That he was oft from Homer's page beguiled
    To frame some "wonder for a happy child."

The resignation by Lord Malmesbury, formerly Foreign Secretary, of the
Conservative leadership of the House of Lords about the same time met
with no such consideration. Lord Malmesbury had never been a favourite
of _Punch_, who insinuated that the Tory leader had gone because he was
obliged to, and quoted Artemus Ward's saying: "He told me to get out of
the office--I pitied him and went."

The fateful year of 1870 opened with the attempt to establish a
"Liberal" Empire in France with Ollivier as Prime Minister, a concession
which _Punch_ hailed as a "Magna Charta for France"; almost
simultaneously Lord Clarendon, our Foreign Minister, with Gladstone's
cordial approval, launched his suggestion of a partial simultaneous
disarmament, a proposal rendered futile by the attitude of Bismarck.
Lord Clarendon died on June 27, and his successor, Lord Granville, was
informed by the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office that he "had
never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign
affairs." Yet war had already been declared by France when _Punch_, on
July 23, issued his somewhat cynical manifesto of neutrality under the
heading: "Prussian Pot and French Kettle":--

    In this unhappy event of a war between France and Prussia, we shall
    of course do all we can to preserve the most perfect neutrality. We
    certainly feel it. Our sympathies with the one side and the other
    are, strong as they are, exactly equal.

    As regards the Prussians we take a warmly admiring interest in the
    course of aggrandisement which their King and his Bismarck have
    been pursuing of late years, but most chiefly do we applaud its
    first step--the attack on Denmark, and the forcible annexation
    therefrom of the two Duchies. The immense number of Danes slain by
    the Prussian needle-guns commands our approbation only less than
    our wonder; but what crowns the sentiments with which we regard the
    spoliation and destruction of the Danes is the piety wherewith the
    author of those achievements solemnly expressed his thankfulness
    for having been permitted to accomplish them. One brother once
    knelt with Mrs. Fry in Newgate. The other might have knelt with
    Mrs. Cole.

    On the other hand, with respect to France, we cannot but feel how
    much we owe to the French Imperial Government for the improvement
    which, by the menacing armaments it has kept up now for so many
    years, it has occasioned us to make in our national defences. But
    we have higher reasons for sympathy with France than considerations
    which are merely insular and selfish. The great principles of
    Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality have been professed by France
    more enthusiastically and more loudly than by any other European
    nation; and we behold their standing reduction to practice in the
    occupation of Rome, and the declaration that the chief of Italian
    cities shall never belong to Italy.

    The foregoing reasons should satisfy any Prussian and any Frenchman
    of the perfect impartiality with which Englishmen must contemplate
    hostilities between their respective nations.

[Illustration: A VISION ON THE WAY. "BEWARE!"]

As a matter of fact, public opinion in England at the outbreak of the
war was in the main inclined to favour Germany; the publication of the
Draft Secret Treaty submitted to Bismarck by Louis Napoleon in 1867,
providing in certain contingencies for the occupation of Belgium by
France, and now communicated by Bismarck to _The Times_ went a long way
to sterilize sympathy with France; and it was not until after Sedan that
compassion for France overwhelmed and obliterated the old distrust of
the Emperor's intriguing ambitions. When the cry, "nous sommes trahis"
was raised, _Punch_ blamed the French nation more than the Emperor, whom
he had portrayed in a famous cartoon with the ghost of Napoleon
appearing to him as he set out for the front. As the wheels of war drove
more heavily on French soil and Paris was threatened with famine, one
notices the growing desire that Germany should grant generous terms,
mingled with a sense of impotence. This mood is well shown in the
verses, "Between the Hosts," printed in the number of December 17:--

    Like him of old, when the plague's arrows sped,
      And life sank blighted by that scathing rain,
    We stand between the living and the dead,
      Lifting our hands and prayers to Heaven in vain.
    While those that faint upbraid us from dim eyes,
      And those that fight arraign us as they fall,
    And French and German curses 'gainst us rise,
      And, hating none, we rest unloved of all.

    And so we stand with a divided soul,
      Our sympathies for both at war within,
    Now eager for the strong, to reach his goal,
      More often wishing that the weak could win.
    Only one feeling will not leave our minds,
      Hate of this hate, and anguish of this woe;
    And still war's scythe-set car rolls on and grinds
      Guilty and guiltless, blent in overthrow.

    And first we interpose a useless hand,
      And then we lift an unavailing voice,
    While still Death holds his way with sword and brand,
      Still the Valkyrier make their fatal choice.
    Still stormed on by ill-will from either side,
      Be we content to do the best we can--
    Give all that wealth, peace, goodwill can provide,
      For war's poor victims who their helpers ban.

    We have no right to wait for men's good word,
      No right to pause before men's unearned hate:
    No right to turn the ear, when threats are heard
      Of what will, some day, be the neutral's fate.
    "Do right and fear not" must be England's stay,
      As it has been, let wrath say what it will.
    So with love's unthanked labour let us pray,
      And do our best to ease war's weight of ill!

[Illustration: "VAE VICTIS!"

Paris, March 1st, 1871.]

[Sidenote: _1871--and its Sequel_]

In the autumn the consideration shown by some German troops in Champagne
is welcomed; by the end of the year the reply of Göttingen University to
an appeal protesting against the threatened destruction of the
scientific and art treasures of Paris--a document breathing the familiar
spirit of unctuous rectitude--roused _Punch_ to indignant satire in "A
Deutscher Dove-Coo," the name of the principal signatory being Dove. So
a month later the pseudo-Walpolian letters issued as "Strawberry Leaves"
reflect the popular disgust with which German brutality was viewed, but
at the same time the popular dislike of England's participating in the
war. When the siege of Paris ended at the close of the month, _Punch_
congratulated Thiers on his statesmanship, but rebuked the Parisians for
their fickleness in heaping insult on their fallen Emperor. The Germans
entered Paris, but in the cartoon of March 11, and the accompanying
verses "Vae Victis" a warning was addressed to Germany which has turned
out to be a true prophecy. The triumph is admitted, but the sequel is
clearly foreshadowed:--

    Yet listen, conqueror, while the shade,
      That should sit near thee in thy car,
    Whispers how quickly laurels fade,
      How swiftly shift the sands of war;
    How, sixty-five years since, there came
      A mightier Emperor than thou,
    Upon Berlin to put the shame
      Which thy hand puts on Paris now.

    Even as thy heel is on their head,
      That on thy folks' head set their heel,
    So, ere threescore more years have sped,
      The woe thou work'st thy sons may feel.
    "Who smite with sword by sword shall fall,"
      Holds for kings as for subjects true;
    God's mills grind slow, but they grind small,
      And he that grinds gives all their due.

[Illustration: "AU REVOIR!"

GERMANY: "Farewell, Madame, and if----"

FRANCE: "Ha! We shall meet again!"]

The courtesy of Germany in coming to an amicable settlement over the
loss of some British colliers sunk in the Thames is acknowledged; but
anxiety as to her further aggressions was not allayed by her desire to
possess Heligoland, and was undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of
that brilliant realistic romance, _The Battle of Dorking_, while the
fratricidal tragedy of the Commune, and the ruthless measures of
suppression employed, augured ill for the recovery of France from the
abasement of defeat. These events and the lessons they conveyed to
England were not overlooked by _Punch_; they served to temper his
light-heartedness with moods of misgiving. Yet the wonderful
elasticity--due, as even official Republican historians admit, to the
industrial prosperity created under the Second Empire--which enabled
France to pay off what in those days seemed a crushing war indemnity
long before the time fixed, emboldened _Punch_ in the spring of 1873 to
indulge once more in a prophecy of the reversal of the verdict of 1870.
When the German occupation ended, France is shown undauntedly
confronting Germany with the words: "Ha! We shall meet again."

Germany was not the only foreign power that caused anxiety during the
Gladstone administration of 1868-1874. Russia availed herself of the
troubles of 1870 to revive the Near Eastern question by refusing to
recognize her treaty obligations in the Black Sea; but the friction thus
created was allayed by the compromise effected by the Black Sea
Conference. And Russia's expedition to, and occupation of, Khiva in 1873
gave rise to further uneasiness. But non-intervention remained the order
of the day throughout. The Ashanti expedition of 1873, whether in
respect of its aim or its scale could not be regarded as forming an
exception. But it furnished _Punch_ with occasion for much plain-spoken
criticism of War Office red tape and mismanagement. He saw in Sir Garnet
Wolseley "the right man in the wrong place":--

    In our deep penny wisdom, and horror of waste,
      We shipped off the General minus his men,
    So that if in a fix he should find himself placed,
      He might merely lose time writing home back again.

[Sidenote: _Gladstonian Legislation_]

Happily these misgivings were falsified in the sequel, and early in 1874
_Punch_ was able to record, amongst other evidences of the satisfactory
conclusion of the campaign, the arrival in England of King Coffee's
State umbrella. The Gladstone administration may not have been efficient
in the conduct of military operations, but in the sphere of Army Reform
it deserved well of the country for the abolition of purchase, in the
teeth of strong opposition from the Horse Guards' element, and the
reorganization of the service on lines which substantially endured for a
generation or more. For these improvements we have to thank a civilian,
Cardwell, whose name is indissolubly associated with the changes brought
about in 1870. The second instalment of Gladstone's scheme for the
pacification of Ireland--the Land Act of 1870--was supported by _Punch_,
but did not achieve its purpose, since it left the vexed question of
dual ownership unsettled; and it was another Irish measure--the
University Bill--that brought the Government down. The legislative
achievements of the Gladstone Administration had been immense and
salutary in many directions, but the universality of its activities
undoubtedly contributed to its growing unpopularity and lent force to
Disraeli's famous electioneering cry of "plundering and blundering."
_Punch_, who had in the main supported Gladstone, advised the Cabinet to
resign after their defeat, but the Prime Minister resumed office
temporarily and did not dissolve till January 1874.

[Illustration: THE HOLIDAY TASK

DR. PUNCH: "My dear young friends, you have done next to nothing this
half. Therefore, a little task during the vacation will be good for you.
You, Master Benjamin, must get up a 'definite policy.' You, Lowe, will
write a paper on the 'Application of the _Screw_.' Ayrton, you will have
to get by heart the whole 'Book of Etiquette.' Miall, you must attend
Church regularly. Whalley, you're going to America--stay there!
Plimsoll, you must learn to--ahem--moderate your _transports_. And as
for you, William Ewart, the _idler_ you are the better!"]

[Sidenote: _England 2,000 Years Hence_]

Much had been done in this, the central mid-Victorian age, to abate the
evils and abuses which kept the "Two Nations" apart in earlier days. Yet
at the opening of the new Disraelian _régime_, with its imperial
aspirations, it may not be amiss to reproduce the verses, somewhat in
the vein of Thackeray's musings on _Vanitas Vanitatum_, in which Punch
bade farewell to the Comet of 1858:--

ADIEU TO THE COMET

    Dare a bold atom ask, with brain half dizzy,
      What you will see two thousand years to come,
    This planet still an ant's nest, black and busy,
      Or an extinct volcano, white and dumb?

    Will you behold, if keeping that appointment,
      (Made for you, Sir, by Airy and by Hind)
    Men still anointing Kings with holy ointment,
      And Priests still leading, as the blind the blind.

    Earth's choicest youth fierce rushing to the slaughter
      That two crowned Fools may wreak their idiot pet;
    Or wiser Christians' blood poured out like water,
      That Jews may gamble with a nation's debt.

    Will that day's Patriot be a mouthing truckler,
      Setting proud Freedom's hymn to Freedom's dirge;
    Will Law be still the rich man's shield and buckler,
      The good man's terror, and the poor man's scourge?

    Will you find Life a hot and blindfold scrimmage,
      Men straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold;
    And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image
      Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old?

    Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit,
      Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed;
    Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit,
      When Lies shall fail--the first time, and the last?

    Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder--
      Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad;
    Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder--
      "An undevout Astronomer is mad."




THE ROAD TO REFORM


Turning from England's international outlook to home affairs, we are
confronted in the earlier stages of the period under review by the
powerful negative influence of Lord Palmerston. A great Foreign
Minister, a capable and humane administrator when he was at the Home
Office, he had little belief in legislative remedies, and his refusal to
grapple with Reform became progressively distasteful to his Liberal
supporters. The old party system had been confused and shattered by the
secession of the Peelites, as the result of the Repeal of the Corn Laws,
and Palmerston was maintained in power in fact, if not in name, by a
coalition. His death ended the _régime_ of masterly inactivity and
cleared the way for the reconstruction of parties and the prolonged duel
between the two great protagonists--Disraeli and Gladstone.

The Reform Bill of 1867, the chief constructive achievement of
Disraeli's first Premiership, was a great advance on that of 1832, but
the boon was robbed of much of its grace by the party strategy which was
summed up in Lord Derby's famous phrase about "dishing the Whigs."
Meanwhile Ireland had been forced into prominence by the outbreak of
Fenianism, the Liberals had been reunited under Gladstone by his Irish
Church policy and on his accession to power in 1868, we enter on the
golden age of Gladstonian finance, with a low income tax--it dropped to
3d. in the year 1873--high wages and industrial prosperity.

[Sidenote: _Labour and Intervention_]

It was also, as we have seen, the age of non-intervention in foreign
politics. Strange to say the strongest appeal to the Government to
interfere by force of arms in a foreign quarrel was made by a deputation
of working men, introduced by Professor Beesly, in May, 1863, with a
view to expounding to the Prime Minister the resolutions in favour of
Poland voted by a Trade Union Meeting in St. James's Hall:--

    One of the deputation, Mr. Cremer, a joiner, after Pam had given
    the deputation the requisite sympathetic and evasive answer,
    jovially observed, in plain English:--

    "We are men of action, my Lord, and have come to the conclusion
    that the only way to aid the Poles is to call on Russia to desist
    from her present conduct, and if she will not attend to that call,
    thrash her into compliance."

We append _Punch's_ comments because they are typical of his gradual
adoption of a more critical attitude towards the working man. It should
be remembered that there was no Labour Party in the House of Commons
until 1884. Before that time working men like Mr. Burt and Mr.
MacDonald, the two miners returned in 1874, were returned by an
arrangement with the Liberals and sat on the Liberal benches:--

    If the honest working men were so thoroughly well represented as to
    command a majority in the House of Commons, they would not, of
    course, want to thrash foreign powers into compliance with their
    demands, and tax others to pay the expense of their own war. Would
    they subject their wages, one and all, to Schedule D, then, in
    order to thrash Russia into liberating Poland? If so, they are fine
    fellows. If not, the parts performed by the handicraftsmen who
    joined in the deputation to Lord Palmerston are about on a par with
    those of Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Bottom, the
    weaver; Flute, the bellows mender; Snout, the tinker; and
    Starveling, the tailor, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_; our British
    carpenters, joiners, and other working men partake in a very
    delusive dream in the expectation that England is going to fight
    for the Poles. The income-tax makes cowards of us all, except the
    working men who do not pay it.

Many of the abuses and evils at which _Punch_ had tilted so vigorously
had been removed and remedied. The Corn Laws had been repealed; the
Factory Acts had improved the conditions of labour. Obsolete and
barbarous laws had been removed from the Statute Book. The Game Laws had
been modified, and the administration of justice was marked by a humaner
spirit. The principle that property had its duties as well as its rights
was being steadily enforced, and, at the close of the period under
review, class privilege was curtailed by the institution of open
competition in the Civil Service and the abolition of purchase in the
Army.

This brief and imperfect list may help to explain the conversion of
_Punch_, the strenuous and impassioned advocate of the masses during the
'forties and 'fifties into the champion of the middle classes, and the
very candid friend of the working man and Trade Unions as revealed in
the later 'sixties and early 'seventies.

[Illustration: THE SUNDAY QUESTION:

The Public House]

[Sidenote: _The Gang System_]

Life on the land showed little signs of progress in the opening years of
this period as illustrated by _Punch's_ legal pillory. But the vagaries
of clerical and aristocratic magistrates, culled with chapter and verse
from provincial newspapers, which excited his wrath in 1858, almost
disappear in the 'sixties, no doubt in consequence of a more humane
interpretation of the Sunday Observance Act. In 1869, the debate on "The
Recreation of the People" at the Church Congress revealed a growth of
clerical tolerance and common sense which extorted the high approval of
_Punch_. Still, the "Sunday Question" was far from being solved when it
impelled the convivial _Punch_ to print in the same year the companion
cartoons contrasting his vision of what might be with the squalid
reality of what was.

The incubus of Sabbatarianism, so far as it affected farmers and
labourers, was at any rate much lightened in these years. But a far more
serious evil was the gang system, under which a gang, chiefly of
children, some as young as five, but mostly boys and girls under
fourteen, were hired by a gang-master, who made as much as he could by
taking them about the country and letting out their labour to farmers.
It was not until 1867 that the good Lord Shaftesbury carried the
Agricultural Gangs Act by the provisions of which no child under eight
might be employed in an agricultural gang, and girls were placed under
the protection of a licensed female gang-master. It was a modest
instalment of reform, long since extended by our Elementary Education
Acts; it is to the credit of _Punch_ that he hailed it as placing a
check on "a system so abominable that nothing but the intensest
hypocrisy can call this a Christian nation while it exists." Against
those who deliberately perpetuated ignorance by enslaving the young he
carried on a truceless war. He was slower to condemn the ignorance of
rural superstition when it could be paralleled by the credulity of the
educated, and his observations on the sentence passed on a Devonshire
shoemaker may be taken to heart fifty years later:--

    A paragraph in a contemporary, headed "Superstition in Devonshire,"
    contains the following defence, addressed by an old shoemaker named
    Burch to the Barnstaple magistrates, before whom he was charged
    with assaulting an old woman by scratching her on the
    arm:--"Gentlemen, I have suffered five years' affliction from her.
    I have been under her power, and more than a hundred people advised
    me to fetch blood of that woman to destroy the spell. I have lost
    fourteen canaries, and from forty to fifty goldfinches; as fast as
    I got them they died, and I have had five complaints brought upon
    me at once."

       *       *       *       *       *

On hearing this declaration:--

    "The Mayor said that it was most extraordinary that such ignorance
    and superstition should prevail in the present enlightened age."

    In the present enlightened age persons of position in society and
    of education believe that they shake hands with spirits at dark
    _séances_. His Worship the Mayor of Barnstaple cannot have known
    that, or he would not have called the belief in witchcraft
    ignorance and superstition. If spiritualism is true, sorcery is
    possible, and, as there is no legal remedy against it, old Burch
    may be considered to have been justified in taking the law into his
    own hands for self-protection. Accordingly, since he was fined 2s.
    6d. and costs, and, as he couldn't pay the money, sent to prison,
    perhaps a subscription to get him out of gaol, and make him amends
    for the trouble he has got into, will be raised among affluent and
    superior "spirit circles." For if one medium can float about a
    room, why may not another ride upon a broomstick?

[Illustration: "SMALL BY DEGREES"

SUFFOLK FARMER: "Two shill'ns a week more? Never! That'll never do! Out
of the question!"

SUFFOLK PLOUGHMAN: "You're right there, Mas'r Wuzzles, sart'n sure! It
'on't dew. Our Sal sahy there'll be eight shillin' and threepence for
bread, three and sixpence for rent and coal, and half-a-crown for club,
clothes, boots and shoes for the owd 'oman, five kids, and me. No, that
'on't dew--that, that 'on't, b'um by. But it'll be enow to begin with!"]

[Sidenote: _The Old Man and the New Rich_]

Though no friend of feudalism, it is curious to note that in the
vehement protest against enclosures, the closing of rights of way, etc.,
which he published in 1869, _Punch_ is careful to distinguish between
the old and the new rich. The closing of Nightingale Wood, between
Southampton and Romsey, which "from time immemorial had been open by
gracious permission to rural ramblers," was the occasion for an outburst
culminating in the statement that "the brutes now fast closing the
sylvan scenery of England to Englishmen, are, with the exception of an
ignoble duke or two, rich rogues of speculators and financiers, who have
ousted the old territorial aristocrats and squires, having bought fields
and forests with the reward of their rascality."

In the selfishness of the "profiteer," as we now call him, _Punch_ sees
a sure provocative of Communism. He would clearly have applauded the
distinguished but eccentric judge who in a later day erected on his
country estate boards with the notice "Trespassers will _not_ be
prosecuted."

It remains to be added that the grievances of tenants and farm
labourers, though far less frequently mentioned than in earlier years,
did not altogether escape the vigilance of _Punch_. In 1861 he printed
an ironic petition from a tenant to his landlord asking to be as
comfortably housed as his horses. In 1868 he alludes to the scandalous
housing conditions on the estate of a noble landlord in Essex--an estate
which of recent years has been noted for its humane and liberal
management.

[Sidenote: _Prison v. Workhouse_]

Far more space, however, is devoted to the administration of the Poor
Law, the economics and evils of Industrialism in the manufacturing
centres, and the efforts of practical philanthropy. Throughout the
'sixties and right on into the early 'seventies _Punch_ never wearies of
insisting on the folly of making life in prison more comfortable than
that in the workhouse. His campaign begins with an onslaught on the
guardians of the Durham Union, who appeared to think that there "ought
to be a correspondence between the spiritual nutriment of paupers and
their material diet":--

    Under this impression it evidently was that they advertised the
    other day for a chaplain, offering the salary of £20 a year. Their
    advertisement was answered by a tender from one John Smart, who
    turned out to have been a clergyman's footman, and conceived that
    he had learned to exercise the functions of a parson from his
    master. He had, he said, "had a good deal of private practice, but
    not public."

    It is painful to find a respectable man-servant reduced to apply
    for employment in the capacity of a Workhouse chaplain. Cannot an
    inferior class of clergyman be ordained on purpose to administer to
    paupers a coarser kind of spiritual food? Deep indeed must be the
    humiliation experienced by a footman in exchanging plush and gold
    lace for the canonicals of a chaplain whose salary is £20 a year.

It was the time of the garrotting scare. Hence the point of _Punch's_
comment:--

    The frying pan as compared with the fire is much less comfortable
    than the Model Prison in proportion to the Union-Workhouse.

    The former of those two establishments relatively to the latter is
    considerably milder than Purgatory may be imagined to be, in
    contrast with the other place which the prisoners mentioned. Quod,
    in comparison with the Abode of Want, is quite a tolerable sort of
    Limbo. What is the moral of this arrangement, in the apprehension
    of the classes who have to live by their own exertions? Whatever
    you do, keep out of the Workhouse. Garrotte anybody rather than
    apply to the Union.

_Punch_ still disapproved of the gallows; the strongest argument in its
favour was the manifest truth that the cheapest thing you could do with
a worthless rascal was to hang him. But he saw a better way in rendering
penal servitude exemplary:--

    At any rate, for the prevention of garrotte robberies and all other
    crimes, one step might be taken somewhat analogous to the treatment
    proverbially recommended for that other complaint, the influenza,
    which is just now likewise so prevalent. "Stuff a cold," says the
    popular adage, "and starve a cough." At present the moral reverse
    of this rule is observed in penal economy. You stuff a convict and
    starve a pauper. Wouldn't it probably answer better to allow
    paupers sufficient food and put criminals on low diet? Thus you may
    be enabled to get on without the gallows.

It was stated, and accepted by _Punch_ in 1860, that since 1856 there
had been a decrease in crime of 25 per cent. owing to the establishment
of Reformatories. But the series of papers in the _Morning Post_ in 1863
on the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham--where the boys were
subjected to a devotional drill, made to lift and lower their hands in
prayer and sing grace "to the sharp order of a master," and mercilessly
caned and birched by a tall, muscular drill master for acts of
insubordination--gave _Punch_ furiously to think:--

    The Middlesex Model School at Feltham is an institution for the
    reformation of young thieves, but its arrangements for developing
    the religious sentiment in the youthful mind appear to be such as
    may be conceived to have been devised for mutual edification by the
    inmates of an asylum for idiots.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Flogging is a fine thing; but how strange that its application is
    limited to boys and soldiers and sailors: to children of tender
    age and members of an honourable profession! Wouldn't it be at
    least as suitable to garrotters, and even to cruel swindlers, whose
    exemplary torture, in comparison with the misery caused by their
    crimes, would be the lesser evil of the two?

The painful disclosures resulting from inquiries into workhouse
conditions are repeatedly referred to and make strange reading in a
comic journal. At a meeting held in Willis's Rooms by the Earl of
Carnarvon and the Archbishop of York early in 1866, the brutalities to
which the sick poor were subject in the infirmaries of most of the
London workhouses were illustrated in such hideous detail, that _Punch_
declared "it would be cheaper to put paupers out of their misery than it
was to let them die in misery, and it would at least be just as moral."

The parsimony, the self-indulgence and the barbarous procrastination of
the guardians of St. Pancras are castigated a few months later, when a
motion to postpone the consideration of the appointment of an extra paid
nurse for three months was carried by six votes to five. There were
forty guardians; but most of them were absent at the quarterly dinner of
the Burial Board. _Punch_, therefore, had good excuse for saying that
"these nine-and-twenty parochial humbugs, instead of minding their
business, were engaged in stuffing their most ungodly digestive organs
with funeral baked meats."

[Sidenote: _Ignorant Guardians_]

The Derby-Disraeli administration had come into power in the previous
month. So when Mr. Gathorne Hardy had succeeded Mr. C. P. Villiers as
President of the Poor Law Board, the alteration in the methods of
procedure in regard to investigating workhouse abuses provoked a
well-timed and damaging attack on the attempt to whitewash Bumbledom. It
is a dreary subject, but the principles which ought to govern a
Departmental inquiry could not be better expressed. And _Punch_ was
happily able to fortify his humanitarian zeal with ridicule when, in
quoting from the description of the horrors of Walsall Workhouse given
by the _Lancet_, he gives two stories showing that workhouse
mismanagement in those days, at any rate, was largely the result of
crass ignorance:--

    It was suggested in one workhouse board-room that a bath ought
    unquestionably to be supplied, when a guardian got up and stated
    "he were agin it." He never had one in his house in his life, and
    he didn't see why a pauper should enjoy what he didn't want. On
    another occasion the absence of a proper light at the entrance door
    was dwelt upon, and a gas-lamp was proposed. This was seconded by
    another worthy, who, approving of the gas-lamp, said, "and I'd have
    it lighted with ile."

    Now the first of these gentlemen may be a regular saint. He never
    bathed, and he regarded his neighbour as himself. To be sure, if he
    was a saint he was also a pig; but swinishness has not seldom been
    combined with sanctity. The other guardian, who didn't know better
    than that a gas-lamp could be lighted with "ile," was himself so
    destitute of all enlightenment that he may be excused as a simply
    irresponsible clown.

The euphemisms of Poor Law inspectors, who used colourless words such as
"inadequate" and "insufficient" when "barbarous," "brutal" and
"horrible" would have been nearer the mark, had been exposed by the
_British Medical Journal_ in 1868. If destitution was not a crime, why,
asked _Punch_, was the pauper treated worse than the criminal? These
abuses, in the exposure of which he joined hands with serious medical
journals, explain and justify the intense and even passionate desire of
self-respecting poor people to avoid the Union.

Though no lover of Jews, _Punch_ in 1869 contrasts Jewish guardians
favourably with their so-called Christian brother officials. Dickens's
picture of old Betty in _Our Mutual Friend_ is hardly overdrawn, and a
year after Dickens's death _Punch_ was still contrasting the comforts of
prison life with the usual conditions of life amongst the submerged
poor.

The State had not yet awakened to a sense of its responsibilities to the
"legal poor." Much was being done by practical philanthropy, and it may
be fairly said that no appeal to _Punch_ for assistance or encouragement
was left unanswered. Wholehearted in his support of Ragged Schools, he
comes forward in 1858 to plead the cause of their logical
corollary--Ragged Playgrounds:--

    Deprive a boy of healthy, fair and open games, and you drive him to
    resort to unwholesome, foul and sneaking ones. Deny him any
    playground but a hole-and-corner court, and you'll find that he'll
    betake himself to hole-and-corner games in it. In default of
    wholesome cricket, he'll become a dab at chuck-farthing; and will
    get from pitch and toss to still worse kinds of time-slaughter.

            *       *       *       *       *

    If we mean then to teach the ragged young idea, we must give heed
    somewhat to the ragged body likewise. And the first thing to be
    done is to provide it with proper play space.

_Punch_, therefore, may be regarded as one of the pioneers of the
admirable "Play Centres" movement. In the same year we find him
applauding the conversion of an old thieves' public house in Westminster
into the headquarters of the Ragged Schools, and appealing for funds to
maintain it. Drinking fountains had been established in Manchester and
Liverpool, and Punch expresses a desire to see them introduced into
London. Here, at any rate, he was prepared to welcome the saying that
what Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.

In the domain of social reform _Punch's_ great bugbears were patronage,
condescension and misplaced missionary efforts. Towards Exeter Hall
philanthropy the old and rooted hostility remains throughout this
period, and in 1865 we find _Punch_ pleading vigorously for a greater
interest in social reform at home to supplement the fashionable
enthusiasm for foreign missions. For missionaries of the type of
Livingstone he had nothing but praise, but that "perfect Christian
gentleman," as Sir Bartle Frere described him, had severed his connexion
with the London Missionary Society in 1857, and thenceforth had been
subjected to "much hostile criticism from narrow-minded people."

[Illustration: TELESCOPIC PHILANTHROPY

LITTLE LONDON ARAB: "Please 'm, ain't we black enough to be cared for?"

(With _Mr. Punch's_ compliments to Lord Stanley.)]

The benefactions of George Peabody roused _Punch's_ interest from the
very first. In 1862 and 1863 his pages abound in questions as to what
was being done with the Peabody Fund. But in 1864 the first block of
"Peabody dwellings" was opened in Spitalfields, soon followed by others
in Chelsea, Bermondsey, Islington and Shadwell; and in 1866, on learning
that Mr. Peabody had increased his gift to the London poor from £150,000
to a quarter of a million, _Punch_ was ashamed at the lack of public
recognition of his generosity. The letter from a "London correspondent"
is more than an expression of gratitude--it is a valuable contribution
to the study of Victorian sociology.

MR. PEABODY'S GIFT.

    "I will confess to you that I indulged myself with the thought that
    it would be a graceful conclusion to the reference sure to be made
    to American affairs in the Queen's speech, if a few words of
    cordial recognition were devoted to the munificence of this great
    American citizen. Of course, I was immediately ashamed of myself
    for thinking such a thing possible; and I hope you will overlook
    the ignorance of etiquette, routine and precedent--the shadowy
    creatures that hold us back when we are yearning to obey some noble
    impulse--betrayed by such a disordered fancy. When I read the
    Speech, all feelings of disappointment about Mr. Peabody
    evaporated, for I found that from the beginning to the end of the
    Royal oration there was not a line to commemorate the name and the
    fame of the Great Minister [Lord Palmerston] lying so near in the
    sacred silence of the Abbey. The shadowy creatures were again
    appalled by my audacious expectation, and held out menacingly a
    noose of ruddy tape.

    "I then waited to see whether Mr. Childers, in proposing a public
    loan in aid of the erection of houses for the labouring poor, would
    introduce Mr. Peabody's name. He did, and handsomely; and I am not
    without hope that before the vessel of State gets into the chopping
    seas that lie in its track, the captain, or perhaps the first
    lieutenant, may say something on this American question which would
    give unqualified satisfaction on both sides of the Atlantic. You
    will not misunderstand me. You will not suppose that when I speak
    of thanking Mr. Peabody, I am thinking of gold boxes, or addresses
    beautifully engrossed on vellum and enclosed in polished caskets,
    or public banquets, or services of plate. His gift towers above all
    ordinary gifts, as St. Paul's rises over all meaner edifices; but
    it does seem to me that it should be acknowledged and gratefully
    recorded by the voice of the eloquent speaker and the pen of the
    eloquent writer, be it in Parliament or in the pulpit, from the
    public platform or in the columns of the omnipotent Press. To some
    extent this has been done, but not commensurate with the magnitude,
    the rarity, and the disinterestedness of the gift.

    "When I read the unprofitable proceedings of Convocation, the
    discussions about canons and catechisms, rubrics and conscience
    clauses, I think to myself that Mr. Peabody may be doing more for
    the souls of the poor, by providing for their bodies, than both
    Houses of Convocation will do, though they should sit to the end of
    the century, and enjoy a fresh gravamen at each sitting.

    "If I were the Bishop of London, out of the fund with which his
    name will be imperishably associated, in every district containing
    a Peabody block of buildings, or dwellings for the poor, such as
    Alderman Waterlow understands how to build, I would provide a
    working clergyman, sure that he would find eager listeners in men
    and women, translated from styes of filth and disease, and
    degradation, to homes abounding in cleanliness, and health, and
    comfort, through the direct bounty or beneficent example of the man
    who has arisen to the rescue and deliverance of the poor of
    London--George Peabody.

"Perhaps the best commemoration of their benefactor by the Peabody
settlements would be a day's holiday in the country every summer, on his
birthday, if it falls in one of the leafy months."

The neglect of which _Punch_ complains cannot be laid to the door of the
Queen. When Mr. Peabody was about to return to America in March, 1866,
she acknowledged his munificence in an autograph letter, saying how
gladly she would have conferred upon him either a baronetcy or the Grand
Cross of the Bath (both of which he declined), and asking his acceptance
of a miniature portrait of herself.

Peabody's gifts to London amounted in all to £500,000, and set an
example which native millionaires have done well to follow. But he was
an even more munificent benefactor to his own country, where he gave at
least a million to education. When he died in London in 1869 _Punch_, in
his memorial verses, contrasted the feelings aroused in the two nations
with those of the "mourners" of most rich men:--

    No common mourners here such office fill--
      A mother and a daughter, grand of frame,
    Albeit one in blood, oft twain in will,
      And jealous either of the other's fame.

    But by this bier they pause from jar and boast,
      Urged by no rivalry but that which strives
    Him that lies here to love and honour most,
      Ranking his life highest among the lives.

    Of men that in their tongue and blood claim part:
      And well may child and mother mourn for one
    Who loved mother and child with equal heart,
      Nor left, for either, Love's best works undone.

The beneficent use of great wealth on a great scale seldom evades
ultimate acknowledgment. _Punch_ said no more in his tribute to Peabody
than that great and humane American deserved. But minor endeavours were
not overlooked, even where they led to no immediate results. Such, for
example, was the proposal of F. D. Maurice and others to found a Working
Women's College in 1864. Classes for women had been held at the Working
Men's College from 1855 to 1860. The larger scheme was not realized, but
has been revived within the last year by the establishment of the
Working Women's College at Beckenham. Such again was the establishment
of the London Dressmaking Company in 1865, under the patronage of Lord
Shaftesbury and the Bishops of London and Oxford, to which _Punch_ gave
a vigorous puff-preliminary in his editorial columns.

In 1858 the fate of Emily Druce had shown that the plea of Hood's "Song
of the Shirt" was in danger of being forgotten. But sweated labour was
not confined to the cheap clothing trade. In 1863 West-End milliners
came under the microscope of Parliament and _Mr. Punch_:--

    Public indignation has been excited by the accounts of the death of
    Mary Anne Walkley, a girl employed by Madame Elise, of Regent
    Street, wife of one Isaacson, and a notorious dressmaker. "Long
    hours in an overcrowded room and sleeping in an ill-ventilated
    bedroom," said Sir George Grey, "caused the young girl's death."
    What is to be done? Lord Shaftesbury in the Lords, and Mr. Bagwell
    in the Commons, called attention to the system under which such
    girls are killed; and the man Isaacson, who seems to fill a similar
    office to that of Mr. Mantalini, and who writes English of which
    that gent would be proud, issued a letter full of impertinence and
    bad grammar, in defence of Mrs. Isaacson's place. Thereupon the
    parish requested other testimony, and Dr. Lankester examined the
    premises, and found the dormitories rather better and the workroom
    rather worse than had been expected.

[Illustration: THE HAUNTED LADY, OR THE GHOST IN THE LOOKING-GLASS

MADAME LA MODISTE: "We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any
sacrifice, and the robe is finished _à merveille_."]

These tragedies and the efforts which they prompted serve as a
convenient transition to a more general survey of Labour problems,
Labour legislation, and Labour organization and representation as they
are revealed and discussed in the pages of _Punch_ from 1857 to 1874.
Under the recently established and rapidly extending joint reign of
steam and coal, it was only natural that rural life should recede into
the background. Railway construction had drawn off many labourers from
agriculture, and the influx of labour into the manufacturing districts
continued apace. In the prospectus of the Dressmaking Company given
above, the work-hours are given as ten. But in 1859 the movement among
working-men for a nine-hours' day had already been started. Strikes were
common, but _Punch_ discourages them on the ground that the men always
lost in the long run, and that the "agitators"--the name "Labour
Leaders" had not yet emerged--were the real criminals. The _Examiner_
took the same line in 1861 when it wrote "the submission of workmen to
the tyranny of their Unions is at once one of the most curious and
lamentable phenomena of our time." Yet the existence of genuine distress
is not denied, and in a little parable in verse entitled "Men and Bees,"
profit-sharing between masters and men is recommended as the true
solution.

On what was still, in spite of Factory Acts and other measures, the
greatest blot on our industrial system--the employment of child
labour--_Punch_ spoke with no uncertain voice. Early in 1860 he gives
Lord Brougham a good mark for taking up the question in the Lords:--

    Lord Brougham, always true to his humane instincts, brought before
    the Lords the case of the young children employed in Bleach Works.
    It is a cruel one. Infants of seven and eight years old are at work
    for eighteen hours, and are sometimes four nights without sleep.
    The brutalities by which the poor little children are kept
    sufficiently awake for the purposes of their task-masters are
    shocking. Years ago, when the cruelties of the climbing-boy trade
    were exposed in the Lords, a noble Lord told a good story, made
    their Lordships laugh, and by getting the Bill thrown over for a
    year, left a new batch of children to the mercies of the Sweep.
    There was nothing of this kind to-night, and Lord Granville
    promised information. He will be good enough to remember that Lord
    Brougham _has_ tendered information, which proves that our friend
    Mammon is, as usual, doing the work of Moloch.

[Sidenote: Climbing Boys and Girls]

Here, at any rate, there is no sympathy for the greedy capitalist, who
comes off as badly as the "agitator." The mention of the chimney-sweeps
is timely. In 1864 the employment of the climbing boys had been
prohibited by Act of Parliament for twenty years. Yet the Act had been
so systematically evaded that in that year more than 3,000 children were
still kept at labour in that filthy and unhealthy form of slavery. The
subject was brought up in the House of Commons in April by Mr. Digby
Seymour, and furnished _Punch_ with an excuse for assailing those
"sentimental and pious ladies" who "prefer subscribing to societies for
converting little Hottentots to using influence to suppress the
atrocities committed upon little white children at home." A month later
Lord Shaftesbury intervened in the Lords: the details which he brought
forward were too shocking for reproduction, but "fine ladies who mew
over the sorrows of the Circassians, and devout ladies who send
missionaries to the Chinese, had better know what is done in their own
houses, and within a few feet of their own beds, with the children of
white English folk."

The kidnapping of little boys had been revived, and at a meeting held in
York the following agreement was signed by the assembled sweeps:--

    "We, the undersigned Master Sweeps of the City of York, mutually
    agree, from and after this date, not to employ Climbing Boys and
    Girls in our business; that the Act of Parliament on their behalf
    made should be strictly complied with; and that we ought no longer
    to risk the heavy penalties it prescribes, both against
    householders and ourselves."

It thus appears that, in York at least, the employment of climbing girls
had become almost or quite as common as that of climbing boys.

Lord Shaftesbury's "Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act" (1864) provided
that a chimney sweeper convicted of causing or allowing any person under
the age of twenty-one to ascend or descend a chimney or enter a flue for
the purpose of sweeping it or extinguishing a fire might be sent to
prison for a term not exceeding six months with or without hard labour.
But master chimney sweeps still continued to "snap their sooty fingers
at the law." In the issue of March 2, 1867, _Punch_ reproduces the
following business "card":--

    "William Burges, Chimney Sweeper, No. 36 Bolton Street, Chorley,
    flatters himself with having boys of the best size for such
    branch of business suitable for a Tunnel or Chimney, and that it is
    now in his power to render his assistance in a more extensive
    manner than he usually has done. He also carries his boys from room
    to room occasionally, to prevent them staining or marking any room
    floor with their feet."

In short, there was good ground for the complaint that while a great
deal had been said about our working men, but little notice had been
taken of our working children. A discussion of the "half-time system" at
a working men's club in which another enlightened and benevolent peer,
Lord Lyttelton, took part, is accordingly welcomed as sensible and
opportune:--

    "By this system," said Lord Lyttelton, "which compelled every
    parent who chose to send his child to work also to send him or her
    half the day to school, a very useful compromise had been effected
    between the demands of labour and education.... This system, as
    carried out in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire,
    had resulted in the increased education, and consequent improved
    life and conduct, of their inhabitants, as had been manifested
    during the late cotton famine, and in many other ways."

    Gentlemen of England who live at home at ease perhaps have little
    notion of how hard some children work, and how needful it appears
    to make some effort to relieve them. From a Blue-Book he produced
    at the meeting we have mentioned, Lord Lyttelton

    "Gave an instance of a little girl engaged in a brickyard near
    Birmingham from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M., only having fifteen minutes for
    breakfast, and thirty minutes for dinner, no time for tea, and
    during one day she would have to catch and throw to her neighbour
    fifteen tons of bricks."

    What a mercy it would be to such poor little working children if
    their fathers were compelled to send them every day to school!

[Sidenote: _White Slaves in the Black Country_]

Towards the end of the same year the Town Council of Sheffield met to
consider the report of the Children's Employment Commission relative to
the overworking of children in the trades of that town:--

    According to that Report, a boy, only nine years old, living at
    Wadsley, four or five miles from Sheffield, was obliged by his
    father to work as cellar-boy in one of the furnaces, on most days
    of the week from six in the morning to six or seven in the evening,
    and on Saturdays from three in the morning till three in the
    afternoon. This enforced labour at a high temperature would, if
    only occasional, appear to be equivalent to a somewhat long
    compulsory innings in the Turkish bath. Imposed nearly every day,
    it may be considered by some who do not consider too deeply, to
    constitute a combination of the Turkish bath with Turkish tyranny,
    and tyranny about as barbarous as ever was practised in Turkey.

[Illustration: A DISTINCTION

THE "GOOD PARSON" (to applicant for instruction in the Night School):
"Have you been confirmed, my boy?"

BOY (hesitating): "Please, sir--I--don't know."

PARSON: "You understand me; has the Bishop laid his hands on you?"

BOY: "Oh, no, sir, but his Keeper have, sir--very often, sir!"]

Naturally, such outspoken comments gave offence, and in 1866 and again
in 1868 _Punch_ was very much in the black books of the Black Country
for what he said on the state of morals, manners and education among the
workers of that region of coal and iron. The controversy began with some
lines, "The Queen in the Black Country," which were inspired by the
inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at Wolverhampton. These gave pain
to certain susceptible inhabitants of that town. _Punch's_ reply was to
quote from the report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1864 on
the trades in the Wolverhampton district, showing that all the large
employers lived far away from the workpeople they employed; that a few
ministers of religion were almost the only representatives of the upper
class resident in the "Black Country"; that large numbers of children,
youths, young persons and women worked the same long hours as the men,
from 6 or 7 A.M. to 9, 10 and 11 P.M.; that among them little girls were
often kept bellows-blowing fourteen hours a day.

       *       *       *       *       *

[Sidenote: _Laws to Protect Children_]

In January, 1868, _Punch_ was accused of being a Rip Van Winkle, who had
been asleep for half a century, because when Bishop Selwyn was
translated from New Zealand to Lichfield he had published some verses
ending up with the question, "What's the savage o'er sea to the savage
at home?" His answer was to say that he wished he _could_, like Rip Van
Winkle, fall asleep not over the Black Country only, but over every
manufacturing district of England, to wake in fifty years and find
education for ignorance, thrift and comfort for improvidence and
squalor, gentleness and refinement for coarseness and brutality among
men and women; health and happiness for sickliness and suffering,
premature decrepitude and deadening of mind among children. But the
facts were too strong for him:--

    We never said, or meant to say, that things were as bad in the
    Black Country now as they were fifty, forty, or twenty years ago.
    We are quite ready to believe, with a more courteous and kindly
    Black Country correspondent than Mr. Lawley, that much has been
    done, and that much is doing, for religion, education and
    civilization in that region as everywhere else.

       *       *       *       *       *

If _Mr. Punch_ has been unfair to the Black Country, he has, at least,
been sinning in good company. Hear what Mr. Justice Keating spoke from
the Bench, in a Black Country case, not three weeks ago:--

    "I cannot help noticing the most deplorable state of matters shown
    by the evidence of these girls. We call ourselves a Christian
    people and pride ourselves upon being a civilized nation. These two
    girls have said that they could neither read nor write; that they
    had never in their lives been at school, church or chapel; that
    they had never heard of the Bible; and, as the learned counsel had
    suggested, in all probability they had never heard of a Divine
    Being. We send out missionaries to the heathen, but what avails all
    this when we see such a state of things at home?"

The introduction of the Metalliferous Mines Bill in the Lords in July,
1872, prompted _Punch_ to express his ironic satisfaction:--

    Would you be surprised to hear that we already protect women and
    children to this extraordinary extent? No children under 15 are
    sent down into the mines, and women are not worked more than twelve
    hours, and--will you believe it?--not at all on Sundays.

In the same month the Lords read a second time the Bill for protecting
children against those who cruelly train them to become acrobats. There
is hardly a single mention throughout all these years of efforts to
secure humane treatment for working children in which the honoured name
of Lord Shaftesbury is not prominent, as it was in this debate. There
was, as _Punch_ says, no sentimentality about this interference, and we
ought not to leave children to be tortured for the delectation of the
lower class of folks, well-dressed or not, who are pleased by unnatural
acrobatic feats.

It gave _Punch_ no pleasure to write sermons on Blue Books, least of all
when the Blue Books only gave him the blues. He usually abstained from
the discussion of merely painful subjects. But just indignation often
forced him to make exceptions. Thirty years after the passage of the
first, and nine after the passage of the second Chimney Sweepers
Regulation Act, a very bad case of evasion occurred in the North of
England:--

    We take this paragraph from the _Pall Mall Gazette_:--

    "Chimney-sweeps, who continue, in defiance of the law, to employ
    'climbing boys' may take warning from a case which has been tried
    at Durham. A Gateshead chimney-sweeper was sentenced to six months'
    imprisonment for the manslaughter of an unhappy little lad who was
    suffocated in attempting to carry out his orders in clearing a
    flue."

    Apart from the individual ruffianism in this case, _Mr. Punch_ asks
    whether the Act which was intended to deliver little children from
    the most hideous cruelties is becoming a dead letter in any part of
    the kingdom. Is there any other place than Gateshead where
    little lads are rammed into foul flues to be suffocated? The
    present generation may not remember the struggle that had to be
    fought out, over and over, before the children could be protected.
    It had to be waged against habit, prejudice, greed, ridicule; but
    the victory was won. James Montgomery,[1] the poet, with one
    ghastly but damaging volume, The _Chimney Sweep's Magazine and
    Climbing Boy's Album_, gave thousands a nightmare that lasted for
    years, but he carried the Act. There was a poem in the book, too,
    by Blake, the painter, that did yeoman's service. We got the Act,
    and believed that the system of atrocious cruelty was at an end.
    But the above paragraph wakes painful doubts.

    We should call the sentence on the fellow who killed the child
    ridiculously mild, could anything ridiculous connect itself with
    such a theme. We wish that this master chimney-sweeper of Gateshead
    could have been sentenced to two years' imprisonment, varied by
    twenty sound lashes with the cat every quarter day, except the last,
    when he should have had fifty, as a parting testimonial of the
    public sense of his character.

[Footnote 1: No mention is made in the otherwise full and sympathetic
notice of James Montgomery in the D.N.B. of this, not the least
honourable of the services of that Sheffield worthy. Though his verse,
especially in the epic vein, was unequal, the D.N.B., differing from
Lord Jeffrey who slated it in the _Edinburgh_, agrees with _Punch_ in
according James Montgomery the title of poet, reserving that of
"Poetaster" to Robert or "Satan" Montgomery, who also dealt in epics,
and was the victim of Macaulay's famous and ferocious castigation in the
_Quarterly_.]

[Sidenote: _A Child Heroine_]

This was written in the issue of March 15, 1873. Just a year later, at
the close of the Ashanti campaign, an appeal was made, and not in vain,
to _Punch_ to recognize the heroism of another working child:--

A TEN-YEAR-OLD MARTYR

    "DEAR MR. PUNCH,

    "There will be a great deal of war-paint going round soon, in the
    shape of titles, honours, and decorations, official rewards for
    'killing, slaying and burning.' Will you give a decoration to the
    little motherless girl of ten, Louisa Row,[2] who 'undertook the
    cooking' for her father, 'a labourer,' and his family, and died in
    the execution of her duty?

    "She has not killed anyone, black or white, except herself; she has
    not burned anyone's huts, or anyone's villages--she has only burned
    herself. She will get no glory, unless you, with a stroke of your
    pen, will put one little star of honour upon her unknown grave.

    "THE AUTHOR OF _Olive Varcoe_."

[Footnote 2: "A painful death by burning has happened at Torquay. Louisa
Row, aged ten, lost her mother a few weeks ago, and undertook the
cooking for her father, a labourer, and the rest of the family. She had
well performed the duties devolving upon her since her mother's death,
until one day she went too near the grate, her frock was ignited, and
she was terribly burned. The poor child lived several days after the
accident. At the inquest a verdict of 'Accidental death' was
returned."]

Will our correspondent accept this inscription for her poor little
martyr's tombstone?

    Duty's small Servant, without prize or praise,
      How soon on thy hard life hath death come down!
    Take this brief record of thy childish days--
      Gold, tried with fire, makes the best Martyr's Crown.

_Punch's_ record as the champion of the working children leaves little
room for criticism. And we have seen in several of the extracts given
above that his severest censures are directed against the employers of
labour, the greed of gain, the worship of Mammon. But if he cannot be
convicted of partiality to capital, he was not always fair to labour.
Even in his most democratic days he showed a distrust of "delegates."
The working man's grievances were admitted, but his salaried spokesmen,
when they were drawn from his own order, were condemned, with very few
exceptions, as untrustworthy mischief-makers. How acute this distrust
had now become may be gathered from the acrimonious article which
appears in 1861 under the heading "A Dig at the Delegates":--

    A Delegate is generally a lazy, idle lout, who likes to sit and
    talk much better than to work; and who, considering himself as
    being "gifted with the gab," tries to foster small dissensions and
    causes of dispute, that he may have the pleasure of hearing himself
    prate about them. In other words, he is a drone that goes buzzing
    about the beer-shops, and living upon the honey that the working
    bees have toiled for. His business is to set a man against his
    master, and to keep afloat the Unions that tend to nurture Strikes,
    by giving men a false idea of their own strength, and underrating
    the resources and resistance of employers. Having duped the
    shallow-pated to elect him as their mouthpiece and being paid by
    them to lead a lazy life in looking to what he is pleased to call
    their interests, the Delegate grows fat on their starvation and
    their Strikes, and what is death to them becomes to him the means
    of life. Fancied grievances and most unreasonable demands the
    Delegate endeavours to encourage and support, for squabbling brings
    him into notice and his tongue into full play, and raises his
    importance in the pothouse-haunting world. A claim for ten hours'
    pay for only nine hours' work is just the sort of trade demand that
    a Delegate delights in; for he knows that its injustice must
    prevent its being listened to, and he will have the chance of
    swigging nightly, gratis, pots of beer while denouncing the
    iniquity of rapacious masters, in all the frothy eloquence of a
    public-house harangue.

    As nobody but a fool would submit to have his earnings eaten into by
    a sloth, it is the business of the Delegate to clap a stop on
    cleverness, and keep the brains of working men down to the
    muddle-pated level of those who are his tools. He, of course, fears
    the quick sight of any workman of intelligence, lest it may see
    through his iniquitous designs. He, therefore, gets the best hands
    marked on the Black List, and does the utmost in his power to reduce
    the active, skilful and industrious working man to the standard of
    the stupid, slothful, sluggish sot.

[Illustration: MRS. NORTH AND HER ATTORNEY

MRS. NORTH: "You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course
of action; I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable
arrangement, I must put the case into other hands."]

There have always been people who trade on discontent, and would find
their occupation gone were it removed. But to represent such motives as
animating the majority of Trade Union delegates was a gross
exaggeration; and it was both unfair and unjust to draw so hard and fast
a distinction between the rank and file of the working classes and those
whom they chose to represent them. The weakness of _Punch's_ position
was severely tested during the war of North and South in America and the
Lancashire cotton famine, of which that war was the cause. Just as
_Punch_ failed to recognize the existence of idealism in the leaders of
the North, and consistently maligned and misrepresented Lincoln until
his death, so he failed to render justice to the idealism of the cotton
operatives, who espoused a cause which was not only unpopular and
unfashionable, but the promotion of which entailed the maintenance of
that blockade which caused widespread distress and misery in Lancashire.
_Punch's_ attitude towards America in the earlier stages of the conflict
showed a complete inability to comprehend the great issues involved, and
an impartial dislike of both sides tempered by a sentimental leaning
towards the South. It must be remembered that at this time the cause of
the South was favoured by nearly all classes, that it appealed to Mr.
Gladstone; that the Duke of Argyll and John Bright were almost the only
statesmen who backed the North; and that amongst London newspapers of
any weight the _Spectator_ stood almost alone on that side. _Punch's_
reading of the war at the close of 1861 is shown in the cartoon which
represents King Cotton as Prometheus, bound with the chains of Blockade,
and with the American Eagle preying on his vitals. The verses which
accompany the picture emphasize the suicidal folly of the eagle, but the
question of slavery or the Union is not even mentioned. A fortnight
later the point of the "other [Cotton] Kings" is explained by another
cartoon in which John Bull, addressing the combatants, says, "If you
like fighting better than business, I shall deal at the other shop."

Here the verses drive home the _argumentum ad pocketum_ in the crudest
way. Cousin Jonathan is told not to be an ass, or "bid Mrs. Britannia
stop ruling the wave":--

    We'll break your blockade, Cousin Jonathan, yet,
      Yes, darn our old stockings, C. J., but we will.
    And the cotton we'll have, and to work we will set
      Every Lancashire hand, every Manchester mill.

    We're recruiting to do it--we'll make no mistakes:
      There's a place they call India just over the way;
    There we're raising a force which, Jerusalem, snakes!
      Will clean catawampus your cruisers, C. J.

[Sidenote: "_Distressed Millionaires_"]

Events entirely failed to justify these truculent words. A year later
the cotton famine was at its height, and an appeal for funds is headed
"Welly Clamming," with the explanation, "Everywhere we hear this, the
Lancashire Doric for 'nearly starving.'" _Punch_ applauds the zeal of
the Quakers in relieving the distress caused by famine, fever and frost,
and simultaneously reproduces this extraordinary advertisement from the
_Manchester Guardian_:--

    _Travel_: A gentleman, whose son, aged 17, is thrown out of
    occupation by the Cotton Famine, would be glad to meet with one or
    two other young gentlemen to accompany his son on a Tour, for five
    or six months, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere.

    Address F. 127 at the Printers.

The advertiser, according to _Punch_, appears to be "one of those
distressed millionaires who, because their mills have ceased working,
declare themselves destitute mill-owners, and devolve on the squires and
farmers and the British public the duty of rescuing their unemployed
workpeople from starvation."

[Illustration: "A STILL BIGGER CLAIMANT"]

When a ship was sent to Liverpool bearing the contributions of the
United States to the relief of Lancashire in February, 1863, _Punch_
welcomed the gift without reserve, as linking the two worlds anew by the
chain of fraternal goodwill. But a very different spirit is shown in his
acid comments on the debate in the House of Commons initiated by W. E.
Forster, who attacked the Government for not interfering to prevent
ships of war being supplied by our builders to the Confederates, and
said that we incurred great danger of war. The facts and the sequel
fully justified Forster's protest, but _Punch_ was not content with
backing up Palmerston's defence of the Government, and treated with
contempt and ridicule Bright's insistence on the sympathy of the working
classes with the North:--

    Here it may be mentioned that Mr. Bright[3] alluded in his speech
    to a meeting held the day before at the St. James's Hall, where he
    had been in the chair, and a crowded assembly of workmen testified
    the utmost sympathy with the North. This meeting is grandiloquently
    described by the Yankee organ here, but shall describe itself for
    _Mr. Punch's_ readers. It was chiefly composed of Trade Union men,
    and when a person who had chosen to be free and act for himself
    ventured to speak, although on the same side as the other orators,
    these lovers of liberty interrupted him with cries of "He's not a
    Society man!" Mr. Bright made a fervid and eloquent speech in
    favour of the North, and a shoemaker came next, who abused _Mr.
    Punch_, said "that a monster in human shape had been guest of the
    Lord Mayor," and that "the Devil, in the shape of _The Times_
    newspaper, was carrying out an infernal purpose." A joiner then
    called Lord Palmerston a liar, and a Professor Beestley, or some
    such name, attacked the "wicked press," meaning the respectable
    journals. An address to Mr. Lincoln was agreed to, assailing the
    "infamous _Times_," the "arrogant aristocracy," the "diabolical"
    South, our "unscrupulous moneyocracy," and the "infamous
    rebellion," and terminating with some gushing bosh about the
    vivifying Sun of Liberty. This document is penned in _New York
    Herald_ style, and probably owes its origin to Yankee inspiration.
    To this kind of meeting, and this kind of language, Mr. Bright
    referred, complacently, in the House of Commons. The North must be
    in a bad way when such allies are coveted.

[Footnote 3: The variations of view in _Punch's_ estimate of John Bright
form an interesting study. In the main, while admiring his courage,
_Punch_ found him too fond of asserting an impracticable independence.
The masses distrusted him as a cottonocrat; the middle-classes as an
out-and-out democrat and therefore an advocate of mob-rule. Punch
himself had described _Bright_ as an inciter to class-hatred in 1860.]

[Sidenote: _Libelling Lincoln_]

The South was in a much worse way when a "respectable journal" was
reduced to explaining away the undoubted and disinterested support of
the North by Lancashire cotton spinners and other British working men as
Trade Union tyranny, to say nothing of that worst infirmity of political
controversy--the vulgar perversion of an opponent's name. _Punch_ was on
stronger ground in criticizing the spread-eagling of the northern Press,
as when the _New York Herald_ declared that:--

    They (the American people) know that when this rebellion began the
    aristocrats of England took advantage of the chance to destroy us,
    and joined heart and hand with the slaveholding rebels. They know
    that this rebellion was born in Exeter Hall, nurtured by the
    English aristocracy, armed from English arsenals, and supported by
    English sympathy and assistance.

_Punch_, though no lover of Exeter Hall, could not refrain from
ironically vindicating its innocence, and makes for the rest some good
debating points against the _Herald_. But there is little "neutrality"
in his statement that Southern loyalty was as staunch as that of the
North, "though not so truculent or atrocious"; and when he falls foul of
the Yankees--a word invariably used in a disparaging sense--for calling
the confederates "rebels," he did not know that the magnanimous Lincoln
would never allow them to be called by that name in his presence. He is
made to do so, however, in _Punch's_ parody of one of Lincoln's
speeches--a truly lamentable performance, in which the President claims
dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the
"rotten old world," talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in
general behaves like a vulgar buffoon. The true Lincoln is to be found
in the immortal Second Inaugural delivered on March 4, 1865.

As for the British working men, though _Punch_ had undoubtedly
endeavoured to discount the strength of the tide of feeling which
continued to run strongly against the slave power, in spite of the
terrible suffering brought about by the blockade, he quoted with
approval Lord Palmerston's formidable and damaging indictment of the
manufacturers in the House of Commons on July 30:--

    "We know," he said, "that in the county most fortunes have been
    made by the manufacturers. I do not agree with the Hon.
    Member for Stockport that it has all been invested in the mills. On
    the contrary they have accumulated much more than their mills could
    have cost. There are enormous capitalists in the county, some of
    whom, I am sorry to say, though they have starving populations at
    their gates, and anticipate worse distress as coming, have
    actually, for the sake of profit, sold and sent out of the country
    the cotton which they ought to have used for the employment of the
    people. I say, why are these people to be exempt, and not to be
    made to contribute to the distress which they see around them?"

This speech, _Punch_ observes, enraged Cobden, who was furious with
Palmerston for his unjust, reckless and incorrect charge; but his reply
was inconclusive, as he could only say that a large proportion of
Lancashire mill-owners had _not_ sold their stocks of unsold cotton to
foreigners for the sake of the high prices which the fibre commanded.
Cobden returned to the charge a couple of days later in a speech which
is a most extraordinary prospective plagiarism of the election address
of any anti-waste Independent Liberal candidate in the year 1921, as may
be judged from _Punch's_ summary:--

    The present is the most extravagant government that ever existed in
    peace time.

    This is all Lord Palmerston's fault.

    He is always interfering and getting up sensations.

    If the Liberals do not disentangle themselves from this system they
    will "rot out of existence."

    The Tories keep Lord Palmerston in Office and have more confidence
    in him than in their own chief.

    He is puffed by a clever and noisy _claque_.

    All the questions dear to Radicals and Dissenters have gone back
    under his leadership.

    This sort of thing must not go on next year.

[Sidenote: _Our Noble Selves_]

The honours of the debate, which did not enhance Cobden's reputation,
rested with Palmerston, but apart from his extreme frankness in dealing
with the Lancashire mill-owners, he owed his triumph to his unrivalled
Parliamentary opportunism. The Governments of neutral states cannot play
heroic _rôles_ in a great war. More scope is left to opposition leaders.
Lord Derby distinguished himself by his liberality and energy in
organizing relief measures, but the Lancashire working man was the most
heroic figure in English public life from 1861 to 1865, though _Punch_
had only a glimmering of the truth. The note of complacent satisfaction
over the tranquillity and prosperity of England as compared with the
disturbed state of Europe is frequently sounded, and the Exhibition of
1862 is taken as the occasion to blow the national trumpet in "Our Noble
Selves":--

    All the world we invite to behold a grand sight
      Of not only goods, chattels, and treasures,
    But of law that's obeyed because mended or made
      By men who bring forward good measures.
    Let them come then, and see what a people are we,
      Steady-going, not headlong and skittish.
    What a world this of ours would be, O foreign Powers,
      If all nations behaved like the British!

       *       *       *       *       *

    This is Liberty Hall; no restriction at all
      On the freedom of speaking and writing;
    The result is that, say any fool what he may,
      Foolish language occasions no fighting.
    'Tis the easiest job to disperse any mob,
      Without being so much as pumped on
    By a fire-engine hose, off the multitude goes,
      Mind, Order reigns bloodless at Brompton.

This mood is, however, tempered by moments of self-criticism. The social
millennium had not arrived when in 1862 a statue was erected in Bolton
to its benefactor Crompton, the inventor of the spinning-mule, while his
descendants were living in destitution:--

    The spinning mule made Bolton. Samuel Crompton made the spinning
    mule.... He died in 1827, at the age of 74, and now Bolton, whose
    master-manufacturers cheated him living, honours him dead with a
    statue.... But Samuel Crompton left more behind him than the great
    invention and the memory of his wrongs and struggles. He begat sons
    and daughters as well as invented mules. He died a pauper, and they
    have fared as the children of those who die paupers are apt to
    do.... One of his sons is living dependent on charity, as his
    father died. Somebody bought him a suit of clothes that he might
    make a decent appearance at the inauguration of his father's
    statue. Besides this son, there are living some half a dozen
    grandchildren, some dozen great-grandchildren, of the
    inventor--all, with one exception, in poverty of the meanest, most
    pinching kind. Not one of them, son, grandchildren, or
    great-grandchildren, was invited to the inauguration of Samuel
    Crompton's statue.

[Illustration: IN FORMA PAUPERIS

LONDON ARAB: "Please, sir, can't I have a shill'n's 'orth?]

A sum of £2,000 had been collected for the statue: a few weeks after its
inauguration Lord Palmerston sent £50 to the surviving son. Assuredly
there have been few more remarkable examples of asking for bread and
being given a stone. And mill-owners were not the only masters whose
methods exposed them to criticism. When in 1863 the engine-driver and
fireman of a luggage train were fined 15s. each at the Oxford City Court
for being found drunk and incapable on their engine, _Punch_ admits the
moderation of the punishment, but asks his readers to ponder the story
told by the delinquents, and put the saddle on the right horse:--

    They declared in the presence of the Company's Officers and without
    contradiction, that their day was fourteen hours, and that owing to
    extra pressure, they had only had seventeen hours sleep the whole
    of last week.... On whom should fall the blame and punishment? On
    the men, outworn, and driven to stimulants as a substitute for
    sleep or a support under exhaustion, or on the managers of the
    Company, who thus overwork, or, in other words, underpay their
    servants?

[Illustration: MUDDLEBY JUNCTION

OVERWORKED POINTSMAN (puzzled): "Let's see! There's the 'scursion' were
due at 4.45, and it ain't in; then, afore that were the 'mineral'--no!
that must ha' been the 'goods,' or the 'cattle.' No! that were
after--cattle's shunting now. Let's see. Fast train came through
at--con-found!--and here comes 'the express' afore its time, and blest
if I know which line she's on!]

The cartoon published nine years later, in 1872, showed that _Punch_ was
still dissatisfied with the conditions of railway servants. _A propos_
of the railways, it is worth recording that in 1860 there were cheap
excursions to Brighton and back for 3s. Also that in 1868 _Punch_
commits himself to the view that an increase in railway fares means less
revenue--an interesting parallel to the recent controversy.

In 1865 the cattle plague led to a sharp rise in the price of meat; but
the attempt to introduce and popularize cheap jerked (or charqued) beef
from South America--sold at threepence a pound--was not successful,
though _Punch_ appealed to the public to give it a fair chance in a set
of verses with the refrain:--

    Oh, the jerked beef of La Plata,
    A platter give me of jerked beef.

"Progress at high prices," in _Punch's_ opinion, was dearly bought. When
two demonstrations were held by working men at Worcester this summer to
protest against the high price of meat which was attributed to a
monopoly amongst the farmers and butchers, and a resolution was adopted
to abstain from the consumption of meat for a certain time, _Punch_ saw
in this move a tacit acknowledgment that the high price was owing to
demand, and cordially endorsed the comments of _The Times_:--

    There can be no doubt that the present high price of meat is mainly
    to be traced to the fact that the consumption on the part of the
    working classes has of late years enormously increased, owing to
    their prosperous condition, good wages, and cheap bread. A general
    resolution on their part to limit the consumption would soon bring
    down the price.

[Sidenote: _Honest Fault-finding_]

The strike against the butchers was one in which the working classes
might safely combine to turn out. "They will not injure themselves, nor
hurt their wives and families: on the contrary, all the while the strike
lasts they will be putting by money. The public will support instead of
discouraging them." But it is impossible to take the commendation
seriously in view of the last sentence; "whilst others, I trust, are
endeavouring, by total abstinence from butchers' meat, to reduce the
butchers to reason, I remain medicinally, of course, always 'A
Beefeater.'" Much more effective, because untainted by irony, are the
plain-spoken verses on the British workman as painted by his flatterers,
his detractors and his candid friends:--

    While Democrat orators praise him and puff him
      As the land's bone and sinew, and Nature's own nob:
    Aristocrat talkers calumniously cuff him,
      As shiftless, and soulless, sot, spendthrift, and snob.

    'Twixt the daub of his bully, the daub of his backer,
      The true British Workman's been able to stand,
    And at once to disclaim both the brighter and blacker,
      As alike wide of truth, from the right and left hand.

The success of "Tom Brown" (Tom Hughes), who was elected for Lambeth in
1865, encouraged the enthusiastic friends of the British workman in the
hope that he would now be painted without fear or favour, but Tom
Brown's honest unvarnished portraiture was more than his sitter could
stand:--

    While a fact is a fact 'twill do no good to blink it,
      Put up with the shadows Tom Brown dares to show,
    Your face may be darker than you like to think it,
      If the shadows ain't fast, wash, and let's see them go.

    While your Union pickets still waylay and "ratten"
      The knob-sticks, who work on their own honest hook,
    While on your hard earnings strike-delegates batten,
      And machines and machine-work are in your black book;

    While men who earn more by the week than their curate
      Are content in one room of a hovel to pig;
    While shop-drinks and Saint Monday their old rate endure at,
      And the wife and the young 'uns come after the swig;

    While limb's rest and soul's light to your infants begrudging,
      You drive them to workshop, to mine, loom or wheel,
    To drag through long years of unnatural drudging
      As though minds could die out, and yet bodies not feel;

    While such are the shadows your features that darken,
      Needs must that the blacks in your picture appear;
    And they're no friends who bid you your own praises hearken,
      When an honest fault-finder is craving your ear!

Later on, however, Tom Brown was himself taken to task for flattering
the working man.

On the question of housing and sanitation _Punch_ refused to believe
that landlords were altogether to blame. Social reformers and
legislators found themselves up against stubborn facts, and none were
more stubborn than the Briton's prejudices in favour of vested rights
and a man's house being his own castle, wherein he is free to do what he
likes with his own:--

    These stubborn facts are, no doubt, at the bottom of much that is
    worthy of respect in John Bull's character. They have not a little
    to do with his Magna Charta and his Habeas Corpus. But they
    occasionally stop the way all the same; obstruct the efforts of the
    Local Board or Nuisance Removal Committee, crouch like lions in the
    path of the Officer of Health, trip up the heels of the Inspector
    of Nuisances, and crop out in back slums, by-lanes, and blind
    alleys for district visitors and zealous clergymen to break their
    shins over.

[Sidenote: _Village Sanitation in 1865_]

These remarks form the preface to a series of extracts from the verbatim
report of a Visiting Committee appointed in 1865 to inspect a little
seaside village. The name of the place is withheld, but _Punch_ pledges
his word for the absolute veracity of the reporter, adding that what the
Committee found in the way of stinks, putrid wells, foul accumulations,
and purblind or pig-headed people was to be found in nineteen out of
every twenty English villages, seaside or inland, rural or suburban. The
houses in a sample street were occupied by an old gardener, a small pork
butcher, three pilots, three sailors' wives, and two coast-guardsmen.
The description of the well in the pork butcher's house is enough, in
Dickens's phrase, to sicken a scavenger. But the complacent fatalism
which marked all these householders rises to a pitch of sublimity in the
immortal phrase of the first coast-guardsman:-

    "Had the cholera in '44: ain't afeared of it. _Considers as it's a
    natural went for the overplush of mankind._ When his time comes,
    knows as he 'as got to go. Considers as his time wasn't come in
    '44. Always keeps his house very clean: does all the scrubbing
    himself, and paints his bedsteads and chests of drawers with red
    lead and turps twice a year."

According to the local doctor, all the inhabitants of these houses were
drinking water strongly impregnated with lead, but "they appear to like
it so I can't help it, especially as the landlord refuses to alter the
pumps." The first pilot considered that he had a right to drink his own
sewage if he liked it. The second coast-guardsman "couldn't abear
chloride of lime," and, in general, disinfectants were dreaded more than
bad drains. An optimistic speaker on Social Science in October, 1859,
had declared that the advance of education was certainly very marked.
"Classes once illiterate now show a love of literature, the taste for
which has even reached our cabmen, who in demeanour and civility are not
the men they were." _Punch_ was sceptical about the cabman and printed
an ironical poem on his progress modelled on "She wore a wreath of
roses." The passages we have quoted show that six years later pork
butchers, pilots and coast-guardsmen left a good deal to be desired in
their knowledge of practical hygiene. But _Punch_ does not acquit the
landlords or Government officials, and, though no lover of despotism
abroad or at home, there were moments when he felt that a little more
"paternal government" would not be a bad thing. As he put it a little
later: "when _Mr. Punch_ is reminded of tanks, cisterns, bins and butts
for miles along a tainted shore being overlooked by a mythical Inspector
of Nuisances instead of being looked into, in his utter bewilderment he
is tempted to exclaim, Wanted a Bismarck."

       *       *       *       *       *

With the death of Palmerston the question of organic reform re-emerged,
but the Russell administration, hampered by the disaffected Adullamite
Liberals--brilliantly led by Lowe--and restrained by Whig caution,
handled their Bill in a half-hearted spirit which courted defeat.
Russell resigned at the end of June, 1866, and was succeeded by Lord
Derby with Disraeli again as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is on
record that Gladstone, shortly after Palmerston's death, agreed with
Denison, the Speaker, that there was no strong feeling for reform in the
country. Yet within a few months the diagnosis was completely falsified.
Immediately after the fall of the Russell administration came the
historic Hyde Park riots and a vigorous agitation throughout the
country. "The artisans, who had seemed apathetic towards the franchise
when it was dangled before them, became angry when it was refused."
_Punch's_ account of the rioting and its sequel is liberal of censure,
but cannot be regarded as either impartial or judicial or as
appreciative of the significance of the episode:--

    _Monday, July 23._--It did not seem to suit the Fates that our
    friends the Conservatives should slide into the recess quite so
    quietly as had been anticipated. Sir George Grey, the late Home
    Secretary, had ordained that the proposed Reform Demonstration
    should not be allowed to take place in Hyde Park, but his Ministry
    went out in time to save him any further trouble in the matter. Mr.
    Walpole had to vindicate the law, and his gentle soul has been a
    good deal perturbed by events. One Beales insisted on holding the
    meeting, and Sir Richard Mayne locked the Park Gates. The result
    was inevitable. The artisan class attended in large numbers, and of
    course behaved perfectly well; but, equally of course, the
    processions were supplemented by a vast mass of Roughs, who behaved
    perfectly ill. _Mr. Punch_ is unable to compliment the Reform
    League, inasmuch as its acts tended to violate order, and its
    "experiment of right" could have been tried with a hundred men
    instead of with thousands. Nor can we compliment the authorities
    who endeavoured to defend an untenable post, inasmuch as law could
    have been asserted by the arrest of a few individuals. He does not
    make a great noise about the breaking down of some railings, and
    the destruction by some roughs of trees and shrubs, nor would he
    put London in a state of siege because a good many windows have
    been broken, but all this sort of thing is really the fault of one
    Beales, who knew that a mob would follow the working man. Rough and
    Bludgeon came largely into contact, to the discomfort of the
    former, and the Beaks looked to the rest, Mr. Knox having
    especially distinguished himself by firmness and moderation, coming
    down sternly on ruffians and being lenient to mere fools.

    But Mr. Walpole had to defend himself in the House, and also had to
    see a Reform deputation, before whom he wept, and some of whom
    managed to misunderstand him, or pretended to do so, whereby there
    was another meeting summoned, as if with Government sanction, but
    after explanations, in and out of the House, the idea was given up.
    So ended the campaign, and _Mr. Punch_ is almost ashamed of the
    fuss which has been made over an affair of broken heads, while two
    great nations are mourning over slaughtered myriads.

[Illustration: NO ROUGH-IANISM

WORKING MAN: "Look here, you vagabond! Right or wrong, we won't have
your help."]

[Sidenote: "_One Beales_"]

"One Beales," as _Punch_ contemptuously describes him, was a political
agitator, but of a very different type from the "delegate" as depicted
in a previous page. He was an Etonian, a scholar of his college at
Cambridge, a barrister of the Middle Temple, and a revising barrister
for Middlesex, who died in the odour of legal sanctity as a County Court
Judge. But as a member of the Emancipation Society in the Civil War, a
member of Mill's Jamaica Committee in connexion with the case of General
Eyre, and above all as President of the Reform League, and advocate of
Manhood Suffrage and the right of public meeting, he had incurred
_Punch's_ unremitting hostility. "Beales and his Bubbly-jocks" were
constantly held up to ridicule. But they were very far from being
ridiculous. The League served as a spear-head for the discontent aroused
by the failure of Russell's Reform Bill, which it had cordially
supported. The meeting in Trafalgar Square on July 2, 1866, had been
prohibited, but Sir Richard Mayne, the first Commissioner of Police,
withdrew the prohibition, and the meeting, attended by nearly 70,000
persons, passed off quietly. Beales is declared to have shown great
courage and coolness on July 23. The meeting assembled near the gates of
Hyde Park; the invasion of the Park and the pulling down of the railings
occurred as the crowd were returning to Trafalgar Square, but the
leaders were in no way responsible. The police were roughly handled and
had to be reinforced by the Guards before the crowd was driven out; but
an amicable arrangement was reached between Beales and Walpole next day
as to the discontinuance of any further meetings except by arrangement
with the government. The Reform League had done its work; its mission
was virtually ended when Disraeli's Reform Bill passed in 1867 and it
was formally dissolved in March, 1869, three days after Beales had
resigned the presidency. No amount of belittling of Beales can disguise
the fact that he and his League gave a great impetus to the Reform
movement--the Lord Mayor of London actually presided over one of its
meetings in the sacred precincts of the Guildhall--and forced on the
introduction of the Bill of 1867. During its progress through Parliament
another great meeting convened by the Reform League was held in Hyde
Park in May, 1867. The Home Secretary issued a notice warning all
persons against attending it, but was practically over-ruled by the
Prime Minister, who announced that nothing would be done to hinder it.
The meeting, attended by 200,000 people, passed off without any
disturbance or untoward incident, and Walpole soon afterwards retired.
As Walpole, in consequence of his Hyde Park associations, had become one
of _Punch's_ regular butts, it is only fair to his memory to say that
the story of his having broken down and wept before a deputation is
denied by the D.N.B. _Punch's_ review of the episode quoted above is
thoroughly typical of his temper in this period of transition; of his
independence, his readiness to acknowledge the moderation and sanity of
British working men, his anxiety to distinguish between them and the
hooligan fringe; and at the same time of his distrust of their leaders
and of any organization which in his view savoured of extremism. There
were "bubbly-jocks" in Beales's following, but he was no bubbly-jock, as
Wilkes was no Wilkesite, and in many ways though by different means was
working towards the same end as _Punch_ himself. Beales had no gifts as
a mob-orator. His real strength lay in his knowledge of the law; and it
was on the legal ground that he worsted Lord Derby and Walpole. There
are some who think that modern democracy was born on July 23, 1866. Be
that as it may, the Hyde Park riot was a great landmark in our political
history.

[Sidenote: _The Future of Coal_]

It is pleasant to turn from _Punch's_ not very happy handling of the
Hyde Park incident to his wiser, if fanciful comment on the warnings of
the philosophical alarmists who predicted the speedy exhaustion of our
coal supplies, and asked What, then, would Posterity do for force and
for fuel? _Punch_ suggests another conceivable fear to balance that of
the coal pessimists. If our population continued to increase at the same
rate, not only would the bowels of the land be consumed, but its entire
face be covered up with towns and factories. For his part he feared
neither the one nor the other event:--

    If the coal ever runs out, something equivalent to it will
    doubtless turn up, or else turn down. Somebody will discover a
    cheap way to set the Thames on fire, or to draw below, and store,
    atmospheric electricity. By a system of vertical elevation instead
    of lateral extension, our architecture will be adapted to our area,
    and our cities, no longer expanding, will continue to ascend. The
    higher they rise the less will Posterity be troubled with any
    amount of smoke which it may be unable to consume. The future of
    England will then be as fresh as a daisy, still as familiar a
    flower as ever.

The growth of industrialism was not to be dreaded if it was humanely and
wisely controlled and directed. That is the moral which _Punch_ draws
from the opening of the new docks at Barrow-in-Furness in September,
1867. The occasion was indeed "worth a crowd and a crow":--

    A Barrow that has grown, one may say, from a barrow into a
    coach-and-four in ten years! A Barrow that has swelled almost
    within the memory of the youngest inhabitant from the quiet
    coast-nest of some five score fishermen into the busy, bustling,
    blazing, money-making, money-spending, roaring, tearing, swearing,
    steaming, sweltering seat of twenty thousand iron workers, and the
    crime and culture, the dirt and disease, the hard-working and
    hard-drinking, the death and life, the money and misery they bring
    along with them!! A Barrow out of which they are tipping 600,000
    tons of iron every year!!! A Barrow big enough to hold a
    Monster-Iron-Mining-and-Smelting Company, with two Dukes among its
    directors, to say nothing of Lord knows who, in the way of Lords,
    and Lord knows how many millionaires!!!!

The two Dukes--one of them, Devonshire, a Second Wrangler into the
bargain--were both present, and also the first of living orators, Mr.
Gladstone. But the person who interested _Mr. Punch_ most was the
master-spirit of the great iron company, "one Schneider," and he is not
slow to improve the occasion:--

    He has hitherto been known to fame among public men chiefly as an
    ex-M.P., turned out of his seat at Lancaster for gross and
    shameless bribery. He has seen so much done by energy and money
    that he probably thought the one as legitimate a lever into
    Parliament as the other. But he has been punished for his mistake.
    He has now an opportunity to repair it. His name is the same as
    that of the President of the French Legislative Assembly, the
    energetic, far-sighted M. Schneider, whom _Mr. Punch_ has already
    honoured as the head and heart of the admirably-conducted firm
    which has made the iron manufacturing district of Le Creusot, a
    model as yet to be imitated among the great English industries of
    the same kind....

    And now for _Mr. Punch's_ proposition. Suppose M. Schneider were to
    set himself in real earnest to wipe out the recollection of
    Lancaster by the redemption of Barrow? What if he were to prove
    himself the ditto of M. Schneider of Le Creusot, not in name only
    but in deed, and to make Barrow-in-Furness the Creusot of England,
    in morals, manners, civilization, education, domestic comfort and
    culture, as well as in industry, energy and money-making? Here is a
    work worthy of the noblest ambition, the most determined energy,
    the highest intelligence, and certain of the richest reward--a
    reward not to be gauged by dividends, it is true, but beyond the
    measure of millions. Let there be two Schneiders known in the world
    for their noble conception and perfect discharge of the duties of a
    great captain of industry, and let one of them be an Englishman.

[Sidenote: _Reform Bill of 1867_]

Henry William Schneider, who started the Barrow Steel Works and was for
many years one of the directors, died in 1887. His namesakes of Le
Creusot still continue their dynasty. Early in 1870, the year of the
Franco-Prussian war, _Punch_ again repeats his comparison of Le Creusot
with the greatest and best managed English iron-works to the advantage
of the former, on the basis of statistics which had not been
contradicted by M. Rochefort or any other of M. Schneider's bitterest
enemies.

Divergent contemporary opinions on the Reform Bill of 1867 found vent in
a number of famous phrases. Disraeli, who had guided its passage through
the House, claimed to have "educated his Party"; while Lord Cranborne
(afterwards Lord Salisbury) described the measure as "a political
betrayal which has no parallel in our annals." Lord Derby's
contributions to political phrase-making were threefold. The Bill was a
"great experiment," a "leap in the dark" (commemorated in one of
_Punch's_ most-famous cartoons), and he had "dished the Whigs." Lowe's
advice that we must now set to work "to educate our future masters" was
the weightiest of all. In view of the compromises and manoeuvring by
which the passage of the Bill was secured, there is good warrant for the
verdict of later historians:--

    Even in English politics few great changes have come about with
    less evidence of principle or conviction on the part of those
    mainly concerned in it, with more appearance of mere opportunism
    and concession to the expediencies of the moment. It was difficult
    to be enthusiastic over a Reform Bill framed by a ministerial party
    which did not want reform, under pressure from an opposition which
    did not want the Bill.[4]

[Footnote 4: _The Political History of England_, Vol. xii., by Sidney
Low and Lloyd Sanders, p. 207.]

[Sidenote: _Working Men Candidates_]

_Punch_, whose attitude towards Disraeli on his return to power had
turned from satirical distrust to reluctant admiration of his commanding
ability, welcomed Reform, but his welcome was accompanied by grave
misgivings as to the growing strength of the Trade Union movement, and
throughout 1867 cartoons and comments in prose and verse abound in
condemnation of the intimidation practised at Sheffield by trade union
agents. The report of the Royal Commission appointed in January, 1867,
proved the existence of terrorism, but exculpated forty-eight out of the
sixty trade unions in Sheffield from complicity in outrage, and showed
that it had been denounced by the principal trade union leaders.
Picketing, even when "peaceful," had been pronounced illegal, and trade
unions had no protection against embezzlement by their own officials on
the ground that their rules were in restraint of trade. On the other
hand Lord Elcho's Master and Servant Act had placed the workman on a
level with his employer in regard to breaches of contract, and rendered
the remedy mutual. It cannot be said that the successes of the trade
unions in the legislative field were greeted with enthusiasm by _Punch_.
Nor did he show much sympathy with the efforts to secure direct
representation of Labour in Parliament. Mr. George Odger is
congratulated on retiring from the contest at Chelsea at the end of
1868, in compliance with the decision of the arbitrators to whom he and
his Committee referred the question whether it was better for the
Liberal cause in Chelsea that he or Sir H. Hoare should quit the field.
The arbitrators were Mr. James Stansfeld, Tom Hughes, and Mr. Peter
Taylor. But when the chairman of Mr. Odger's Committee declared that "it
was the old story over again, that working men acted with undue faith in
those they considered they might trust," _Punch_ felt called upon to
address "a serious word to working men." The arbitrators were all men of
the most advanced Liberal principles, the highest character, and the
strongest fellow feeling with working men. Their impartiality was above
suspicion. So _Punch_ proceeds in his most magisterial vein:--

    The fault of working men has been, not the putting "undue faith" in
    friends of this kind, but the not putting faith enough in them; and
    the tone in which the Chairman of Mr. Odger's Committee,
    and--_Punch_ is sorry to see--Mr. Odger himself, comment on the
    decision of Messrs. Stansfeld, Hughes and Taylor, confessing at the
    same time that they are not informed of the grounds of it, is a
    striking illustration of this fault. There is nothing so hard in
    the practical education of working men as the teaching them to
    prefer disagreeable truth to flattering falsehood, and not to turn
    from the friends who have the pluck to tell them such truth to the
    schemers who mislead them by such falsehood. It is this difficulty
    which has wrecked more working men's movements, co-operative,
    educational, self-helping, than any other--the difficulty of
    getting working men to know their true friends from their sham
    ones, and to trust the former, even when their vanity is fretted,
    or their wish or whim of the moment thwarted, for any reason,
    however weighty, or in any cause, however sacred.

If Mr. Odger, as _Punch_ averred, had marred the grace of his withdrawal
by the manner of it, so _Punch_ marred his candour by asperity. Tom
Hughes here decided against Mr. Odger. Little more than a year later he
supported Mr. Odger as the "working-man candidate" for Southwark, and
provoked a vehement protest from _Punch_ against the "mischievous
nonsense" he had talked at an election meeting. This open letter begins
with a handsome acknowledgment of the services of his old friend, the
author of "the truest and manliest book extant on English public-school
life"; and of his pluck and straightforwardness and recognition that
men, "whether gentle or simple, are, on the whole, made of the same
clay, pulled by the same strings, worthy of the same rights, and liable
to the same duties"; of "his courage in telling necessary if unpalatable
and unpopular truths." None the less "the working-man candidate" sticks
in _Punch's_ gizzard.

He had no objection to working men standing for Parliament, but "they
should be very careful in their choice of fighting-ground." At
Maidstone, in 1870, "they chose it as badly as possible":--

    It is true that Mr. Applegarth, the working man's candidate, retired
    before the final struggle, finding--according to his own
    statement--"that he was too late in the field to make headway
    against the popular feeling in Sir John Lubbock's favour!" He had
    better have said, "Finding that he had no business ever to have come
    forward." What right, _Punch_ asks him, had he, or any man who
    wishes to see the best wisdom of England in the House of Commons, in
    the field which Sir John Lubbock had occupied in advance of him? All
    working men who are worth their salt must admit that no claims that
    could be set up on behalf of their order could stand a moment's
    comparison with those of Sir John Lubbock on the support of the best
    and broadest Liberalism. Let them choose constituencies where they
    will have to fight pseudo-Liberalism and genuine Toryism, and
    welcome. But in the name of their cause and ours, don't let them put
    stumbling blocks in the Parliamentary path of such men as Sir John
    Lubbock, or they will only do what they have more than once done
    already--make way for the fox, while the lion and the bear are
    worrying each other.

The underlying assumption that "the best and broadest Liberalism"
sufficed for the needs of the working classes has long since gone by the
board. Here at any rate _Punch_ failed to foresee the inevitable march
in representation summed up in the three stages: Liberal, "Lib.-Lab.,"
Labour. There is, however, a considerable advance on the views expressed
in his letter to Tom Hughes in his welcome to Messrs. Burt and Macdonald
on their election in 1874:--

    Earliest among the early birds, _Punch_ was glad to hail his
    friends, Messrs. Burt and Macdonald, representatives of Underground
    Britain, Members for the Mine, sample black diamonds, "picked
    Wallsends." They have sought and found the fairest audience in the
    world. _Punch_ will take his Davy that any light theirs can throw
    on dark places will be gladly received; that all they have to say
    to the purpose will be attentively--nay, respectfully--listened to,
    and weighed as carefully as was ever corve at pit-bank. And really
    these pioneers of the pick--hewers, we presume, of a way for other
    Working-men Representatives, equally stout and worthy--are about
    the only novelty, as far as _Punch_ can presage, of the new
    Parliament, always except the Parliament itself, with its sudden
    swap of sides and strangely altered balances of Power.

[Sidenote: _Truckling to the Working Classes_]

This friendly greeting, anticipating without misgiving the extension of
Labour representation, must not blind us to the fact that throughout the
period under review _Punch_ was gradually becoming more and more
confirmed in his championship of the middle class as the backbone of the
country, the real power of the nation. The appeal in support of the
funds raised to support the children of Ernest Jones, the Chartist poet,
who died in 1868, is generously worded. But Chartism was long extinct,
and Jones, a man of good family, had quarrelled with most of the other
leaders on his release from gaol in 1850, and his former colleagues had
"freely denied both his disinterestedness and his sincerity." Landor had
pronounced his verses noble, and _Punch_ appealed to both Conservatives
and Liberals on the broad ground that a brave man had died poor.

The well-deserved rebuke administered to "van-demons," "persons whose
only notion of enjoyment consists in getting drunk, and then howling
songs and playing horns as they drive homeward from their
drinking-bout," can be paralleled from the protests repeatedly uttered
in 1920 against the char-à-banc nuisance with its attendant "bellowing
and braying." But a much more combative note is struck in the verses on
the tendency to kow-tow to the working man published in 1872, at a time
when the rise in prices, especially in that of coal, and the hardships
of the middle classes and the small income-tax payer coincided with
unusual prosperity among the working classes and particularly amongst
the miners:--

"WHY SHOULD THE POOR BE FLATTERED?"

_Hamlet_, Act v., Sc. 1.

    "Why should the Poor be flattered?"
        Art foolish, Hamlet, trow?
    All else are torn and tattered,
        None else are flattered now.

    Your Clown, our race accusing,
        Declared our wits astray:
    We beat him at abusing
        Ourselves. Behold our way!

    Our Queen mis-spends her income,
        Her Court's all fashion's slaves,
    The Lords are feeble Ninkum-
        Poops, and the Commons, knaves.

    Our soldiers are no fighters,
        Our sailors cannot sail,
    Our bishops shame their mitres,
        Our merchants cheat and fail.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Our architects are Vandals,
        Unfit to rear a stone;
    Our music-writers Handels
        To no ears but their own.

    Only the so-called Worker,
        The Stalwart Son of Toil,
    Never from that a shirker,
        Never in brawl or broil.

    That sober, saving Being,
        The nation's "heart and core,"
    Him we are all agreeing
        To flatter--and much more.

       *       *       *       *       *

    "Why should the poor be flattered?"
        You pause for a reply--
    But, if our brains are battered,
        Dear Hamlet, don't ask why.

When critics complained of the extravagance of the rich in their
entertainments and house-decoration and found in the newspaper accounts
of this luxury an explanation of industrial discontent and strikes for
higher wages, _Punch_ did not hesitate to fall back on the disputable
argument that the consumption of luxuries involved the profitable
employment of those who produce them:--

    Suppose, instead of flowers and dessert at £200, including peaches
    at a guinea a-piece; suppose, instead of a house decorated by Mr.
    Owen Jones, and a set of aluminium plate, millionaires were to
    spend their money in founding schools and scholarships, for
    instance, and in educating their poor relations' children, and
    sending them to the Universities; even suppose they expended it in
    almshouses, and Peabodying the destitute, the mechanical
    working-classes would have far less cause to be satisfied with them
    than they are now. It may be that there is a wiser and a better use
    for riches than lavish expenditure on the productions of
    market-gardening and decorative art; but the consumption, at any
    rate, benefits producers, and enables employers in those lines of
    business to pay the artisans and labourers the higher wages. So the
    working-classes, at least, need not grumble.

[Illustration: PROSPEROUS JOHN]

The complaints of the income-tax payer, when it stood at 3d. or 4d.,
leave us cold, and envy rather than compassion is excited by the bitter
cry of the consumer who had to pay 30s. or even 36s. a ton for coal or
1s. 3d. for meat. Otherwise there is an extraordinary similarity in the
comments and protests which fill the pages of _Punch_ in the years
1871-1873 to those which have been so painfully familiar since November,
1918. The prosperity and extravagance of the miners is constantly
referred to. They are accused of being overpaid and, in consequence, of
not working steadily. The "vicious circle" is neatly summarized in a
doggerel verse:--

    Strikes follow strikes; the reason why,
    High wages rendered prices high;
    Then Working-Men for wages higher
    Struck, and to still more pay aspire.
    Such aspiration what will crown?
    It is "Excelsior!" upside down.

When Lord Lyttelton, at a harvest festival at Hagley, compared the
conduct of the agricultural labourers with the extravagance of the
workmen in the Black Country, _Punch_, disavowing all criticism of the
Black Country as dangerous, made bold to ask how it was possible for a
Northern pitman to save his means:--

    He has only a house found him, rent-free, all the coals he
    requires, medical attendance and medicine when he or any member of
    his family is ill, and, at the lowest, seven shillings a day. For
    this miserable wage, and for these trumpery advantages, the artisan
    of the pit is expected to do, actually, six hours' work daily. How,
    thus crushed and starved, can he save anything? If a malignant
    aristocrat suggests that many an educated gentleman manages on far
    less, working, moreover, twice as hard, bringing up a family in the
    right way, and even paying for life assurance, _Mr. Punch_ scorns
    to argue with a bloated Dives, who would compare a white-handed
    swell with Nature's nobleman, the hardy son of toil, and the real
    strength and glory of the nation. Heave a coal at the head of the
    insolent cynic.

[Sidenote: _Victims of the Income Tax_]

In 1873 the wages in some collieries had gone up to 10s. or 15s. a
day:--

    To be content with from 10s. to 15s. a day is to be satisfied with,
    say, some £234 a year. If that is to be earned by mining here,
    there can be no inducement for any skilled miner to betake himself
    to gold or diamond diggings. He can live in clover, on enough to
    satisfy all his wants, by raising black diamonds at home. For a
    miner, an income of the above amount is a salary much more adequate
    than £5,000 for a Law Officer of the Crown. The miner has no
    appearances to keep up in a mine. He need not incur any expenses
    but those which are necessary for his personal wants and pleasures,
    including champagne and dog-fighting; which, the former luxury as
    well as the latter amusement, he can manage to afford well enough
    by a judicious economy above-ground, of lodgings, furniture, and
    clothes.

Coals went up to 50s. a ton in London this year and the cry of the
middle classes, of whom _Punch_ was now the great champion, was echoed
with great fervour in an article on a speech by Sir William, then Mr.
Vernon Harcourt:--

    Mr. Vernon Harcourt, in some of his late speeches, has placed
    himself in striking contrast with most of the other leading
    politicians, both Liberal and Conservative, by speaking the truth.
    For example, at the Druids' Dinner the other day, in discussing the
    impost by which the incomes of a part of the people are taxed to
    pay the expenses of the whole, instead of attempting to defend
    confiscation with sophistry, and to stifle complaint with sneers,
    he condemned the false and dishonest apology, alleged by financial
    swindlers' advocates on behalf of the Income-tax, that it weighs
    only on the rich who are well able to pay it, and he maintained
    that, on the contrary, it falls "with the greatest severity on the
    poorest of all the classes of the community--that which, upon
    limited means and small profits, has to keep up a state of
    respectability." The lie which Mr. Vernon Harcourt refuted is one
    of those lies which Statesmen are very apt to tell in talking to
    simpletons; lies coupled with truths, from which the generality of
    people at public meetings have not sense enough to disentangle
    them. It is quite true that the rich are well able to pay the
    Income-tax; but to say that the Income-tax weighs only on them is
    telling a falsehood which transcends common lying. The rich, as a
    rule, can afford to live up to their incomes, and it matters
    nothing to wealthy people whether their incomes are taxed, or
    duties are imposed upon the luxuries on which they expend them. The
    class rightly described by Mr. Harcourt as the poorest of the
    country consists of persons under the necessity of living as much
    within their incomes as possible. They need to make all the
    provision that ever they can against ruin constantly staring them
    in the face. The Income-tax, substituted for indirect taxation,
    wrings from them the savings they ought to put by, and, by way of
    compensation, offers them the advantage of buying cheapened
    superfluities, which, how cheap soever, are too dear for them at
    any price. Thus are their slender incomes in large measure
    confiscated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and amends are made
    them with facilities to squander the rest.

[Illustration: FROM THE COAL DISTRICTS

MY LADY: "I'm afraid I must give up the pine-apple, Mr. Green! Eight
shillings is _really_ too much!"

SUCCESSFUL COLLIER: "Just put 'un up for _me_, then, Master. 'Ere's 'arf
a sovereign; and look 'ere--yer may keep the change if yer'll _only tell
us 'ow to cook 'un_!"]

[Sidenote: _Colliers and Cormorants_]

References to the champagne-habit among the miners abound throughout
this year. A picture shows a miner buying a pine-apple which a lady
could not afford. Their practice of travelling first-class is also
reprobated. But the bitterest explosion of _Punch's_ wrath against the
pampered aristocrats of industry was provoked by a speech in which John
Bright complacently dwelt on "the growth of material prosperity and
comfort in every class." To this _Punch_ vehemently demurred:--

    Clerks of all kinds, Civil servants, fund-holders and annuitants
    with fixed incomes, landowners, doctors, lawyers, and professional
    men in general, is that so? Do you find it so?

    When Mr. Bright said "every class," did he not mean to say, or, at
    least, should he not have said "certain classes"? It is quite true
    that the shoddy class, and the class of great speculators, have
    prospered exceedingly, to as great an increase of their material
    comfort as increasing wealth could procure them. A proportionate
    growth of material comfort and prosperity has obviously been
    experienced by the operatives and mechanics, otherwise called the
    Working Classes--although there are classes who may be said to do
    some little work, other than manual labour, to be sure. Do not
    coal-miners for a fair day's work obtain at least a full two days'
    wages; do they not drink champagne; and have not they and the rest
    of our flesh-and-blood amongst them, drunk us out of the Alabama
    difficulty? They have grown in content too--the Striking Classes.
    They and the other classes that grasp with one hand and squander
    with the other, and go on grasping and squandering, and thereby
    raising prices higher and higher every day, they, all of them,
    indeed are without doubt increasingly prosperous and comfortable,
    but they are not everybody. There are a very great many other
    people besides, who constitute everybody else, and these, so far
    from being more prosperous and comfortable than they once were, can
    now no longer afford the luxuries, or even the necessaries, they
    then could, but have to go without.

The ugly phrase about the Alabama claims was not _Punch's_ own coinage,
but he was not in a mood to mince his words where the miners were
concerned. The charges against overpaid workmen and profiteers have a
strangely familiar ring. And so has the reference, though not under the
now familiar name, to the practice of "Ca' Canny," which, however, had
been in occasional use for many years before _Punch_ suggested, in 1874,
that it might be met by reprisals:--


COLLIERS AND CORMORANTS

    The _Sheffield Daily Telegraph_ informs consumers, already
    subjected by producers to excessive extortion, that at
    Motherwell:--

    "At a mass meeting of Scotch miners on Thursday, 3,000 colliers
    resolved to work only four days per week, and only eight hours per
    day, in order to reduce the output, and to keep up prices."

    But suppose the butchers and poulterers combined against them, as
    they combine against the public, what then? And could not
    the vintners agree to raise "these rapacious colliers' Champagne to
    some four or five pounds a bottle? Perhaps they will try.

Already Lord Shaftesbury had spoken plainly on the results of that
"enormous increase of wages which had lately taken place in nearly every
class of working men," even going to the length of endorsing the view
that high wages, when unaccompanied by self-control, were the curse of
the working classes:--

    Of course, where economy and prudence were practised the condition
    of the Working Man should be improved by higher wages; but there
    was recklessness and improvidence. The sudden increase of money had
    been productive of the greatest possible mischief, and so long as
    these habits continued he could not but think that an increase of
    wages was a positive infliction to the Working Man, his wife, and
    his children.

This bold statement prompted _Punch_ to reduce the argument to an
absurdity, or something near it, by suggesting that the true way of
planting the spirit of self-control in the minds of the people would be
simply to lower their wages to the requisite standard. Simultaneously he
vindicates the character of the working classes for thrift and sobriety
in the following ironical eulogium:--

    The Working Classes, it is surely not too much to say, spend every
    little increase of wages they obtain by their harmless strikes
    chiefly in the education of their children, and in the purchase of
    the appliances needful to make home happy. If they are at all
    extravagant is it not in books, and in the dress which some of them
    are a little too apt to lavish on their wives? For the vast
    improvement evident in their habits we have to thank not only the
    Licensing Act, but also the Trades' Unions Act; and moreover the
    Conservative Reform Bill, which has rendered them, as Mr. Lowe
    said, our masters--if not their own.

[Illustration: ONE-HANDED JUSTICE

FIRST RUFFIAN: "Wot was I hup for, and wot 'ave I got? Well, I floor'd a
woman and took 'er watch, and I've got two years and a floggin'."

SECOND RUFFIAN: "Ha! _I_ flung a woman out o' the top floor winder; an'
I've on'y got three months!"

FIRST RUFFIAN: "Ah, but then _she was yer wife_!"]

[Sidenote: _Punch and Capital Punishment_]

The reference to working men's wives is especially ironical, for _Punch_
was at this time engaged in a vigorous campaign of protest against the
very lenient sentences passed on men for brutal assaults on their wives.
References to this subject abound in these years in prose and verse and
cartoons, culminating in the year 1874. He strongly supported resort to
flogging in such cases. We have already noticed the modification, indeed
the practical abandonment, of his old hostility to capital punishment.
The cause of this conversion is curious. It is hardly too much to say
that it was largely the result of a remarkable speech made by John
Stuart Mill--a true humanitarian if ever there was one--on the measure
introduced in April, 1868, to make executions private. _Punch_, though
he often differed from Mill, had the greatest respect for his fearless
independence and integrity, and was evidently profoundly impressed by
Mill's speech[5] in reply to Mr. Charles Gilpin (the Member for
Northampton), who had argued in favour of the abolition of capital
punishment, and we find the following admirable summary of it in his
"Essence of Parliament":--

    The speech of the night was that of Mr. Mill, who approved of many
    of the labours of the "philanthropists," but said that they ought
    to know when to stop. To deprive a criminal of the life of which he
    had proved himself unworthy--solemnly to blot him out from the
    fellowship of mankind, and from the catalogue of the living--was
    the most appropriate and the most impressive mode in which society
    could deal with so great a crime as murder. Imprisonment would be
    far more cruel, and less efficacious. None could say that this
    punishment had failed, for none could say who had been deterred,
    and how many would not have been murderers but for the awful idea
    of the gallows. Do not bring about an enervation, an effeminacy in
    the mind of the nation; for it is that to be more shocked by taking
    a man's life than by taking all that makes life valuable. Is death
    the greatest of all earthly ills? A manly education teaches us the
    contrary; if an evil at all, it is one not high in the list of
    evils. Respect the capacity of suffering, not of merely existing.
    It is not human life only, not human life as such, but human
    feelings, that should be held sacred. Moreover, taking life for
    murder no more implies want of respect for life than fining a
    criminal shows want of respect for property. In countries where
    execution is morbidly disliked there is no abhorrence of the
    assassin. Mr. Mill added that we had been in danger of reducing all
    our punishments to nothing; and, though that disposition had
    stopped, our penalties[6] for brutal crimes (for which he earnestly
    recommended the Scourge) were ridiculously light, and ought to be
    strengthened.

[Footnote 5: It is strange that in the full account of Mill's
Parliamentary activities given by Sir Leslie Stephen in his article on
Mill in the D.N.B. no mention is made of this speech. Nor can I find any
reference to it in Bain's _Reminiscences_.]

[Footnote 6: Mill's actual words were "flogging--a most objectionable
punishment in ordinary cases, but a particularly appropriate one for
crimes of brutality, especially crimes against women." (Hansard, 3rd
series, Vol. cxci., p. 1,054.)]

[Sidenote: _The Organ Grinder Nuisance._]

It will be noted that Mill here met the argument which _Punch_ had
advanced in earlier years as to the relative severity of long
imprisonment and capital punishment, and answered it on the humanitarian
ground that the former was more cruel as well as less efficacious. Mill,
as we notice elsewhere, had more than anyone else shaken _Punch's_
hostility to woman suffrage, but the effect of his speech on capital
punishment was even greater. It must not be forgotten, however, that
Mill had been in the forefront of the movement for securing the
prosecution of General Eyre for his drastic suppression of the riots in
Jamaica. _Punch_ supported General Eyre throughout, and it may well have
been that on the question of capital punishment he was influenced by the
principle _fas est et ab hoste doceri_, even though the opponent was
undermining his own position. On more general grounds one can well
understand that _Punch_, as an independent observer and thinker, would
admire and be impressed by the candour and detachment from party ties
which marked Mill's political career.

The change in _Punch's_ views on the claims of Labour, especially
organized labour, has already been sufficiently illustrated. But it did
not prevent his espousing the cause of workers where the conditions were
bad, the hours long and the pay inadequate. _Punch's_ protracted
campaign against the organ grinders was no doubt to a considerable
extent due to Leech's sensitive nerves, and to sympathy with
brain-workers such as Babbage, the mathematician, who declared that "one
quarter of his entire working power had been destroyed by audible
nuisances," but his support of Mr. Bass's Bill in 1864 was largely based
on the fact that the business was conducted by undesirable aliens, and
that the Italian _padrone_ was an employer of sweated labour. In 1871
there is a cartoon satirizing the strong measures taken by the police
against a demonstration of child match-makers at a time when adult
agitators were allowed to preach Revolution and Communism in Hyde Park,
and in the same year and month, when a post-mistress was convicted of
theft and forgery, the evil is traced to the temptation to which
underpaid officials were subjected. _Punch_ had already predicted that
in any national emergency the patriotism of the mercantile marine could
be implicitly relied on, a prophecy splendidly realized in the Great
War, and in 1873 he lent a vigorous helping hand to Samuel Plimsoll in
his campaign against the "Coffin-Ships":--

    Let horrified shipowners never so oft
      His charges, indignant, fling back,
    I call him the cherub who sits up aloft
      To keep watch for the life of Poor Jack!

[Illustration: THE COFFIN-SHIPS

POLLY: "Oh, dear Jack! I can't help crying, but I'm so happy to think
you're not going in one of those _dreadful ships_!"

JACK: "What, Davy Jones's decoy ducks! No, no, lass--never more. Thanks
to our friend Master Plimsoll, God bless him!"]

Simultaneously _Punch_ printed a cartoon assuming that "Jack" would
never again be sent to sea in one of "Davy Jones's decoy ducks." This
was rather premature, as Plimsoll's campaign to secure the compulsory
load-line which began in 1870, and in which he showed more zeal than
discretion, did not lead to legislation until 1876. But with all his
faults Plimsoll earned his title of "The Sailor's Friend" and justified
_Punch's_ salutation.




THE CHURCHES


The annals of Church and State history were rich in events of prime
importance during the years 1857-1874. When one reflects that this short
period witnessed the removal of Jewish disabilities, the publication of
_Essays and Reviews_, the much-canvassed appointments of Temple and
Stanley, the resounding controversies which arose over Colenso and
Jowett, the Mackonochie and Purchas trials, and the Disestablishment of
the Irish Church, it will be seen that _Punch_, in view of the keen
interest he had taken from the very first in the relations of Church and
State and Society, found an almost embarrassing wealth of material for
comment and criticism. On all these subjects he had a good deal to say,
and he said it with very much the same mixture of intolerance and common
sense, of rationalism and reverence which marked his utterances in
earlier years. He professed to represent the majority of English
Protestants: he was avowedly Erastian in his maintenance of the
supremacy of the Law Courts in all cases; he was the unrelenting enemy
of Extreme Ritual, the Confessional, and any attempts to revive
monasticism; and on occasion he was ready to bang the "No Popery" drum
as loudly as ever.

When Béranger died in 1857, his burial prompted a tribute in verse which
begins with the lines:--

    Ah Béranger, you brave old singer,
      Of all the things you hated worst,
    That felt your lash's lustiest stinger
      Tyrant and Jesuit were first.

In _Punch's_ view there was nothing to choose between the two. But his
hostility was not confined to one Order: it embraced Vaticanism in the
widest sense, and there were many moments when he anticipated, and acted
on, Gambetta's phrase, "Le cléricalisme, c'est l'ennemi." Thus, to take
one instance, the demonstration of Irish Roman Catholics at Blackheath
at the close of 1862 moved him to fury. It was the time of the French
occupation of Rome, and the spectacle of these "Irish Yahoos" hurrooing
for the Pope and groaning for Garibaldi was altogether too much for
_Punch_. He would have quenched their zeal for the "temporal absolutism"
of the Pope with water from a fire-engine, and he described the
demonstrators as "prepared to shed the last drop of their blood if the
perpetual enslavement of the Romans should require that precious
sacrifice." The French, by their intervention, were only "propping by
force the rule of superstition." This was just after Garibaldi had been
wounded at Aspromonte, and when the bullet was removed _Punch_ said that
this, at any rate, was a true relic. Rome--Papal Rome--was to him the
Scarlet Lady, a red rag to John Bull.

As a set-off to this special hostility to the Roman Communion, it is
only fair to admit that other Churches and Sectarianism generally came
in for a great deal of shrewd and, at times, bitter criticism. _Punch_
was by no means an orthodox Churchman. Kingsley and Maurice and Stanley
were his heroes. He stood for comprehension and toleration, and fair
play for the "Higher Criticism." He had far more sympathy with underpaid
curates than opulent bishops--indeed, he had little respect for the
episcopal bench, if we except Temple and Tait.

The Sabbatarianism of Evangelicals, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists
generally, continued to excite him to indignation or derision--as when
in 1858 Sunday walking was tabooed by some Scots fanatics, who also
sought to stop all Sunday sailings, or when early in 1861 a controversy
arose in Scotland as to whether the sale of milk was permissible on that
day.[7]

[Footnote 7: Within our own times the milking of cows on Sunday was
objected to by Scottish Sabbatarians.]

In 1868 the Lord's Day Observance Society addressed a memorial to the
Brighton Railway Company against Sunday trains, which ended as
follows:--

    "Lastly, as recognizing the Christian principle of a particular
    Providence, we cannot conceal from ourselves the conviction of the
    signal instances of the Divine displeasure in two accidents on the
    Sabbath Day, one of which in the Clayton Tunnel ended in the
    hurrying of several lives in a moment of time into eternity and
    which, in a financial point of view, resulted in a loss to the
    proprietary of not less than £50,000."

[Illustration: THE BROMPTON AREA-SNEAK]

_Punch_ acidly comments on the authors of this "pretty specimen of
snuffle," that they evidently know no more about the Grand Prix than
they do about the Tower of Siloam.

The notion that Sunday should be a day of gloom and that religion should
be divorced from cheerfulness found no support in _Punch_. A few years
later, that is in 1871, he records with amazement the utterance of a
Scottish minister who, at a children's _soirée_ held at Kincardine,
forbade them to applaud, and told them "there would be nothing of that
kind, and no laughter in Heaven." In the same year, under the heading of
"Sabbatarian Progress," we read:--

    The Sunday Closing Bill's referred
      To a select committee,
    We view concession to absurd
      Fanaticism with pity.

It was the same year that _Punch_ got into hot water over a picture of
Keene's. In it an old lady remarks to a guest: "They're all alike, my
dear. There's our Susan (it's true she's a Dissenter), but I've allowed
her to go to Chapel three times every Sunday since she has lived with
me, and I assure you she doesn't cook a bit better than she did the
first day!!" The Young Men's Christian Association at Dover, in
consequence of this flippancy, decided that they would not take in
_Punch_ as being a paper hostile to religion. _Punch_ displayed a ribald
impenitence, making great play with the speeches delivered by the Mayor,
Mr. Knocker, and a Mr. Mowll, and the hostile decree was rescinded
shortly afterwards.

[Sidenote: _Glaring Contrasts in the Church_]

When the scandal of the sale by public auction of pews in fashionable
churches came up in 1858 it was used as a stick with which to beat
Puseyism. But when the Bishop of Exeter, on April 23, made an eloquent
appeal in connexion with the want of church accommodation for the
people, denounced the pew system as illegal, and declared that to seat
only fifty-eight per cent. of the inhabitants of London 670,000 sittings
would be required, _Punch_, forgetting his ancient feud with "Henry of
Exeter," congratulated him on these gleams of real liberality. But what
chiefly concerned _Punch_ as a Church Reformer were the glaring
contrasts which existed in the "richest and poorest Church in the
world." He was disgusted at the "snobbery" of the archbishops in kindly
sanctioning a Registry for Curates, like a Registry for Servants:--

      ... It would appear from these figures [quoted from _The Times_],
    that Curates are expected to perform the cure of souls about as
    cheaply as the salters work the cure of herrings. Well, _Floreat
    Ecclesia_! and Heaven bless the Bishops! Of course, it's all just
    as it should be, or the Registry of Church Servants would never
    have been sanctioned. The Bishops have full knowledge of the
    present scale of wages at which Curates may be hired, and by
    sanctioning the registry they, of course, approve the scale. So,
    _Floreat Ecclesia_! and Heaven bless the Bishops! The Curates are
    the men-of-all-work in the Church, and receive as recompense a
    maid-of-all-work's wages. Proportionally, their pay is really not
    much more: for they have to live like gentlemen, which kitchen
    servants have not.

[Illustration: A HOME THRUST

"Ah, Bishop, what a heavenly sermon that was of yours last Sunday, about
worldliness and the vanities of the flesh!--it nearly made me cry! And I
say, Bishop, _how hard it hit you and me_!!!"]

When the question of revising and shortening Church Services was
discussed in the same year, _Punch_ suggested as an alternative the
discontinuance of all sermons except on special occasions. But the most
pointed of his criticisms throughout this period are directed against
Ritualism and in particular the use of the Confessional. High Anglican
Ritualism was to him the Chambermaid of the Vatican. As for the
Confessional, it was "a dangerous and disgusting practice."

[Sidenote: Father Ignatius]

In the autumn of 1858 _Punch_ printed a cartoon on "Soapy Sam's"
dangerous flirtation with the Scarlet Lady, accompanied by a letter
advocating more drastic treatment of those who practised the
Confessional, and later on in the year Tait, then Bishop of London, is
applauded for his intention to deal faithfully with Ritualists and
credited with saying: "You must not bring your toys to Church."
_Punch's_ attacks on the Ritualists exhibit a steady crescendo in
freedom and even brutality through the 'sixties, and, admitting the
sincerity of his dislike, little excuse can be found for the publication
of such tasteless pictures as that, for example, of the sentimental
young lady who observes to her sister, _à propos_ of a sandalled curate,
that "it is no use working slippers for him, and mother says he doesn't
wear braces." Throughout the years 1864 and 1865 the vagaries of
Brother, or Father Ignatius (the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne) are held up
to unqualified contempt. But this "Histrio Anglicanus," as _Punch_
called him, invited ridicule by his extravagances and those of his troop
of mimic monks. The point of _Punch's_ attack was that they were not
real members of a monastic order, but mountebanks who played at being
Romanists and occasionally imposed on Roman Catholics by their "profane
tomfoolery." Father Ignatius, moreover, was doubly obnoxious to _Punch_,
for he was not only a mock monk, but an extreme obscurantist who
fulminated against the Higher Criticism and all liberal theologians. No
quarter was therefore given to him in verse or prose. He is treated in
"Spoiling the Game" as a dangerous lunatic:--

    Brother Ignatius wears a monk's gown
      (A strait waistcoat were suitable wear),
    Brother Ignatius shaveth his crown--
      'Twould be well were his whole head shaved bare.

[Illustration: HEIGHT OF FASHION

ARDENT RITUALIST: "Oh, Athanasius, it's charmingly becoming!"]

At this time Father Ignatius was established in Norwich; it was in after
years that he moved to Llanthony Abbey in the Black Mountains, a most
appropriate choice of residence; and the campaign of contempt reached a
ribald climax in the issue of July 15, 1865, which contained "A Modern
Gregorian Tone: a Chaunt pointed according to the Use of Norwich." This
Chaunt, which was founded on an actual dissension amongst the
brotherhood, gives an extremely diverting account of the mutiny provoked
by the rigorous dietary imposed by the Superior--with dispensations in
his own favour. It is "funny without being vulgar." But the prose
article on the next page, "Ignatius and his Monkeys," deviates into
scurrility at the outset:--

    It is not true that Brother Ignatius and the monks, his associates,
    have removed from their monastery at Norwich to the Zoological
    Gardens, Regent's Park, and there taken up their abode in the
    Monkey House.

Where _Punch_ showed a want of justice as well as of perspective was in
treating all or nearly all Ritualists as if they were on the same level
with Father Ignatius. In 1869, when Mr. Mackonochie maintained the claim
of "Church Courts for Church Causes," _Punch_ was not content with
declaring that parsons were unfit to do legal justice; he challenged
them to declare whether they were prepared to emulate the example and
martyrdom of Becket; he bade them get their heads shaved or betake
themselves to Rome. The "Pastoral to Mr. Mackonochie and Co." shows a
slightly more conciliatory spirit, and admits that they were gentlemen
and scholars, and did a great deal of practical good and hard work among
the poor. None the less _Punch_ charges them with playing a game--"a
game dangerous to your own morality and that of your party-spirited
followers, who almost believe in your infallibility." Hence _Punch's_
final advice: "If you cannot become wholly Roman or wholly Greek, _set
up for yourselves_, but do not remain the ecclesiastical mermen you are
at present."

The Purchas case was treated lightly at first in the lines on "The Dean
and the Parson":--

DEAN OF RIPON TO PARSON PURCHAS

    DEAN (Sings)--

        The Judges have spoken. Now don't be irascible:
        Off with your Tunicle, Stole, Alb and Chasuble.

    PARSON P. (Sings)--

        That's true, Mr. Dean, but they also declare
        That a cope in Cathedrals all clergy must wear
        On high days and Sundays--

    DEAN (Sings _fortissimo_)--

        What me wear a cope!
        On Sunday or Anyday
        Go to the ---- Pope. (Exeunt in opposite directions.)

[Sidenote: _A Ritualist A B C_]

But _Punch_ was seriously annoyed by the report of a meeting of
Ritualists at which it was unanimously resolved to disobey the judgment
of the Privy Council; and made no secret of his satisfaction when the
Archbishop of Canterbury "turned down" the protest of 5,000 Anglicans
headed by Pusey. A little earlier he had published an A B C for youthful
Anglicans, showing a considerable knowledge of, but absolutely no
respect for vestments. It may suffice to quote two entries:--

    T is the Thurible, whose very smell
    Incenses the people and makes them rebel.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Y is the Yeoman who now never enters
    His old Parish Church, and has joined the Dissenters.

These jocularities, though not delicate, may pass. The worst examples of
_Punch's_ controversial zeal were prompted by the Confessional; and the
worst of all is the set of verses headed, "A good sound Confession,"
describing how a priest was soundly horsewhipped and kicked downstairs
by an irate husband who returned home to find his wife on her knees
before her Confessor. The priest, be it added, unctuously professes to
have enjoyed his flagellation as an exquisite mortification.

It is pleasant to turn from these exhibitions of virulent if honest
antipathy to the treatment of those controversies in which freedom of
thought was involved. _Punch's_ earlier verses on _Essays and Reviews_,
published in 1861, are more distinguished for their wisdom than their
elegance of versification:--

A WORD OF ADVICE TO THE BISHOPS

    Denounce Essayists and Reviewers,
      Hang, quarter, gag them or shoot them--
    Excellent plans--provided that
      You first of all refute them.

    By all means let the Hangman burn
      Their awful book to ashes,
    But don't expect to settle thus
      Their heterodox hashes.

    Some heresies are so ingrained
      E'en burning won't remove them,
    A shorter and an easier way,
      You'll find it--to disprove them.

    Be this, right reverends, your revenge,
      For souls the best of cures,
    Essay Essayists to upset
      And to review Reviewers.

The long and ignoble campaign, as a result of which Jowett was for ten
years deprived of the emoluments of his office as Regius Professor of
Greek at Oxford, roused _Punch_ in 1863 to a satiric and imaginary
account of the proceedings in the "Small Debts and Heresies Court at
Oxford."

Jowett, it need hardly be explained, was doubly obnoxious to the
heresy-hunters. He had long been suspect for the liberality of his
religious opinions; he had also contributed to _Essays and Reviews_:--

DE HAERETICO COMBURENDO

    A little book[8] Professor Jowett made,
    And argued not as one of truth afraid;
    But Oxford Dons alike fear truth and Jowett,
    And their proceedings not a little show it.

_Punch_ goes on to give utterance to the wishes of the obscurantists:--

    Oh for a holocaust of heretics
    With Jowett in one common van to mix,
    For leave to burn, hang, quarter, disembowel,
    Maurice and Williams, Temple, Wilson, Powell!

    To teach admiring minds those Acts who follow
    That Oxford toleration's wide of swallow,
    As wide as from Geneva to Maynooth,
    But one thing it won't tolerate--the truth!

[Footnote 8: This probably refers to his work on the Epistles of St.
Paul (1855).]

[Sidenote: _Jowett and Colenso_]

_Punch_ returned to the charge just a year later, at the time of the
vote in Convocation on the question of Jowett's salary:--

IN RE JOWETT

    Heresy's seed is rank! Shall Jowett sow it?
    Tell me not, sciolists, Greek's not theology:
    As if there's not a heterodox philology
    That can be wrapped up cunningly in articles,
    Impregnate accents, propositions, particles,
    Poisoning texts as strychnine poisons wheat.
    The silly crows, no doubt, scoff at alarming;
    "What's toxicology to do with farming?"
    And peck, and peck and drop dead as they eat.
    E'en so Greek roots poisoned may be by Jowett,
            And who's to know it.

When the proposed statute to give Jowett a decent remuneration for his
services was rejected, _Punch_ suggested that the Crown might make
suitable amends for their persecution of the Regius Professor by making
him a Bishop (March 26, 1864). The question of the salary was
satisfactorily settled in 1865. The suggestion of the Bishopric was well
meant rather than wise: a far more suitable sphere of activity and
influence awaited him as Master of Balliol (1879-1893).

The famous case of Bishop Colenso, which synchronized with the Oxford
heresy-hunt of Jowe

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