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.

[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.

[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.

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_]

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!

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Volunteers_]

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.

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.

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.

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!

[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.

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.

[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.

[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?

[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."

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[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!

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."

_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.

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.

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 Jowett and other contributors to _Essays and Reviews_, is dealt with very much in the same spirit. By way of introducing the subject to a generation who do not know Colenso as an arithmetician and take for granted the method of applying scientific criticism to scripture history, which he was the first English Bishop to adopt, it may be as well to state that while Bishop of Natal he had incurred the displeasure of his metropolitan, Dr. Gray, the Bishop of Cape Town, by the publication of his critical studies of the Pentateuch. Dr. Gray claimed the right to try and depose Colenso for heresy, and did so. Colenso protested against Gray's jurisdiction and appealed to the Crown, with the result that the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council pronounced the whole of the proceedings null and void. The episode created a stir by the side of which the Kikuyu controversy is reduced to insignificance. Colenso's searching historical criticisms did not merely alarm orthodox theologians; they estranged his friend, the broad-minded F. D. Maurice. _Punch_ was with Colenso in his refusal to acquiesce in Dr. Gray's claim to override the secular courts; he respected Colenso's fearless courage and honesty; but for the rest he declined to enter into the theological issues involved and hovered on the outskirts of the dispute:--

COLENSO AND CONVOCATION

Truth is great; must prevail; Reason, Parsons, don't rail; You will hinder, not help, her defence so. But confute the man's sums; You may then snap your thumbs And make faces at Bishop Colenso.

Much neater and better, however, is the summary of the correspondence between the Bishop and the Archbishop of Canterbury given three weeks later:--

THE NATAL CORRESPONDENCE

I

My dear Colenso, With regret, We hierarchs, in conclave met, Beg you, you most disturbing writer, To take off your colonial mitre. This course we press upon you strongly: Believe me, Yours most truly, LONGLEY. Lambeth.

II

My dear Archbishop, To resign That Zulu diocese of mine, And own myself a heathen dark Because I've doubts of Noah's Ark, And feel it right to tell all men so, Is _not_ the course for Yours, COLENSO.

Kensington.

[Sidenote: _Dean Stanley and Père Hyacinthe_]

Stanley was appointed to the Deanery of Westminster in 1863, and the lamentations of the _Record_, the organ of ultra-orthodox Evangelicalism, gave _Punch_ his opportunity:--

That the wisdom and justice of the appointment of Canon Stanley to the Deanery of Westminster might be clear to everybody, the _Record_ gives its certificate that such appointment is "a melancholy fact." Disapprobation by the _Record_ having been thus signified, of course every sensible person must now be convinced that the Dean is the right man in the right place.

Comments of this sort add to the liveliness of newspaper controversy, but they do not conduce to the popularity of those who indulge in them. But at any rate they are an improvement on _Punch's_ references to the "viperine expectorations" of the editor of the _Tablet_ in earlier years.

The welcome extended to Père Hyacinthe in 1869 showed that _Punch_ was not restricted in his sympathies to Protestant heretics only. But we fear that his welcome was not entirely disinterested. In his verses on "Hyacinthus Redivivus," _Punch_ attacks Pius IX for favouring Père Hyacinthe as long as he was a winning card, and then rending him as a heretic. The lines are friendly, but reading between them one can detect a warning to M. Loyson to shun the dangers that beset the fashionable preacher in New York, whither he was then bound. We cannot resist the feeling that _Punch_ was more pleased by the Pope's embarrassment in dealing with this modernist than anxious to see Romanism reformed from within.

In the high affairs of Church and State the year 1868 was a great landmark. After a long debate Gladstone's Resolutions on Irish Disestablishment were carried against the Government on April 5. The discussions were followed closely in _Punch's_ "Essence of Parliament," and two interesting points are brought out. Disraeli maintained that the House had no mandate, as we now say, to deal with the Irish Church. They ought not to be asked at eight days' notice to repeal the Union. On the other hand, Gladstone argued that it would be ultra-democratic, if not anarchic, to say that Parliament could not act without appeal to the constituencies. The Government were beaten by 328 votes to 272, but remained in office till the autumn, when they appealed to the country. By the return of a Liberal majority Gladstone was left free to introduce the first instalment of his scheme for pacifying Ireland. This view is clearly set forth in _Punch's_ doggerel stanzas headed, "Out and In":--

Gone is Dizzy, From the busy Cares of State repose he can. In comes Gladdy Who of Paddy Means to make a loyal man.

_Punch_ acquiesced in the measure, but showed some anxiety lest it should be interpreted as a concession to Fenian intimidation. His cartoon, which bore the inscription "Justice to Ireland," shows the figure of Justice blindfolded, with sword and scales, enthroned in the background. In front and at her feet Gladstone, laying the Irish Church on a flaming altar, says: "This is a sacrifice to Justice, not to Papists or Assassins. And if they----" Turning their backs on him are a sulky-looking priest and a Fenian desperado levelling a gun. The Bill for Disestablishing and Disendowing the Irish Church was introduced by Gladstone on March 1, 1869. A month later _Punch_ published another cartoon entitled, "Disendowment and Disarmament." Here a Fenian says to a priest: "Be jabers, your Riv'rence, it's spoilin' our thrade they are entirely"; and his Riv'rence replies: "Thrue for you, me boy." During the course of the debates the "Essence of Parliament" contains an entry with an unpleasantly familiar ring:--

_Thursday_ (_April 29_). Another and another Irish murder. The desire of Members to know that the Government is doing something cannot be blamed. The Irish Secretary stated that the Executive would proceed with the utmost vigour, but deprecated the entering into details. There is a Ruffian called the Mayor of Cork, who has presided at a dinner to two of the released Fenian convicts, and who eulogized O'Farrell, who wounded the Duke of Edinburgh. Mr. Gladstone said that the fellow's language could not be too severely condemned.

John Bright, who had joined the administration as President of the Board of Trade, donned a court uniform and (if _Punch_ is to be believed) actually danced a quadrille at a Court Ball with the Princess of Wales as partner, is applauded for his eloquence in the House and rebuked for his unbridled vehemence outside it. Ministers mustn't bully, but think of their colleagues. They must, in short, wear a muzzle, and if Bright could not bear to wear one, he certainly had no right, _Punch_ argued, to be where he was. The debates in the Commons were fiery and protracted, and those who regarded the measure as one of confiscation secured important concessions, but the battle was really joined in the Upper House. Lord Derby maintained a _non possumus_ attitude, but the eloquence of Magee (then Bishop of Peterborough) and the arguments of Cairns did not avail to prevent thirty-six Conservative Peers from voting with the Government. But, even so, the Lords' amendments threatened a constitutional crisis, only averted by the compromise arrived at by Granville and Cairns in July, 1869. The Bill became law and was put into operation on January 1, 1871. That _Punch_ entertained misgivings as to its effect in encouraging intimidation may be gathered from his cartoon, "How not to do it," in which "Pat" threatens Britannia with unspeakable things if she does not release those noble patriots, the Fenian prisoners.

[Sidenote: "_Mr. Disraeli's Religion_"]

The prevalence of religious cant and snobbery and sensationalism is frequently chastised in the 'sixties and 'seventies. In the spring of 1866 _Punch_ copies an advertisement in which a young man wished "to find a home with a pious family, where his Christian example would be considered sufficient remuneration for his board and lodging." And in January, 1870, he pilloried an even more glaring example of complacent and well-connected religiosity: "A Gentleman, born and bred, kinsman of an Earl ... will preach Christ." The infection of the pulpit by sensation is deplored in 1867 _à propos_ of an announcement in the _Islington Gazette_:--

"Caledonian Road Chapel.--Next Sunday Sermons will be preached, afternoon, by Mr. Geo. B. Clarke, a Black Brother, from Jamaica, Son-in-law of the late excellent Paul Bogle. Evening, by Mr. Henry Varley the Butcher, from Notting Hill, whose 'words sink, like flame-tipped darts, into the souls of his hearers.'"

It is easy to make too much of isolated instances of self-conscious and self-advertising rectitude. There is far greater justification for the animated protest which _Punch_ registered against the attempts made to discredit Disraeli at the time of his first Premiership on the score of his religion or irreligion. Disraeli had to some extent anticipated this criticism when in his first speech as Premier, on March 5, 1868, he said that he knew that in his position there were personal and peculiar reasons which would aggravate the burden and augment the difficulties. On this _Punch_ made the following comment:--

People can interpret these words as they please. Those who give them a significance connected with birth, and who have intelligence enough to take a large view of pedigree, may note that they were uttered by a man descended from one of the Hebrew families expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, and who settled in Venice as merchants.

The campaign of curiosity met with no encouragement from _Punch_, who returned to the subject a few weeks later under the heading, "The Modern Inquisition":--

Perhaps the Premier, who has now got to make a Bishop of Hereford, will write one more letter and satisfy the British Booby on the subject of "Mr. Disraeli's Religion," which appears to afflict divers. Scarcely a day passes but some new conjectural impertinence, or some particularly unnecessary information is tossed out. Mr. Disraeli knows that _Punch_ has not refrained from a great lot of good-natured allusions to the nationality of which the former is so justly proud; and it is possible that we may have many another cartoon of which he will be the smiling or scowling hero. But we protest--and we are as good a Protestant as Mr. Hardy--against sneaking into a gentleman's study, and taking notes as to whether Prayer Book, Missal, Watts's Hymns, Koran, or Shaster, be most thumbed, and publishing inferences. We do not see whose business it was to announce that Mr. Disraeli had no particular religion until he was five, and that he was then taken by Samuel Rogers to Hackney Church, especially as we believe the latter statement to be false, Mr. Rogers and his father having been regular attendants at the Unitarian Chapel at Hackney, of which the celebrated Dr. Price was, in older days, Minister. Nor do we see why the pastor of Hughenden should gratify vulgar curiosity by proclaiming that the Premier has been a regular Church-goer for seventeen years, and was a Communicant at Easter. Is this England or America? We do not habitually admire French legislation, but the late edict against ransacking Private Life is not without its merits. Somebody will be asking about our religion next, and will need all his own to bear the consequences.

In earlier years _Punch_, as we know, had overlooked Lord Shaftesbury's great services as a practical philanthropist in view of his Sabbatarianism. But he had learned to dissociate Lord Shaftesbury from the "snuffling sect" of Puritan killjoys, and in 1868 indulges in a eulogy of his Protestant zeal against Popery and Ritualism. The ballad on the insurrection in Spain, in the early winter of that year, shows no abatement of _Punch's_ distrust of Romanism. The end of the Temporal Power in 1870 was welcomed as the logical, inevitable, and desirable consummation of Italian unity: it made Italy, not the Vatican, mistress of Rome, and it was in keeping with the consistent policy of the paper that the Pope's pretensions as a peace-maker in 1871 should be roughly disputed. England, it is claimed, was the true pacificator of Europe, and Professor (afterwards Sir John) Seeley's observations in "How to keep the Peace" suggest the possibility of a League of Nations.

The end of this period was marked by the passing of a great divine, a famous bishop and the greatest of missionaries. In the memorial verses printed on April 13, 1872, _Punch_ recognized the true saintliness, the love of truth, the nobly righteous indignation of F. D. Maurice:--

The life of love he lived, the truth he spoke, The seeds of good he sowed on earth remain. In many brave hearts, eased from Evil's yoke, The fruitful soul of Maurice lives again.

Incidentally it is noted that Maurice never received any preferment, bishopric, canonry, or deanery.

[Sidenote: _Wilberforce and Livingstone_]

The lines given below on Wilberforce, who is coupled with Lord Westbury, are largely inspired by the _de mortuis_ note. The writer begins by recording the worst that had been said of both--the slyness of the sleek priest, the sneers and scorn and mincing tones of the bitter lawyer. But now we know better, and recognize that the dove was blended with the serpent in both:--

And so, Life's judgment set to right by Death's, Lay busy Bishop and keen Judge to rest; And, by their coffins, think with bated breaths, How good the worst of us, how bad the best.

Writing of Livingstone, always one of his heroes, _Punch_ does not agree with the view that his was a wasted life, or that a greater work of reclamation was to be done at home, and applauds the unselfishness, fearlessness, and vision of one who died in sight of evening rest and honours fairly won:--

By their own scale great souls gauge things and men; Their ways and weights are not our weights and ways; Only their vision goes beyond our ken, Reaching to larger lights--diviner days.

It was in this larger vision that _Punch_ found the Church of England wanting, and when the first Pan-Anglican Synod met in 1867, he took as the text of his cartoon the acid comment of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ just quoted.

The question of Public Worship Regulation was already in the air, though it did not lead to legislation until the return of the Conservatives to power. On July 12, 1873, _Punch_ published a cartoon _à propos_ of the protest against Ritualism and the Confessional. Mr. Miall, M.P., a leader of the Liberation Society, is shown with two archbishops expressing his delight to find them so earnestly co-operating with him for the destruction of the State Church. A fortnight later _Punch_ complained that Dr. Thomson (the Archbishop of York) had misread the cartoon. What _Punch_ really meant was to suggest that by neglecting the representations of real Churchmen, and by tolerating the antics of Ritualism, the hierarchy were playing into the hands of the Church's enemies. But he still hoped that the Archbishops would stiffen their backs and carry out the spirit of Tait's threat against those who brought their toys to church. So when Archdeacon Denison, who supported the Confessional, denounced certain Bishops for their ultra-Protestantism, _Punch_ suggested that Denison's friends should present him with a triple cap (with bells).

EDUCATION

The worst of education, as Peacock remarks, is that there is no beginning and no end to it. But the subject is set about with other pitfalls and difficulties. It is one of the most important things in life; its annals have been adorned by great and even heroic names; yet the calling has never been free from gibes at the dominie and the gerund-grinder. And again, by the irony of fate it has been responsible for an unconscionable amount of dull and pedantic and cranky literature. There is no greater benefactor than a good schoolmaster; there is no greater bore than the "Educationist." _Punch_, though a comic journal, has not escaped the infection in dealing with the subject, but it is to his credit that on the whole he has resisted the temptation to indulge in untimely facetiousness, and has not been afraid to be serious when the occasion demanded.

Contending zealots, assisted by Parliamentary apathy, had effectually barred the progress of national education throughout the period treated in the previous volume. But the awakening had begun in 1858, though more than twenty years were to pass before Forster's Act was placed on the Statute Book. The debate on the Paper Duty in June, 1858, showed, at any rate, that all parties were at one in condemning this tax. Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, could not afford to remit it, but _Punch_ read the signs of the times aright in his comment: "The House voted £563,435 for Educational purposes in order to qualify the people to read the books which the removal of the paper duty will place in their hands." It was reserved for Mr. Gladstone to make good this forecast. His famous series of Free Trade Budgets between 1859 and 1865 were quite as much the effect as the cause of national prosperity, but in 1865 "no one ventured to doubt Gladstone's financial omniscience. Everyone who paid less for his pound of tea or his newspaper could look upon him as a personal benefactor."[9]

[Footnote 9: Oman's _England in the Nineteenth Century_, p. 155.]

The judicious use of opportunity rather than genius may have been the secret of Gladstonian finance; but no such reserves are called for in appraising the merits of the series of Acts dealing with national education passed during his first Premiership. If one needs a practical illustration of the immense advance made in education in ten years, one need only compare the provisions of the Act of 1870 with the account of what _Punch_ calls an "anti-educational demonstration" in the Commons in July, 1860, when Palmerston was Prime Minister:--

There was a Bill for making it compulsory on the employers of the labour of children under twelve years old, to have a certificate that the child was learning to read and write, and had twenty hours of teaching per month-nothing like an hour a day. But so monstrous an Innovation frightened the House. Mr. Henley was pious, and said that people were not to eat unless they worked, but were not commanded to read and write; Mr. Buxton was humane, and said there were thousands of children too idle, wicked or stupid to learn, and their vested rights were not to be interfered with; Mr. Hardy took the old Tory view, and said that the children of the poor were taught quite enough to enable them to do the duties they were intended for; and Mr. Baynes, as a Dissenter, declared the Bill to be needless, and that the work of education was going on admirably. Yielding to these irresistible arguments, the Bill was thrown out, a majority of 122 to 51 deciding that the children of the English poor want no assistance in the battle with the World, the Flesh and the First Whig.

It was this debate, by the way, that prompted _Punch_ to recall the derivation of Parliament by a French etymologist from the two verbs _parler_ and _mentir_.

[Sidenote: _Education Act of 1870_]

A good beginning had been made with the Act providing efficient inspection of endowed and Grammar Schools in 1869, but the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was a measure of first-rate importance, which has affected our national life more vitally than any other passed in the last fifty years, unless we except the People's Representation Act of 1918. From the moment of its introduction _Punch_ realized its far-reaching influence. On March 26, 1870, he published the cartoon, "The Three R's, or Better Late than Never." Here we see Forster addressing a group of small school children, town and country types: "Well, my little people, we have been gravely and earnestly considering whether you may learn to read. I am happy to say that, subject to a variety of restrictions, conscience clauses, and the consent of your vestries--you may!" The conflict that led to the final compromise is indicated by two groups in the background: one amicably gathered round John Bull; the other including a bishop, a coronetted peer, a sour-visaged minister of the Chadband type, and an austere female.

The issues involved are set forth in a "long and grave letter" addressed by _Punch_ to "Master Gutterblood" in town, and "Master Chawbacon" in the country. Writing as their friend and well-wisher, sincerely anxious to see them properly taught, he deplores the obstacles hitherto put in their way by the "black-coats"--Parson, Priest and Nonconformist Minister. He applauds Forster's plan, and specially condemns the action of the secularizing party who would exclude all religion from schools, since the bulk of English people were in favour of some simple religious teaching:--

Those who are _now_ barring your road to school are not the Churches, but those who insist that no Church at all shall have a hand in your teaching when you have got there. I have been accustomed to think that it was the Established Church's jealousy of the Dissenters that kept you ignorant, now it looks as if you were to be kept in the dark by the Dissenters' jealousy of the Established Church, working with those who distrust and dislike equally Church and Dissent, and all forms of religious Creed.

It was a fair summary of the opposing interests which clashed during the progress of the Bill through the House. _Punch's_ impatience is shown in the further cartoon "Obstructives." "Those people" are a group of clerics of various Churches blocking the school doorway. A fortnight later _Punch_ was able to announce in his "Essence of Parliament" that the very qualified compulsion proposed by Parliament had been approved by large majorities, and to publish his third cartoon on the solving of the problem. Master Forster (with his slate) is saying to Britannia, the Schoolmistress, "Please, M'm, I've done it, M'm." And when Britannia asks, "And _how_ have you done it, William?" he replies, "Please, M'm, I've reduced all the fractions to the lowest common denomination." To this is added the stage direction "The good Boy enters the Cabinet." The Bill passed through both Houses, and when Parliament rose on August 10 and the Queen's Speech made special reference thereto, _Punch_ comments, "Excuse us, your Majesty, but permit us to say 'Hooray!' and to add a cheer for Mr. Forster." He welcomed a measure which affirmed the principle that the State was bound to provide gratuitous instruction for all the children in the realm, but resented the educational luxuries which leading "Educationalists" were anxious to introduce. So we find a burlesque list of these fancy subjects, including hieroglyphics, croquet, bézique, etiquette, given in the following year with the remark: "There are people old-fashioned enough to think that it might be as well to give our poor neglected children only plain joints at first--the 3 R's--and let the _entrées_ stand over for the present." The introduction of the "Fourth R"--Religion--prompted the "Educational Epigram" a year later:--

Milk is for babes, wrote one that knew. Sectarian Educators, you Who dogmas teach which Doctors question, Are you not giving babes strong meat, So much too tough for them to eat The upshot must be indigestion?

In the following summer we have a picture by Charles Keene of a beery working man protesting against temperance propagandism at schools, and resolving to withdraw his small son from the reach of these subversive doctrines, while humorous capital is made out of the "Conscience Clause" at the expense of the "agitator." The provision of gratuitous meals to elementary school children was not yet even mooted, but _Punch_ strongly supported the philanthropists who in 1867 gave weekly dinner parties in Marylebone to seven or eight hundred children, following the example set by Victor Hugo during his sojourn in Guernsey.

[Sidenote: _Children and their Tormentors_]

Turning to preparatory or boarding schools, we have to note that academies of the type of "Dotheboys Hall" had not altogether disappeared, to judge by the advertisement which _Punch_ pilloried under the heading of "Children and their Tormentors":--

"BOARDING SCHOOLS wanted, in London, for a boy, nine years, and two girls, six and seven years old, requiring firm discipline, having become wild and unruly, through neglect occasioned by family misfortunes. No holiday could be given, as holidays destroy any good effected at school. The father, quite a gentleman, can only pay 20 guineas each. This advertisement is only intended for schools of pre-eminent efficiency for such cases, and prosperous enough to be able and willing to accept such terms, and undertake the needed task of reformation for the sake of the schools' own additional credit of success. Particulars and references, by letter only."

As for its conducing to the "credit" of a school to help unnatural fathers thus to get rid of their children, surely no one but a squeers could indulge in such a thought. If through neglect at home, a child becomes unruly and requires to be "reformed," it is right that at a proper age it should be sent to school, if proper means are wanting for teaching it at home. But a girl of six years old can scarcely be so "wild" as to require, for her taming, utter banishment from home: nor can she be much bettered by being badly fed for twenty pounds a year, and, worse still, taught to grow up without knowing what "home" means.

The name of "gentleman" had been strangely taken in vain a year earlier, as we gather from an extract which sounds like an echo from _The Fairchild Family_:--

THE GAME OF JACK KETCH

On Saturday last a man named Thomas Edwards was hanged for murder at Liverpool, when, according to a report of the execution which appeared in the _Daily Telegraph_:--

"To the discredit of some person, a drag, containing gentlemen's children, was brought near the gallows."

Fine fun for gentlemen's children during the Christmas holidays, to see a man hanged. Just the spectacle to amuse little boys--but perhaps there were some little girls too among these gentlemen's children. Well, in that case, the gentlemen have taken a good step towards getting their girls, as well as their boys, off their hands. Nothing is more likely than that the juvenile spectators of Thomas Edwards' death-struggles will get to play at hanging, and effectually hang one another.

In 1868 _Punch_ was exercised in mind by the pernicious influence on the ingenuous youth of "penny dreadfuls," and the activities of educational faddists. Precocious pedantry, as we show on the previous page, is satirized in 1863. There is a curious foreshadowing of Madame Montessori's hostility to fairy tales in Du Maurier's "Little Christmas Dream." Du Maurier had a genius for the delineation of nightmares, and in this picture he quite excelled himself. Earlier in the same year _Punch_ made excellent capital, again with the aid of Du Maurier's pencil, out of Lord Malmesbury's statement that it was useless to teach modern languages at the public schools, "as parents can easily procure such instruction for their children by hiring foreign nurses." The artist depicts four disgusted Harrow boys, who have returned for the holidays, taking an educational walk with their German and French instructresses, while a young and untutored yokel looks on with grim amusement.

A notable landmark in the annals of preparatory and public school education is reached in 1869, when _Punch_ quoted the following epoch-marking advertisement:--

"Grammar School, W---- R---- Wanted immediately, a Second Assistant Master, to teach thoroughly writing and arithmetic, also junior English subjects. Must be a good cricketer and round-arm bowler. Character to bear the strictest investigation. Salary £40, increasing to £60."

[Sidenote: _Punch on Co-Education_]

The resounding fame of W. G. Grace, who began his great career in first-class cricket in 1863, at the age of 15, and had just reached his majority, was doubtless responsible for this new educational departure. The salary was certainly not exorbitant, but the advent of the cricket-master moves no sympathy in _Punch_. He admits the force of the proverb that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," but asks "does not Jack at some schools play a little to excess?" and speculates on the amazement which the schoolmaster abroad would feel in reading this announcement. On the other hand, over-pressure and "cramming" were equally distasteful to _Punch_, who was seriously perturbed by the sensational accounts given in 1870 of the breakdown of Woolwich candidates.

Co-education had not yet emerged on the horizon of practical educational politics, and the plea put forward in a picture by Du Maurier for a mixed "crocodile" cannot be seriously entertained. The artist suggests that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen they should all be formally introduced to one another and allowed to take their walks abroad in company. The question of corporal punishment was raised by a lively correspondence in _The Times_, towards the close of 1872, on the Winchester practice of "tunding" with a ground-ash or cricket-stump. The action was general, the father of the boy whose punishment by a prefect had started the correspondence, the headmaster, Dr. Ridding, "in English less classical than queer," and sundry old Wykehamists all joining in. _Punch_ was at first scandalized by the brutality with which the prefects exercised their disciplinary powers, but the spirit and good sense showed by the victim caused him to modify his view:--

His punishment, while he feels it unjust He takes without blather or ban: Yes, out of the lot who've kicked up a dust, The boy is the Man.

At the beginning of the same year the invasion of the public schools by the new plutocracy, as described by a correspondent in the _Morning Post_, who assumed the unfortunate pseudonym of "Pavidus," impelled _Punch_ to some outspoken comment. "Pavidus" complained that the standard in tips and pocket-money had been unduly raised by the young cotton-lords--boys who came back with £5 as a minimum. _Punch_ finds the root of the evil in the perversion of the public schools from their original intention--to educate the sons of poor gentlemen--and suggests that if the "nobs" don't like their sons associating with young plutocrats, they should get up poor schools of their own and keep the high-bred paupers select. A similar situation has arisen since the war, but the difficulty has been solved without snobbery or squealing. Parents who cannot afford to send their sons to schools with which their families have been associated for generations, send them elsewhere, but they do not "make a song about it."

[Sidenote: _University Reform_]

There remain the Universities, the apex of the educational pyramid. The Universities Commission was not appointed till 1872. Its report on the income and property of Oxford and Cambridge was not published till October 1874, and the Universities' Act was not passed till 1877. _Punch's_ contributions to the discussions which arose over University Reform nearly always take the form of hostile criticism of the champions of "no change," and he devotes by far the greater amount of space to the castigation of Oxford conservatives and non-resident reactionaries. The vote on the institution of the non-Collegiate or "unattached" system in 1868 furnished _Punch_ with the materials for a comprehensive indictment of all his pet Oxford aversions. In the wail of the Mediævalists, headed "An Oxford _Miserere_," _Punch_ ranges himself on the side of the reformers; Sir John, afterwards Lord Coleridge, who had taken an active part in the successful movement for the abolition of religious tests in the Universities; Conington, the distinguished Latinist and editor of Virgil; Raper, the well-known Fellow of Trinity College, who, under more than one President, was the power behind the throne; and Jowett, who with Stanley and Maurice, had always been supported by _Punch_ in his espousal of "modernist" views.

When Mr. Meyrick, an Oxford Don, expressed his satisfaction that our Educational System was not that of the Germans, _Punch_ was unable to echo his complacency, and went so far as to wish that "our Dons and Fellows were but as these Germans"; but it may be pleaded in extenuation of his offence that the doctrine of "Kultur" was less vocal in the 'sixties, and that German professors and teachers were not then so firmly harnessed to the car of "Machtpolitik." _Punch_ little thought that some fifty years later Admiral Tirpitz would admit that the most formidable opponent of Germany was the "polo-playing Englishman." The notion that pastime was overdone finds vent in the "Chant for College Athletes":--

How doth the busy Undergrad Improve each shining hour, Loving each new athletic "fad" To show his muscles' power!

* * * * *

In feats of strength and games of skill His time must all be passed, Heedless that, 'spite of cram, he will Be sorely plucked at last.

[Sidenote: _Affluent College Servants_]

Over-athleticism, however, was not the only ground of complaint against education at the older Universities in the 'sixties. The high cost of living for undergraduates, owing to the extortion of local tradesmen and the perquisites of college servants, provoked a correspondence in _The Times_ in the winter of 1865. _Punch_ ironically affected to defend the retail "profiteers." His College butler in "The Undergraduates' Rebellion" associates himself with the College Dean as the victim of a mutiny of meanness, and the accompanying cartoon rubs in the point, a stout butcher addressing an equally stout Don, engaged in cutting a loaf, with the words, "Wery low them letters in the papers, Mr. Dean! Wery 'ard on both of us, Sir--my beef and your bread-an'-butter!" _Punch's_ satire was justified by the fortunes notoriously made at the time and for many years afterwards by College cooks and butlers, whose incomes sometimes exceeded those of the Heads of Houses. More than ten years later a Christ Church "Scout" bitterly complained of the passing of the good old times. As he put it, "Instead of taking food home out of College, I has to bring it in."

INVENTIONS, NOVELTIES AND FORECASTS

Railways, their dangers and inconveniences, continue throughout this period to furnish _Punch_ with a never-ending theme of criticism and complaint; nor need we altogether wonder when it is remembered that it was not until 1861 that communication between guard and engine driver was established on the Eastern Counties Railway, and then at first only on express and fast trains;[10] and again, that it was not until 1873 that sleeping carriages were first introduced. The murder of Mr. Briggs by Müller on the North London line on July 9, 1864, created a scare amongst nervous passengers, which even the introduction of the corridor carriage has not altogether allayed. But, from the point of view of a Londoner, the most notable feature in railway development was the extension of intra-urban facilities which grew out of the Act of 1853, though the construction of the Underground did not begin till the spring of 1860, and it was not opened for traffic, in its original and limited range, till January, 1863. The completion of the Inner and the addition of the Outer Circle followed; the Swiss Cottage extension was not opened till 1868; but Highgate and many other suburbs remained isolated until the coming of the tubes.

The "Tuppenny Tube" was not opened till June, 1900, but nearly forty years earlier we read in _Punch_ that "amongst the new railway projects, it seems there is to be a tubular underground from Regent's Circus to the Bank." The plea for cheap workmen's trains to the suburbs in the spring of 1870 only surprises us now by its having waited so long to be granted.

[Footnote 10: In January, 1868, reference is made to carriages with circular holes between the compartments in order to facilitate communication.]

In the realm of imaginative forecast, one may note Du Maurier's nightmare picture of aerial trains to Paris in 1870, and the burlesque charter for an aerial railway company in 1872. But the project of a Channel tunnel had long been seriously considered, though the experimental borings were not made till 1876.[11] Ten years earlier _Punch_ had indulged in some fantastic speculations on the result of the preliminary trials conducted by French and English engineers, with Sir John Hawkshaw at the head of the latter.

[Footnote 11: The scheme was originally proposed by a French engineer named Mathieu in the very beginning of the century, and taken up in 1833 by Thomé de Gamond, who worked at it for more than twenty years until an International Committee was formed. Operations were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, but resumed in earnest in 1872. M. de Gamond died in poverty in 1876.]

THE RANTOONE

A patent for pneumatic tyres had been taken out in the 'forties; bicycles and tricycles came in at the end of the 'sixties; but twenty years were to elapse before the boneshaker and the "ordinary"--that wonderful and perilous machine--gave place to the "safety." In 1868 and 1869 references abound to velocipedes--the word "bicycle" had not yet established itself--and in the Almanack for 1869 there is a picture of a strange mechanism called the "Rantoone," a tricycle with two large wheels behind and a small guiding wheel in front. It is also mentioned in Henry Kingsley's _Boy in Grey_, and Crawley's _Manly Games for Boys_. But the bicycle, as we know it, the most momentous addition to the resources of locomotion between the coming of the steam engine and the advent of the petrol-driven motor, was only looming in the future; it was little more than a plaything in the period under review.

Telegraph wires first began to spread their overhead network in London in 1859; the District Telegraph Company was started in 1860. Ten years later _Punch_ celebrates the reduction of the fee for a twenty-word telegram to one shilling. Of the use of telegraphy in war he expressed considerable scepticism, on the ground that it would lead to endless contradictory rumours.

[Sidenote: _The Atlantic Cable_]

The most notable advance in telegraphy, however, was that of the long-distance cables. The year 1858 abounds in references to the second and third attempts to span the Atlantic. Frequent failures delayed the achievement of the enterprise for several years. In 1865 _Punch_ published a series of reports purporting to come from the _Great Eastern_, then engaged in laying the cable, but it was not until the summer of 1866 that he was able to record the completion of the task:--

A Parliamentary week never ended with a more gratifying incident. A Minister, Mr. Hunt, stated that the Atlantic Telegraph had been laid to America, an ex-Minister, Mr. Childers, confirmed the fact, and an Honourable Member held in his hand a signal that had just arrived. _Mr. Punch_ instantly sent Mr. Johnson a peremptory signal to liquor severely.

Undoubtedly the record of the marvels of applied science kept by _Punch_, and the forecasts of further extension in which he indulged, come home to us more closely in connexion with inventions for use in warfare. The unrealized projects of Captain Warner have been described in the previous volume. A liquid-fire bomb or incendiary shell, and an incendiary rifle-bullet attracted attention early in 1859. But the lessons of the American War of 1861-1865 gave _Punch_ occasion to think sometimes seriously, and even with flashes of remarkable insight, on the possibilities of future warfare. His old distrust of armoured ships as "ferreous freaks" was not entirely dispelled by the triumph of the monitor; he gives us a picture of a new iron-clad mistaken for a Noah's Ark, and speaks of the new types as flat-irons. He admits that the action between the _Merrimac_ and the _Monitor_ conclusively proves that one iron-clad ship is a match for several wooden ships carrying more and heavier guns; but if there are to be no ships of war but iron ships, and iron ships are mutually shot-proof, he is impelled to the further conclusion that naval war in the future may end in an inconclusive stalemate:--

Ships being rendered practically invulnerable, any two vessels of war belonging to hostile nations will, hereafter, meeting on the high seas, each find itself unable to injure the other and therefore be obliged to part in peace, the result of their collision having been as nearly as possible the opposite to that of the conflict between the Kilkenny Cats.

From such a prospect _Punch_ professes to derive hope; but there is more sagacity in the "Farewell to the Fleet" which followed three weeks later, a valediction which in its last stanza crudely anticipates the pre-and post-war warnings of Admiral Sir Percy Scott:--

Now farewell, my trim three-decker, Sails and spars and all farewell; Iron's proved of wood a wrecker, Where 'twill steer us who can tell?

In glorious Nelson's days, d'ye mind them, Our tars were sailors every inch: Stout hearts, with pigtails stout behind them, And ne'er a man to skulk or flinch.

But now--my dear eyes! British sailors Half soldiers and half stokers are; And if we manned the fleet with tailors, 'Twould in a month be fit for war.

* * * * *

Bomb-proof, hull-sunk, iron-roofed, we steam on, Nor ball nor boarder fear we now; And when our foe we run abeam on, He sinks at once beneath our prow.

Them Yankee swabs, from shot a-shrinking: Fight under water, so they tells; Dear eyes! our Navy soon, I'm thinking, Will be a fleet of diving bells.

[Sidenote: _The Navy of the Future_]

But by far the best illustration of the way in which the course of the war caused _Mr. Punch_ to think furiously, fantastically, but by no means foolishly, is to be found in the fantasy headed, "A Flying Island wanted":--

Will somebody please invent for us an Island of Laputa?

It would save a mint of money in plated ships, and Armstrong guns, and Shoeburyness experiments. Although we are at peace, a most expensive war is raging between gunmakers and shipbuilders, and so far as one can learn, there seem but little hopes of stopping it. First the guns will gain the day, and then the ships will be built stronger until they are ball-proof, then bigger guns will come, and then still stronger ships; and so the battle will go on, and victories alternately be won by either side, and the Queen's powder be burnt at a most tremendous rate, so long as Mr. Bull agrees to stand the shot.

If the Invention War goes on much longer than it has done, we quite expect to hear of the construction of a cannon that shall throw a ball as big as the Ball upon St. Paul's, and of a mortar that shall pitch a shell as large round as the dome. Indeed, we fancy that in course of time conical shot will equal the Big Pyramid of Egypt, and that guns will be invented of sufficient power to throw such shot across from Brighton to Boulogne.

Now, if somebody would just invent a Flying Island, and present us with the patent, this costly fight between artillerists and shield-makers would probably soon cease. There would be no need then of our Army and our Navy, our big guns and our block ships, our field pieces and forts. Whenever any nation dared to pick a quarrel with us, all that we should have to do would be to let our Flying Island drop upon their heads, and squash their fleets and forces flat at one fell swoop.

The development of long-range artillery has fulfilled _Punch's_ fancy. And we have become a flying island; but, unfortunately, the power of swooping from the skies is shared by other countries. As for ascents into the upper air, it was in the same year (1862) that the long unbroken record in altitude was made by Coxwell and Glaisher in the old-fashioned balloon. There is a reference to the Aeronautical Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1868; but the disaster which befell the Belgian, de Groof, in July, 1874, while attempting to descend from a balloon in a newly invented parachute, elicited a decidedly obscurantist comment:--

DE GROOF

(Killed in attempting to Fly, July 9, 1874)

He who provides for all beneath the sky, Made men to walk, as He made birds to fly; Then let man stick to earth, and have the sense Not to fly in the face of Providence!

[Sidenote: _The Coming of the Typewriter_]

Cigarettes had come in with the Crimean War. In 1858 _Punch_ suggested an improved passport with a photograph. To the same year belong the introduction of the word "dipsomaniac," spirit-drawing (a forerunner of spirit-photographs), _Punch's_ first mention of Schweppe's soda water and of synthetic substitutes for food, and his prediction of the formation of a Camel Corps. Aerated bread, and the magnetic hair brush--supposed to restore the pigment to grey hair by drawing out the iron in the blood--were among the novelties of 1860; hair-brushing by machinery was introduced in 1864, and the sewing machine makes its debut in _Punch_ in 1866. An even more epoch-making invention, which ranks among the most momentous products of the age in its far-reaching results on commerce, journalism, literature and the whole social system, was the type-writer, exhibited in London in 1867:--

GOOD NEWS FOR BAD WRITERS

It is surprising what discoveries are made in the dead season. Here is one, for instance, the account of which has recently been snipped out by the scissors of many a sub-editor:--

"Writing superseded. Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to the London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man's thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonized paper, which is moved by the same manipulation."

Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens; no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play--on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys.

In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away _ad libitum_ whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, and issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopædia complete within a month.

On the whole, this is not a bad though fantastic summary of the possibilities of a machine which, whatever its influence on the manufacture of novels, the multiplication of unnecessary books, and the art of letter-writing, has at least proved a wonderful time-saver and revolutionized the prospects of the "superfluous woman." In spite of its terrible ticking, it has proved a great lubricator of life; and, _à propos_ of lubricants, we have to note the advent in the early 'seventies of synthetic butter, under its modern name:--

There are probably very few members of that generally bread-and-butter-eating community, the British Public, who have not frequently partaken, without knowing it, of the article described in the following extract from a letter of the _Morning Post's_ Correspondent at Paris:--

"Butter, like all alimentary substances, has vastly increased in price. An enterprising merchant exhibits what he calls 'Produit nouveau, Margarine Mouriès, remplaçant le beurre pour la cuisine. Economie incontestable sur le beurre; il coûte moitié moins cher, et on en use moitié moins.' This butter is made from the fat of beef, and costs 10d. per pound."

In merry England, however, this article does not merely replace Butter for the kitchen, but also for the breakfast-parlour, where it is eaten, not under the name of Margarine, in bread-and-margarine, but that of Butter, in bread-and-butter. It is bought for Butter, and it is sold for Butter; only the buyer believes it to be what it is sold for, whereas the seller well knows that it is a product of beef-suet; and he serves his customer with the latter commodity at the price of the former. The "enterprising merchant" of Paris, who sells Margarine as a substitute for Butter, and does not sell his customers by selling it as Butter, and at Butter's value, has very likely found honesty to be the best policy. That policy might, perhaps, be adopted with advantage by an enterprising British Cheesemonger.

Beef-fat is, we fear, a euphemism for the principal ingredient in the synthesis of margarine as originally compounded, and it was a consciousness of this fact that more than anything else prompted the dishonesty of the British cheesemonger.

The list of useful novelties may be completed with postcards, which date from the year 1870. _Punch_ recognized their drawbacks, and recommended people who used them to write in cypher or in Greek characters, which was less a counsel of perfection fifty years ago than it would be to-day.

England's debt to America in the domain of invention was not confined to mechanical labour-saving appliances. The inventiveness of the American journalist repeatedly extorts the reluctant admiration of _Punch_ from 1857 onwards. In the summer of 1858 he culls a gorgeous example of the high art of sensational reporting from a New York paper in which it was stated that six people were butchered by a man who blew his brains out, yet "at the latest date all the sufferers were in a fair way of recovery." Yet in their own way the English penny-a-liners were capable of fine work. In December of the same year _Punch_ quotes the following from the account of an agricultural show in a daily paper:--

"Yesterday the gold medal pen of pigs was denuded of one of its finest specimens, one of those most extraordinary animals having expired from its obesity during the previous night. There were other demises from apoplexy amongst the porcine confraternity during the show."

[Sidenote: _The Press Surpasses Itself_]

It was in the Victorian age, again--though unknown to _Punch_--that the reporter of an Irish paper concluded his description of a burglary with the words, "after a fruitless search, all the money was recovered except one pair of boots." But the supremacy of the New World in this field was conclusively established in the year 1869, the _annus mirabilis_ for ever memorable by its association with the greatest of all American advertisements. Fragments of this classic are familiar even to the present generation, but we are, thanks to _Punch_, able to give the original text in its entirety:--

Among those of our institutions that are especially getting Americanized is a part of our Press, professing to afford us information which it calls "reliable" and also abounding in announcements on which we may rely if their phraseology strikes us as the language of truth and honesty. Some of these notifications are formed on models, whereof a contemporary quotes an example:--

"A wonderful Medicine. The following advertisement is from a recent issue of a New York paper:--'If you want a really pure unsophisticated "family pill," buy Dr. R----'s liver-encouraging, kidney-persuading, silent perambulator--twenty-seven in a box. This pill is as mild as a pet-lamb, and as searching as a small tooth-comb. It don't go fooling about, but strictly attends to business, and is as certain as an alarm clock.'"

Puffery, resembling, if not quite equalling, that above instanced, in wit and humour, is fast gaining ground among us. America has taught us how to advertise. Thank Barnum. We have been, and are continuing to be, Americanized. We are progressing.

One is glad that _Punch_ recognized the "wit and humour" of this unique document, though he says nothing of its magical choice of words. Dr. R---- was Dr. Rumbold. But whether or no he composed the advertisement I have not been able to discover--or, indeed, anything about him. Perhaps it was his swan-song; like the Old Masters, who according to Artemus Ward executed the execrable paintings exhibited at his lecture as their crowning and final achievement: "they did them and then they died."

[Sidenote: _The Next Generation_]

Sufficient materials have already been accumulated to enable the reader to form an estimate of _Punch's_ credentials as a prophet or "intelligent anticipator." They would not, however, be complete without the "Forecast of the Next Generation" which appeared in 1872, and which is interesting not so much from its prophecies as from its comprehensive catalogue of Victorian shortcomings, failings and abuses:--

The next generation will possess an army properly clothed.

The next generation will all be able to read and write.

The next generation will wear light clothes in summer.

The next generation will remove some of the public-statues and edifices which their predecessors have erected.

The next generation will find life supportable without so many Vestries.

The next generation will not make calls.

The next generation will ride to and fro in decent cabs.

The next generation will have other sorts of fish in daily consumption besides red herrings.

The next generation will speak French and German, and, possibly, know something of their own language and literature.

The next generation will not wear high black hats in the month of July.

The next generation will see the officers of the army walking about the streets in uniform.

The next generation will have other public places of amusement open to them on Sundays, besides public-houses.

The next generation will be better cooks.

The next generation will have no theatres with fees.

The next generation will leave the table with the ladies.

The next generation will not avoid Hotels.

The next generation will find they can get on pretty comfortably without the Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Judge Advocate General, etc.

The next generation will not be ashamed of Leicester Square.

The next generation will be able to cross the Channel with less bodily discomfort.

The next generation will journey by railway more safely and more punctually.

The next generation will still have the National Debt, duns, dentists, domestics, humbugs, quacks, impostors, absurd fashions, adulteration, swindlers, and the Income Tax.

LONDON

[Sidenote: _Foul State of the Thames_]

Though nothing comparable to the Hausmannizing of Paris by systematized and uniform reconstruction was accomplished in London in the mid-Victorian period, great changes and improvements were introduced. Bridges were built, the river was partially purified and the Thames Embankment carried out. The state of the "ancient river, shining as he goes, mail-clad in morning to the ancient sea" of Henley's phrase, was a hideous scandal in the 'fifties. Father Thames may on occasion have appealed to the eye, but he continually affronted the nose. In 1858 the growth of London was estimated to reach 5,816,900 by 1901. Yes, says _Punch_, but what if the Thames is not purified? In June of that year the nuisance, aggravated by a dry summer, was painfully brought home to legislators in session at Westminster. Constant protests were raised in both Houses, and when Lord John Manners asserted that the Central Board of Works stopped the way, _Punch_ would have liked to see Thwaites--the chairman--and his "gabbling colleagues" committed to prison until they had purged their contempt for our river.

A month later the drought and the bad drainage produced a regular panic, and on July 15 Disraeli introduced a Bill authorizing the cleansing of the Thames and giving the Board of Works power to raise a special rate (which _Punch_ called the Stinking Fund) and a free hand in construction. The stench of the river continued to inspire a succession of poems, paragraphs and articles throughout the rest of the year, including an address to the Thames (after Tennyson), and beginning,

Bake, bake, bake, O Thames, on thy way to the sea! And I would that thy stink could poison A Bishop, Peer or M.P.

The subsequent discontinuance of these tirades is a tolerably safe indication that the nuisance was being seriously grappled with. Eight years later, in the autumn of 1866, Father Thames, though still a disreputable figure, is allowed by _Punch_ to use the _tu quoque_ argument against a Parliamentary critic at a time when electoral corruption was calling loudly for reform.

The new suspension bridge in St. James's Park is attacked in 1857 for its ugliness. "We can't make a monument, and now it seems we can't make a bridge." The new erection is described as a grotesque failure, but at least the ornamental water had been purified. _Punch_ was more hopeful of the new Blackfriars Bridge, built by Cubitt, when he attended the ceremony of laying the foundation-stone in July, 1865, and when it was opened in November, 1869--just a hundred years after the opening of Mylne's bridge--he celebrated the event in an imaginary dialogue between the Queen, Mr. Cubitt and Dr. Johnson. The introduction of Johnson was thoroughly appropriate, for the doctor had attacked Mylne's bridge, or the "Pitt Bridge," as it was originally called, as contravening sound principles of engineering, and events proved that he was right. Over the new Westminster Bridge, begun in May, 1854, and opened at 4 a.m. on the morning of May 24, 1862--the day and hour on which Queen Victoria was born--_Punch_ abandoned his pessimism, pronounced Page's design beautiful, and scouted the suggestion of a fussy M.P. who wished to have palisades erected to prevent would-be suicides from jumping over. It was this bridge to which another M.P., Sir W. Fraser, was anxious that the name Sebastopol should be attached.

[Sidenote: _London Statues_]

Statues are a subject of mixed comment, mostly unflattering. But a good point was scored in 1858 at the expense of Tom Duncombe, the eccentric Radical M.P. and man of fashion, who was incensed at the erection of a statue to Jenner in Trafalgar Square, and sneered in the House at the "Berkeley cow-pox-doctor":--

_Mr. Punch_ cannot conceive what the veteran dandy Tom was thinking about. Could he be aware that the discovery of vaccination, which has saved myriads on myriads of lives, and which Parliament rewarded, in 1802 and 1807, with grants of £10,000 and £20,000, has the still higher merit of preserving a face from ravages very inimical to lady-killing?

The Guards' Memorial, unveiled in February, 1861, is only faintly praised:--

It is no worse and perhaps it is a trifle better than the many statuesque caricatures that, in the name of Art, are supposed to adorn our much-abused London. The truth is, that the English sculptors have already displayed such a cruel affection for the Metropolis, that it has been quite a spoiled child with them.

When a fine memorial was made, we were not able to keep it; and _Punch_ greatly regrets in 1873 that Foley's statue of Outram, temporarily erected in Waterloo Place before its removal to India, was not allowed to remain there, as it was "the finest statue, the only fine statue ever erected in London." _Punch_, however, had forgotten that ten years earlier he had applied the epithet "fine" to Joseph Durham's statue of the Prince Consort in the Royal Horticultural Society's garden.

But of all London statues the most unfortunate and the most ignominiously treated was that of George I in Leicester Square. The Square throughout the 'sixties was a standing eyesore; an unkempt wilderness, where garbage of every kind was shot. The dilapidated condition of the statue in 1865 harmonized with its dingy surroundings and prompted a parody of Cowper:--

I am Monarch of all I survey, My right leg is minus a foot, My left has been taken away, And another they haven't yet put.

In the "Lay of Leicester Square" _Punch_, after a survey of the great days of Leicester House, where "Prince Fred 'gainst Bubb Dodington once held the stakes," describes its lamentable condition at the moment he wrote:--

In dirt and neglect Soho's Slums I outvie Than my seediest foreigner seedier am I.

Things had come to such a pass that "well bred spectres" no longer could haunt Leicester Square:--

I, Leicester Square garden, so called from the days When my beds were made, shrubs pruned, and grass duly mown, In my dirt and disorder maintain the old ways-- While my leg-less lead King, from his war-horse o'erthrown, Proclaims in his downfall that highest of laws, "Vested rights are still rights, whate'er nuisance they cause."

Later on in the year there is a cartoon aimed at Ayrton, the unpopular Chief Commissioner of Works in which "Ayrton the (B)Ædile" is shown pointing to the battered statue from which the figure of the rider had been removed, and saying "Ha! Now that's a style of Art I flatter myself I really do understand."

From this derelict condition Leicester Square was rescued by the enterprise and munificence of Baron Albert Grant, whose chequered career was largely redeemed by an act which gave us the Square as we know it. Under the heading, "Grant in Aid and a Check that wants Crossing," _Punch_ gratefully records his intervention and the difficulties which delayed the execution of the scheme.

The greatest of all the improvements that belong to this period was the Thames Embankment, which had formed part of Wren's scheme for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Not until nearly two hundred years had elapsed was Parliamentary sanction obtained for carrying out the plan. It was vigorously opposed in the House of Lords by the Duke of Buccleuch, and _Punch_, on July 5, 1862, published a cartoon with the heading, "Sawney stops the way." John Bull, driving a bus labelled "Embankment," is confronted by a fully armed and kilted Scottish chieftain waving a banner inscribed, "Buccleuch and No Thoroughfare," while _Punch_ as conductor remarks, "Drive on, John; never mind the Scotchman." John Bull drove on, and early in August, 1868, _Punch_ celebrated (though somewhat ironically) the completion of the footway opening of the Embankment from Westminster to Essex Street. As Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was responsible for the plans and their execution, was engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, _Punch_ could not resist the opportunity for ridiculing his old _bête noire_ Sir John Thwaites, the chairman, and his colleagues, the _feu de joie_ loosed off by a sergeant and two bombardiers R.A., and the subsequent junketings at Woolwich. The Victoria Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster was not opened to the public till 1870, the Albert Embankment on the south side from Westminster Bridge to Vauxhall in the same year; while the Chelsea Embankment from Battersea Bridge to Chelsea Bridge was finished in 1874. Taken together they constitute the greatest addition to the amenities of London made in our time, to say nothing of the reclamation of swamp and slime from the river and their conversion into what is perhaps the finest roadway in London. Cleopatra's Needle was originally presented to England by Mehemet Ali in 1819. Engineering difficulties stood in the way of its removal from Egypt for nearly sixty years. The question is discussed by _Punch_ in 1869, but it was not till 1877 that the munificence of Sir Erasmus Wilson and the skill of John Dixon solved the problem of its transportation to its present site.

[Sidenote: _London Railways_]

_Punch_ had no regrets when the old Hungerford Market (built in 1680, rebuilt in 1831), an unsuccessful rival to Covent Garden, was swept away in 1862 to make room for the new Charing Cross Terminus. But he was at best a lukewarm supporter of the extension of London railways, underground and suburban. The progress of the excavations and the "horrible mess" in the New Road, elicited a growl at the "Underground" and the delays in the construction of the "Sewer Railway." It was suggested that Dr. Cumming had found out that the opening of the line would bring on the end of the world before the date he had fixed for that catastrophe; that garrotters had found the excavations a convenient hiding-place, and so forth. Blundering, jobbing, squabbling, and litigation are also assigned as reasons for delay. In the following year, 1863, protests against further extensions of the underground trains reach a climax, and _Punch_ denounces the vandals who want to ravage Sloane Square and Regent Street. In particular the viaduct crossing Ludgate Hill roused his indignation, and the anti-utilitarian point of view is maintained in the illustration of the "Highly ornamental tank" with which the railway company proposed to block out the view of St. Paul's, while the issue of Stanford's Railway Map of London is made the occasion of a vehement tirade against the devastation of London: "The railway man shall not be monarch of all he surveys." _Punch_, we may add, admitted the decrease in railway accidents, but attributed it to the pressure of public opinion and the penalties exacted from companies for negligence in safeguarding passengers from loss of life and limb.

[Sidenote: _Eheu Fugaces!_]

The pulling down of historic buildings or the removal of historic landmarks invariably moved _Punch_ to regret or indignation. He cordially approved, it is true, of the relief of the Park Lane block in 1864 by the cutting of Hamilton Place, and the removal of the narrowest and most dangerous bottle-neck in the streets of London. And he acquiesced in the removal of Charterhouse School to the country in the interests of the boys, publishing, without fully endorsing, the arguments of those who prophesied that in its new surroundings the school would come to be known as Magna Charterhouse. But in general he lamented the demolitions and destructions which accompanied the triumphal march of commerce. Even the dismantling of the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1868 evoked a melodious lament:--

I remember, I remember, When I was a little boy, How I came home in December My fond parents to annoy. But my pretty maiden Aunty Was kind and gave to me A sort of show galanty A funny thing to see.

I remember, I was taken By my Aunt's peculiar cabby, For to hear the rafters shaken By the Choir in the Abbey. Nor the service, nor Te Deum Nor the sights of Christmas time, Could approach the Colosseum, Save, perhaps, the Pantomime.

I remember, I remember, All those Ruins in the grounds, And the classic broken pillars (Sold for something like three pounds.) And the statues! One of Jason Was a noble work of art; They were knocked down to a mason, Who removed them in his cart.

A little less than a year later a similar note is sounded when an announcement appeared advertising the sale of the "Supper Colonnade" at Vauxhall "to be sold cheap, a remnant of the past which has witnessed many a scene of merriment with lords and ladies of high degree." The disposal of relics, even dignified relics, has often been a problem to administrators. Parliament debated in 1860 what was to be done with the Duke of Wellington's funeral car, and it was ultimately stowed away in the crypt of St. Paul's. The old "Star and Garter" at Richmond was burned down in January, 1870, and _Punch_ was moved to a poetic valediction in the name of the old frequenters who associated it with the days of their courtship. The doom of Temple Bar was pronounced in the same year, but _Punch_ admits that those who lamented its doom were in "a small and mouldy minority." But there are no reserves in the protest uttered in 1871 against the pulling down of the City churches registered under the heading of "The Pick-axe Age":--

Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. Pull down any secular building that seems to be in the way, and, as Sir Epicure Mammon says,

"Now and then a Church."

Temple Bar is doomed. Now Mr. Lowe wants to destroy the Church of St. Clement Danes, where Dr. Johnson used to worship. All right. St. Mary-le-Strand is an obstruction to vans and drays. Let us erase that. More room is wanted in Trafalgar Square, especially as Mr. Bruce hands it over to legislators of the rough kind; down with St. Martin. Then, though St. Margaret's has historical reminiscences, especially of Commonwealth days, and gives scale to the Abbey, there would be room for a large grass-plot for the people, with Ayrton-statues, were St. Margaret's invited to remove. The Abbey itself suggests an extinct superstition, and its architecture insults that of the Houses; do we want the Abbey? Then, what a splendid sweep for the carriages of the "self-made men of the City," civic knights, and the like, if St. Paul's Cathedral no longer blocked the road from Cheapside to Ludgate Hill! Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. We can't do much in the way of building up fine things, but we are out-and-outers at knocking them down.

[Sidenote: _Historic Landmarks_]

And he returns to the charge a few months later in an ironical plea for the destruction of Wren's churches--St. Mildred's, Poultry; St. Dionis, Backchurch; St. James's, Aldgate; St. Martin's, Outwich, and St. Antholin's, Sise Lane. "Sir Christopher's Cathedral, as it is also a mausoleum, will probably be spared until some railway or tramway shall want the site." When the destruction of Northumberland House was projected in 1873 _Punch_, in a fit of feudal enthusiasm, deplored the vandalism and commercialism of the Philistine Board of Works, and pointed out that there was still time to save the time-honoured house of the Percys. When the demolition was carried out in the following year, and the lion was removed to Syon House, he was consoled by the reflection that it would be at least out of the reach of ignoble and mean-minded vandals. On the other hand, he had rejoiced greatly when in 1866, as the result of a deputation headed by Lord Stanhope and Dean Stanley, Parliament voted a sum of £7,000 for the restoration of Westminster Chapter House. In 1873 St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, an inn which had been a favourite resort of Johnson, Garrick and "Sylvanus Urban," was taken over by the order of St. John of Jerusalem, and _Punch_ compares the public spirit of these Templars favourably with the zeal of the "good Templars" whom he regarded as fussy fanatics. There was no controversial acrimony, however, in his plea for the preservation of the Tabard Inn, Southwark, and the poem "For the Tabard" was written by one who had not merely read but loved his Chaucer.

The preservation of the amenities of London and the suburbs found a strong champion in _Punch_. We note a change of temper in 1864 in his comment on the rowdy behaviour of members of the "lower classes" who frequented St. James's Park, and the suggestion that it should be renamed "St. Giles's." In earlier days _Punch_ had warmly resented the exclusion of working-men in fustian from this same park. But no class prejudice impairs his satisfaction in November, 1864, when Wimbledon Common was preserved for the nation and the "small bore man" by the good offices of Lord Spencer:--

WIMBLEDON PRESERVED

There is for us, and shall be, one retreat, If but that only one, saved stucco-free, Wimbledon, evermore for pilgrims' feet Kept sacred, noble Spencer, thanks to thee! Thy generous charter gives us scope to flee Still thither from the hubbub and the heat.

In the following year he appeals to other Commons--Wandsworth, Barnes and Streatham--to follow the lead of Wimbledon, and when in 1866 Victoria Park was threatened with the erection of the Imperial Gas Company's works, _Punch_ wrote:--

Let Companies shape their projects to scrape Up wealth, and dividends share, But dim their eyes if ever they tries To rob a poor man of fresh air.

[Sidenote: _Alexandra Palace Destroyed_]

When the Alexandra Palace on Muswell Hill was opened in the summer of 1873, its gardens, statues and catering were praised in a welcome to "Alexandra" after the manner of the Laureate. Two days after this welcome appeared, the new Palace was destroyed by fire, and on July 5, 1873, _Punch_ rather cruelly published a review of a poem composed on the event by Joseph Gwyer, potato-salesman of Penge. A few of the stanzas are worth rescuing from oblivion if only for their artless simplicity:--

On Muswell Hill there lately stood, The Alexandra Palace great and good, Both to our own and foreign land, It claimed from each a prestige grand.

With works of art it did abound, Which were wont the ignorant to astound, The sightly dome for miles was seen Surrounded by the pastures green.

But on the 9th of June the palace caught on fire, Each moment seemed to send the flames much higher, Flinging around with consternation spell Such sad results as no mortal could foretell.

The shouts of alarm at this dread afray Many were stricken and did prostrate lay, As if they'd been wounded by some deadly foe, So painful was the unexpected great blow.

While some were witnessing this awful view, Others were anxious as to what they should do, Some it was seen appeared quite romantic, While the poor stall-girls seemed nearly frantic.

* * * * *

In two short hours it was a blaze Which took some years to build and raise Grand Alexandra's noble Dome, Alas! all vanished the Ninth of June.

The Pantheon, mentioned in the previous volume, though shorn of its early glories, was still a feature of London in the 'sixties, and "Jack Easel," in January, 1862, describes a visit to the Pantheon, "once dedicated to the Tragic Muse, now a temple of all the gods," combining a bazaar, an aviary and a picture gallery, chiefly frequented by ladies--"Belindas in Balmorals." The pictures were a very mixed lot, including King Alfred and the Cakes, Actæon, and the Dead Body of King Harold. But the Pantheon in its last days was chiefly remarkable for an assemblage of wondrous knick-knacks, cheap bijouterie, antique vases, antimacassars, Buhl caskets, _bonbonnières_, china candlesticks, cheese-cakes, daguerreotypes, decanters, Gothic go-carts, German glass, rag dolls and ratafia.

[Sidenote: _Tattersall's_]

Of more robust interest is the elegy in April, 1865, on the "Transit of Tattersall's," when the old mart for selling horses in Grosvenor Place at the side of St. George's Hospital, founded by "Old Tatt," was pulled down and a move made to Knightsbridge Green. "Old Tatt," originally studgroom to the Duke of Kingston, leased the premises at Hyde Park Corner from the Earl of Grosvenor in 1766, set up as a horse auctioneer, and founded his fortunes by the purchase for £2,500 of the famous racer Highflyer from Lord Bolingbroke:--

Good bye, old Corner, where so long Turf swells have loved to band, Since first old Tatt his broad-brimmed hat Showed in the well-known stand.

Where, ninety years of hopes and fears, And nine to back of that, The sporting swell with nags to sell Still found a Tit for Tatt.

* * * * *

If walls have ears, what startling tales, Those old rooms must have heard: What sermons they might preach, the stones That paved that old court-yard!

* * * * *

By those oak-pales the first Oaks' stakes Were put down long ago: Germ of that Epsom growth that now All ring-fence doth outgrow.

There the first Derby favourite Was measured by the yard: And there a century's Sellengers[12] Fortunes have made or marred.

Till the world grew so fond of "books," So giv'n to make the same, That the old ground too small was found, For the Turf's "little game";

As from _his_ Grosvenor Place old Tatt Started to win life's race, Young Tatt, on fortune bent, again Takes flight from Grosvenor Place.

At Knightsbridge, lo, a fair glass roof Stands for the dark old sheds: We've tiles as shiny 'neath our feet, As those upon our heads:

But still we love the haunts where first The Turf's keen breath we drew: And what recalls those ancient halls We best love in the new--

The old brown fox, that from his box Still peers with artful face, A hint that to the sharp as well As swift, is given the race.

We miss the verdant lawn, where paced Crowds of green men and still: The gravelled walk, which losers oft More gravelled, used to fill:

And sadder loss than all--no more The old cow crops the lawn: Meek monitor of draughts to come From milch-cows yet undrawn!

Good bye, old yard, and may the new As long its honours wear; And though they leave the Corner still, May Tatts be on the Square!

[Footnote 12: St. Legers.]

Even so small an event as the giving up in 1865 of his business by Farrance, the confectioner's at Charing Cross, was not allowed to pass without due homage:--

Other Farrances may rise, Quite as bilious as before, But the old familiar pies (Veal and Ham) will glad our eyes Nevermore, O nevermore!

Towards new or projected buildings _Punch_ was seldom benevolent. When it was announced that a new National Gallery was to be erected on the site spoiled by the old, he was sceptical of the result, but he greeted the tardy appearance of the lions in Trafalgar Square in 1867, and welcomed the opening of the Albert Hall on March 28, 1871, as providing a building unrivalled for space, sound and light--a eulogy hardly fulfilled as far as acoustics are concerned. But it has a splendid echo, it can hold 10,000 people, and as a scene for the activities of massed brass bands there is nothing to touch it, in London at any rate. Over the Holborn Restaurant, which in 1874 replaced an institution contrived to pay a double debt to bathing and dancing, _Punch_ waxed positively fulsome, but his praise was chiefly inspired by the _cuisine_; in those days good restaurants for the middle classes were few and far between.

The buildings for the International Exhibition of 1862, planned by Captain Francis Fowke, R.E., did not altogether commend themselves to _Punch_, who was inclined to cavil at the bad arrangements, and to compare the structure unfavourably with the Crystal Palace, but Fowke's plans had been scamped owing to lack of funds, and he was not responsible for the artistic shortcomings of the building. _Punch's_ comments are chiefly remarkable for his prophetic observations on our choice of executive officials:--

We are certainly a wonderful people, and work, as perhaps our foreign friends will think, in a paradoxical sort of way. It was a gardener who planned our Crystal Palace for '51, and eleven years later we are indebted for the design of another Exhibition to a soldier. A barrister superintends the casting of our great bells, and we have an architect who is an authority on fortification. Well, perhaps when our coasts are invaded a bishop may be a Secretary at War, and a physician presiding at the Admiralty.

The somewhat chequered career of "Big Ben" is followed with sympathy and interest throughout this period by _Punch_, who claimed to have given him his name. Those who lived in London during the years when his voice was hushed, and welcomed the breaking of his war silence on Armistice Day, will read, not without emotion, the lines which appeared on November 29, 1873:--

BIG BEN

"The great clock of the Houses of Parliament is stopped for a day or two, in order that the 'going train' may be cleaned by Messrs. Dent. During the present month its accumulated error has on no occasion exceeded a second."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.

Big Ben, that beats from Barry's Tower The march of time and tide, To Britain's Commons, and the world Of London far and wide, Stops--and the town that marked the hush Of his deep voice with pain, Is glad to hear 'tis but a halt, To clean his "going train."

* * * * *

O, brave Big Ben, that keep'st true step Thus with the tide of time, Long may'st thou to the Commons set Example so sublime; That England, both of House below And Clock above, may say, 'Tis no vain boast that to the world She shows the time of day!

May headlong Wits, that on the seats Under the Clock may show, Learn by its even beat above To tune hot brains below. And never hold up hands unless The voice of truth to swell; Nor strike, except at the right hour, And then strike strokes that tell.

[Sidenote: _Cabs v. Omnibuses_]

Complaints against the public vehicles of London and their drivers continue, but are hardly pitched in so strident a tone as in earlier years. Still the brigandage of competitive 'buses is severely denounced in 1858; the extent of the evil may be gauged from the drastic regulations issued in the autumn of 1860, so drastic as to excite compassion for the conductor who faithfully carried them out.

_Punch's_ hostility to the "growler" and its bibulous and rapacious driver as the first of all London nuisances remained implacable. A report was circulated at the close of 1869 that their final disappearance was imminent; it was nearly fifty years too "previous," but the wish being father to the thought, _Punch_ indulged in a premature farewell to this "unseemly vehicle". With the advent of "clean cabs and civil drivers" he anticipated that no one would ever think of entering an omnibus, little thinking that a time would come when, with clean and swift 'buses, only the affluent would think of entering a taxi-cab.

The placidity which one associates with mid-Victorian life was rudely disturbed in London by the garrotting scare in the 'sixties. Complaints of the inefficiency of the police and attacks on the Commissioner are frequent in those years. Yet street accidents were far fewer, and, on the whole, it cannot be maintained that London has become safer to live in. The mention of the police reminds one that the tall hat was discarded in 1865 for the helmet, a sensible change which was at first met with undeserved ridicule. The possibility of a strike of policemen at the end of 1872 seemed to _Punch_ so incredible that he declined to treat it seriously.