PART I

THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK

HIGH POLITICS

The pageant of the Victorian age reached its grand climacteric in the period on which we now enter. As a "drum and trumpet chronicle" the history of the eighteen years from 1874 to 1892 was void of any British military operations on the grand scale. Of the names Kandahar, Maiwand, Isandhlwana, Majuba, Khartoum and Tel-el-Kebir only the first and last minister to our complacency. Yet the achievements of Lord Roberts in the two Afghan campaigns were splendid examples of bold leadership and British endurance, and Lord Wolseley's suppression of the revolt of Arabi was more than efficient. In the mid 'seventies Germany came perilously near forcing a fresh war on France; but the influence of the British Crown and Government was largely instrumental in averting the calamity. We were twice on the verge of war with Russia in 1878, first in April after the Treaty of San Stefano at the close of the Russo-Turkish war, and second in July over Russia's intervention in Afghanistan. The country was divided, for while there had been a revival of the old distrust of Russia, Gladstone had thrown the whole weight of his influence into the campaign of protest against the "Bulgarian atrocities." The Government, on the whole, steered a middle course between the "Jingoes" and those who supported Gladstone's "bag and baggage" policy towards the Turks. At the height of the Tory Press campaign against Russia, Lord Salisbury, in a speech in the City, observed: "It has been generally acknowledged to be madness to go to war for an idea, but it is yet more unsatisfactory to go to war against a nightmare." _Punch_, who was never pro-Russian, but at the moment was strongly anti-Turk, interpreted this saying as a caution against Jingo scaremongering.

In one of the earliest of his cartoons on the possibility of war over the Eastern question, he represented Disraeli standing on the edge of a precipice with Britannia, asking her to move "just a leetle nearer." Britannia declines to move one inch farther, adding, "I'm a good deal nearer than is pleasant already." But four months later, in May, 1878, when he showed Britannia between two advisers, Disraeli and Bright[1]--the former wearing a sword camouflaged with an olive wreath--_Punch_ supported neither, but applauded the third Voice, that of Neutrality. Professorial intervention he resented strongly; and severely rebuked Freeman, the historian, for a violent and unpatriotic speech. In fine, he was equally down on the blatant bunkum of the music-halls and the ill-considered agitation of fussy Pacificists; on War-Donkeys and Peace-Donkeys; "Asses are asses, whether bound in Lion or in Calf."

[Footnote 1: Bright had recently made a vehement speech at Manchester against the Turks. It was about the same time that he described Lord Salisbury as "prostrating his intellect (to Lord Beaconsfield) in hope of a succession that might never come."]

But if in Europe Great Britain never got beyond the stage of naval demonstrations and the summoning of troops from India, these eighteen years were not devoid of great as well as spectacular events. They opened with the triumphant return to power of Disraeli, admirably symbolized in Tenniel's great cartoon of the chariot driver and his fallen rival, and with his efforts to translate into practical politics his grandiose doctrines of Imperialism. He made the Queen Empress of India, he riveted our hold on the Suez Canal by the opportune purchase of the Khedive's shares in 1875; he claimed to have brought back "Peace with Honour" from the Berlin Congress of 1878, the year which marked the zenith of his power and the beginning of its decline. The twelve years that followed Gladstone's success at the polls in 1880 were crowded with momentous events; the rise and ferment of the new nationalities abroad; the advent of new champions and gladiators in the political arena at home--Parnell and Randolph Churchill and Chamberlain. In the sphere of domestic politics Ireland dominated the scene. Parliamentary obstruction was raised to a high art; the activities of the physical force extremists culminated in the tragedy of the Phoenix Park murders, and the history of the next few years is written in the two words Coercion and Conciliation, which split the Liberal Party, brought back the Conservatives to power in 1886, and under the Balfourian _régime_ restored a certain measure of peace and prosperity to Ireland. Lord Beaconsfield's "spirited foreign policy" had been largely reversed under Gladstone, and the results did not nourish our national pride. The handling of our frontier troubles in India had at least the support of some of the wisest Anglo-Indian experts, but our magnanimity to the Boers after Majuba was not merely open to the charge of craven-spiritedness, it paved the way to further troubles. It has been said that "any fool can annex"; but it needs a wise man to know when to grant autonomy. Moreover, the loyalty of Gladstone's supporters--including _Punch_--was strained to the uttermost by the disastrous failure of the attempt to relieve Gordon at Khartoum. The full knowledge now available makes it clear that Gordon's appointment was a risky experiment--that his judgment was not equal to his nobility of character--but the months and months of procrastination and vacillation, and the inadequacy of the relieving force when dispatched, cannot be explained away. It was just one of those situations which warranted the old gibe against Gladstone's "three courses." There were moments, and this was one of the most searching, in which he was mentally incapable of "seeing his duty, a dead sure thing" and going for it "there and then" in the way in which plain men with plain minds would have done.

When we add to this brief summary the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, the passing of Lord Beaconsfield and Bright among the elder statesmen, and the tragic eclipse of Parnell, it will be seen that there was enough and more than enough to engage the pen and pencil of _Punch_ as a political and social chronicler. Mention has already been made of our thorny relations with Russia. With regard to Germany, the attitude of England might be described as one of reluctant admiration punctuated by moments of misgiving. These moments were not infrequent in the days of the old Emperor; they ceased during the brief reign of his son, only to recur in a more acute form when Kaiser Wilhelm II "dropped the pilot," made it clear that he intended not only to rule but govern, and by his meteoric versatility and frequent references to his divine mission and to the Germans as the chosen race, awakened the world to the emergence of a new and formidable promoter of European unrest. Our relations with France were correct rather than cordial; her _rapprochement_ with Russia did not make for popularity on this side of the Channel; but in the main English observers read the inner meaning of the Boulanger episode aright, and without exactly exulting over his collapse, were relieved by his failure to revive a military dictatorship.

By way of filling in this rough outline with more detail, we may note that Gladstone's resignation of the Liberal leadership at the close of 1874 was regarded by _Punch_ as premature. In one of the first cartoons in the next year Dizzy is shown saying good-bye to his great antagonist: "Sorry to lose you! I _began_ with books; you're _ending_ with them. Perhaps you're the wiser of the two." Perhaps he would have been--in the ultimate verdict of posterity--had his decision been final. But _Punch_ was right in regarding Gladstone as an unspent force, and in his regretful and affectionate farewell clearly indicates a hope of his return:--

Will he who, from Llandudno's calm retreat Late burst, at once, on battle and defeat, Will he, though Harcourt gird, and Granville pray, Himself the Leader's truncheon fling away, Still in his prime of power, unbent by years, Renounce the joy of battle with his peers, Unmoved by _Punch's_ counsel, or his prayer, Nor to his realm relinquished name an heir?

[Sidenote: _The New Shepherd_]

Lord Hartington, moved by public spirit rather than ambition or enthusiasm, undertook what in the circumstances was the far from enviable task of leading the Liberals. _Punch_ hit off the situation truly enough in the cartoon in which Bright hands the crook of leadership to the "New Shepherd"--and Hartington in his smock-frock replies, "Hey, but Measter!--Where be the sheep?"

The parallel is followed up in the doggerel lines:--

The Marquis Bo-Peep Herds the Liberal Sheep-- If he only knew where to find them. Will they ever come home And--please Home Rule and Rome-- Bring their Irish tails behind them?

_Punch_, always concerned with the dignity of the Mother of Parliaments, was from the very outset exasperated by the increasing levity and obstructiveness of the new House. The levity he satirized in a series of burlesque entertainments with Mr. Whalley as call-boy and Dr. Kenealy as gasman. Dr. Kenealy's efforts to re-open the Tichborne case ended in absurdity--his motion being supported by only two members, Mr. Whalley and Major O'Gorman, that gigantic playboy of the West.[2] Obstruction, another and far more serious matter, was soon organized into a science, and led to repeated scenes of which more anon. Of the new Ministers, Mr. Ward Hunt, the First Lord, was especially singled out for attack because of his cavalier treatment of the loss of the _Vanguard_ and the Admiralty's Fugitive Slave Circulars. _A propos_ of the former, _Punch_ represented Neptune warning Britannia that there would be a row if she did not rule the waves properly. The Fugitive Slave question led to protracted debates and much hostile criticism. In October, 1875, a cartoon shows a slave crawling on board a British warship and clinging to the flagstaff, while Ward Hunt, popping up from the companion, observes: "A runaway slave, John. You'll have to give him up, you know! See our Circular of July 31." John Bull retorts: "Give 'im up, yer Honour!! As well order me to haul down that there flag at once!!!" A fortnight later Ward Hunt is made to reply to his friend _Punch_:--

We haven't hauled down the British Flag (See one of your recent productions), But we've chosen the other alternative-- We've hauled down our Mis-instructions.

[Footnote 2: Major O'Gorman does not appear in the D.N.B. But he inspired an immortal comment from a sympathetic compatriot, who calling to inquire about the Major's progress during a serious illness, was told that he was being kept up by periodic teaspoonfuls of brandy. "Tayspoons!" was the indignant retort. "And what use 'ud a tayspoon be, sthrayin' about in such a wilderness of a man?"]

_Punch's_ view, expressed in comments on the debate in the following February, was that the matter should be left in the discretion of captains--as it had been for thirty-six years. He declared, not without reason, that both circulars were virtually dead, and that the country would not stand them. Meanwhile the growth of the German Navy, which in his earlier years _Punch_ had persistently ridiculed and belittled, had begun to excite attention and misgiving; _Punch_, though a Liberal, was a "big Navy" man, and, early in 1875, was concerned with the dangers of our falling behind in the race of naval armaments:--

RULE, GERMANIA!

_The Times_ informs us that, of "iron-clad cruisers of the strongest type, Germany will, in the present year, have seven built against five of our own navy." The _Pall Mall Gazette_ is of opinion that "the Germans have too many irons in the political fire to give exclusive attention to any one of them."

But very soon, unless we get beforehand with the Germans, will they not have too many irons in the water, too?

The restoration of the monarchy in Spain under Alfonso XII, in the same year, also gave _Punch_ occasion for serious thought. We may pass over the cartoon representing John Bull's anxiety about Spanish bonds as a satire on British commercialism. But there is shrewd political insight in the picture of Alfonso between two fires--Bismarck and the Pope. The German Chancellor makes his support conditional on the withdrawal of the anti-Protestant edicts; while the Pope, on the other hand, maintains the claims of his Church.

In 1876 the Queen assumed the title of Empress of India; Disraeli went to the Lords as Earl of Beaconsfield, Sir Stafford Northcote succeeding him as Leader of the House of Commons; and the "Bulgarian Atrocities" proved the first phase in the conflict which made the Balkans the cockpit of Europe for over forty years. _Punch_ did not cavil at Disraeli's earldom, though he thought his refusal of the Garter in 1878 well calculated rather than modest. He suggests, moreover, that Earl of Coningsby would have been a better title; and in the cartoon headed, "Empress and Earl, or One Good Turn deserves Another," shows Dizzy kneeling to the Queen and saying, "Thank your Majesty! I might have had it before! _Now_ I think I have _earned_ it!" More sympathetic are the verses in which _Punch_ describes the realization of Disraeli's triple dream of success in Fashion, Letters and Politics--the dream that inspired him when he was only an articled clerk and a Jew boy:--

After forty years' fighting, he steps from the fire To the height scarcely scaled in his Old Jewry dream; Adds a third to his two wreaths of boyish desire, Though sore set against him the stress of the stream.

And all who can honour faith, patience, and power And the strenuous purpose that runs a life through Like a muscle of iron, are glad of the hour That sees his hand close on the honour his due!

Mr. Gladstone was now employing his leisure by felling trees at Hawarden, and the contrast lent point to one of Tenniel's happiest cartoons--that of "The Earl and the Woodman"; Disraeli, in his earl's robes and coronet, contemplates Gladstone arrayed _à la_ Watteau, and observes with emotion: "How happy is this blithe peasant, whilst I, alas!----" (Dissembles.) _Punch_, however, was becoming more sceptical of the genuineness of Gladstone's desire for retirement, and in a parody of "You are old, Father William," scouts the notion of his prematurely posing as a Nestor.

The Balkan trouble led to a violent conflict of public opinion in which _Punch_ sided whole-heartedly with Gladstone against those, and they were many, who upheld the traditional view of the "Gentlemen's party," that the Turk was the only "gentleman" in the Near East, and that he might do what he liked with his own. Disraeli's scepticism; his professed inability to find any "atrocities" in official reports; and his dismissal as "coffee-house babble" of evidence brought by a Bulgarian to a vice-Consul, roused _Punch's_ indignation against the Premier and his official informants. It was a "hideous subject" of which Government had heard a good deal and was likely to hear a good deal more:--

Let _Punch_ speak his mind in this matter. Political partisanship and party spirit are both at low, as well as lukewarm, water in England just now; but, if anything will fire John Bull's blood to fever heat, it is such horrors as have been perpetrated in Bulgaria--and part of his wrath will assuredly be visited on those who have striven to interpose official blinds or buffers between England and the sight or shock of these horrors.... The head of Her Majesty's Opposition asserted for the Newspaper Correspondents the credit which English common sense and experience unite to claim for them.

Contemporary records--including the files of _Punch_--do not bear out the statement about the lukewarmness of party spirit. The country was acutely divided, and dissatisfaction with Sir H. Elliot, our Ambassador at Constantinople, prompted _Punch's_ retort, when Lord Beaconsfield declared that the Bulgarian atrocities were "beyond recall," "Yes, but your Ambassador isn't." Gladstone is rebuked for hiding in his tent; but he made amends by launching his famous, though sadly premature, phrase about clearing the Turk out of Europe, "bag and baggage."

[Sidenote: _Neutrality under Difficulties_]

Serbia's resistance was soon overcome, but the Powers forced Turkey to grant her an armistice, and largely through Great Britain's influence, a Conference was held at Constantinople where Lord Salisbury was our representative. A short breathing-space was thus gained, but the Conference was abortive, and war between Russia and Turkey broke out in 1877. _Punch_ was in rather a delicate position: for while distinctly anti-Turk, he had never trusted Russia. Thus, while assailing the _Daily Telegraph_, _Pall Mall Gazette_ and _Morning Post_ for their Chauvinism, and the Tory press generally for their campaign against Russia and their support of the "veracious Turk," he was hardly less severe in his strictures on the belligerent humanitarians who would have welcomed pro-Russian intervention. _Punch_ advocated neutrality, but he was fully alive to the difficulties of the situation, and expressed them in a cartoon in which the British Lion is exhibited in a bothered mood, distrustful of Russia, and unable to make out what the Government meant, or the Opposition either. In his comments on the debate on Mr. Gladstone's resolution, _Punch_ deplores the weakness and dissensions of the Opposition and supports the bolder spirits. Many years were to elapse before Lord Salisbury made his remarkable speech about our having "backed the wrong horse," i.e. Turkey, in the Crimean War. That speech proved that _Punch_ was fully justified in seizing on the caution which the same speaker had given nearly twenty years earlier. For Lord Salisbury declared in 1897 that the defence of the diplomacy of 1878 lay in its traditional character, not in its inherent excellence, and that neither he nor Lord Beaconsfield was free from misgivings as to its results. The music halls have not often enriched the language with permanent additions, but they added "Jingo" and "Jingoism" in 1877. _Punch's_ comment on Macdermott's famous song is instructive. It was inspired by a reference in the Paris _Figaro_:--

On the back page of the _Figaro_ is given one verse in English, with the music, of that "War Song" of the Music Halls, which just now enjoys its share of popularity with "_Nancy Lee_," and "_Jeremiah, Blow the Fire_," and a translation of the whole song into French, of which the _Figaro_ says apologetically, "_Des vers français n'auraient pu arriver à la sauvage énergie de l'original_." The chorus of the song, as sung by most of our London street-boys, instead of "_They all do it_," and "_Woa Emma_," recently shelved, is this:--

"We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do," etc. And the translation, which "_n'aurait pu arriver à la sauvage énergie de l'original_," is:

"_Nous ne voulons pas la guerre, mais, par Dieu! si nous combattons_," etc.

If "_par Dieu_!" is not to an Englishman's thinking rather more savagely energetic than "By Jingo!" then words are meaningless. If "_par Dieu_!" is to be accepted as an equivalent, and as, after all, rather a weak equivalent for "by Jingo!" then either the Frenchman has a very low idea of the Englishman's religion, or his "_Dieu_" means nothing more, ordinarily, than our "Jingo." But "Jingo" is not a savagely energetic exclamation, nor is the true feeling of this country to be gauged by the popularity of a Music-Hall song.

_Punch_ was both right and wrong. The music halls are not a true index of the political sagacity of the country; but he did not foresee that the refrain of this particular song would survive, by virtue of its very blatancy, as a terse summary of national complacency. At the same time he paid homage to its merits by printing a neat Latin rendering from the pen of an Etonian:--

_Inviti quamquam saevo confligere bello, Adsit opus, Jingo testamur Bellipotentem, Sunt nobis nummi, sunt agmina, tela, carinae._

[Sidenote: _Indian Troops in Europe_]

The intervention of amateur diplomatists, clerical or professorial, however well-meant, was firmly and impolitely discouraged when Turkey and Russia were at death grips at Plevna. Early in 1878 _Punch_ endeavoured to turn such efforts into ridicule, as instances of "self-election of the unfittest." Still the naval demonstration in Besika Bay found _Punch_ in his most pacific mood, applauding Lord Carnarvon, who with Lord Derby had resigned, and condemning Lord Beaconsfield's dangerous action and unconvincing explanations. The calling out of the Reserves still further increased _Punch's_ anxiety, and inspired a "Proclamation" calling for self-restraint. When it was announced that Carlyle had joined Bright and the Duke of Westminster in signing a petition against war, _Punch_ noted that the old sage of Chelsea was anything but a lover of peace at any price. But the incident which perturbed him and other critics of the Government more than anything else was the bringing of a contingent of Indian troops to Europe. _Punch_ vigorously supported Gladstone, who held the action of the Government to be not merely provocative but unconstitutional. When the troops were re-shipped to India, he published a sarcastic inscription, to be engraved on a monument on Primrose Hill commemorating an exploit which had cost £750,000. It seems a little sum to us with our profligate habit of thinking in millions, but the frugal taxpayer of the 'seventies, as represented by _Punch_, thought it a monstrous extravagance. The inscription is too long to quote in its entirety, but we may give the peroration:--

So, having more than fulfilled The Expectations of those who imported them And who, after having transferred them to Cyprus, Found themselves considerably embarrassed What next to do with them, They were re-shipped, quietly and unobtrusively, To the general mystification of Europe For the Land of their Birth; Whence, Though they have merited the Admiration of Some And the Respect of Many, And have left behind them An Election Cry to All, It is to be hoped that they will never again visit The Western Dominions of their Imperial Mistress Who, through the mouth of _Punch_ Gladly bids them _Adieu_! Not _Au Revoir_.

_Heu vatum ignarae mentes!_ But _Punch_, who printed this acid _jeu d'esprit_ on August 3, 1878, could hardly be expected to foresee the need of August 4, 1914.

The year 1878 marked the zenith of Lord Beaconsfield's prestige, for it was the year of the Berlin Congress--from which he claimed to have brought back "Peace with Honour"--and of the annexation of Cyprus. _Punch_, however, was always suspicious of Dizzy's phrases and preferred to symbolize the results of the Congress in a _Pas de Deux_ by Lord Beaconsfield and Lord Salisbury, both Gartered, and in a rhymed dialogue complacently referring to their egg-dance. The Afghan trouble was assuming a menacing aspect, finely typified in Charles Keene's cartoon, "The Shadow on the Hills." _Punch_ applauded vigilance, but distrusted the Government's intentions, deprecated the spirited policy which involved "a vague and boundless adventure of annexation," and showed Lord Beaconsfield leading John Bull by the nose in search of a "scientific frontier"--another Disraelian phrase--and the Ameer of Afghanistan, between the Bear and the Lion, exclaiming, "Save me from my friends."

The Transvaal had been annexed by Sir Theophilus Shepstone in the previous year, but _Punch_ had received Lord Carnarvon's announcement with acquiescence rather than enthusiasm.

[Sidenote: _Bismarck's Creed_]

On the other hand, the visit of the Australian cricket team in 1878 furnished him with an occasion for paying tribute to the progress and enlightenment of the Colonies and acknowledging England's debt to their loyalty.

The services of King Edward as a promoter of the _Entente_ with France date back to the same year, in which as Prince of Wales he is represented in a _Pas de Trois_ with the Republic and Marshal MacMahon. _Punch_ applauded the visit, but rebuked the flunkeyism of the accounts given by the Paris correspondent of _The Times_. For the moment Germany's home rather than her foreign policy engrossed attention, for this was the time of the _Kulturkampf_ and the campaign against Socialism. Bismarck is shown in one cartoon squeezing down the Socialist Jack-in-the-Box. These repressive measures were deprecated by _Punch_, and a few months later he commented ironically on Bismarck's _rapprochement_ with the Papacy, the cartoon "Of one mind (for once!)" showing Bismarck and the Pope barring the door against Socialism and Democracy. The reminiscences of the notorious Dr. Busch had appeared, and _Punch_ based on them a bitter set of verses, "The Pious Chancellor's Creed," adapted from one of Lowell's _Biglow Papers_:--

I do believe in subtle skill Disguised as brutal frankness; And the display of ruthless will In rowdy _Reiter_-rankness. As well shirk shedding blood for fear Of staining God's pure daisies, As strive to rule this lower sphere By sentimental phrases.

I hold the great Germanic race Is Heaven's favourite bantling, Supreme in virile power and grace And breadth of moral scantling. The Franks are hounds, their women pigs Gr-r-r! I the vain vile vermin hate! I'd squelch them--but for pap-soul'd prigs Who funk the word exterminate.

Bismarck was alive and formidable. Thiers and Pio Nono passed away in 1877 and 1878. The services of the French Statesman are tersely summed up in the stanza:--

Monarchy loving much, he loved yet more The realm, whoe'er its badge of headship wore; And, waiving self, was willing to abide That rule which Frenchmen would the least divide.

In the accompanying cartoon France is seen laying a wreath on the tomb inscribed "_Libérateur de la Patrie, 1872_," while the shades of monarchists and Communards are seen in the background. The tribute to Pius IX is kindly but not uncritical. He had outlived the patriotic Liberalism of his younger self:--

Happy that one thing he did _not_ outlive, The charitable soul, the kindly heart, That rigid dogma's slaves could scarce forgive, Fearing lest he might play them Balaam's part,

And bless whom he should curse; and so they drew Their bonds about him closer day by day Living or dying, till no will he knew But theirs, and as they pointed, marked the way.

In Home Politics Ireland largely dominated the scene during the latter half of the Beaconsfield administration. As early as 1876 _Punch_ had dealt faithfully with the plea advanced on behalf of political prisoners in the following caustic argument:--

Killing is no murder if complicated with treason. That renders it a mere misdemeanour. A military offence, simply capital, becomes a minor offence when treasonable besides. Treason is an extenuating circumstance of mutiny and murder, and its commission in committing those crimes reduces murderers and mutineers to political offenders. Therefore, instead of being hanged or shot, they ought, if punished at all, and not, on the contrary, rewarded, to be condemned to nothing worse than temporary seclusion, and should, all of them, after a merely nominal imprisonment, be respectfully released.

[Sidenote: _Obstruction and the Remedy_]

This was a logical and ironical _reductio ad absurdum_; yet _Punch_ lived to see it translated into practical politics forty years later. In 1877 the scientific obstruction practised by the Irish Party in the House of Commons prompted a whole series of cartoons. In one Parnell, Biggar and Callan appear as "Erin's Three Graces." In another a drove of Irish pigs (including Whalley) are shown blocking the railway line of Parliament. In a third _Punch_ bids schoolmaster Northcote to take down not the words, but something else of the obstructives. Commenting on the twenty-six hours' sitting in July, 1877, in which the House was held up by a group of obstructives that never rose above seven, _Punch_ observes:--

Four Chairmen--Raikes, Childers, Sir H. Selwin-Ibbetson, and W. H. Smith--were used up in the night-watches, and the House was kept, by relays, against the "Dauntless Three"--for Gray, Callan, Nolan and Kirk are but recruits to the banner of Biggar, Parnell and O'Donnell, the standard-bearers of Obstruction. All pretence of argument was early abandoned; and it became a mere contest of endurance, varied by episodes of more or less--generally less--lively squabbling and chaff--if such a word may be used of anything that passes in the august Temple of Legislation. All this while the new Standing Orders seemed, by tacit consent, set aside; and Parnell, Biggar and O'Donnell moved the Chairman out of the Chair, or report of progress, again and again. And yet the Leader of the House had the rod of suspension in his hand, though he forbore to use it, preferring the _reductio ad absurdum_ of such a night's match between the toughness of the House and the tenacity of its Obstructives. Once only he went so far as to threaten more summary proceedings, on which, they say, O'Donnell collapsed. Of course, the great O denies it.

But why, _Punch_ must again ask, allow debates to be degraded to a farce, and the House to a bear-garden? Go to his Cartoon, ye squeamish, and be wise. With the rod in the Speaker's hands, it is not the Obstructives' _words_ that _Punch_ would have taken down. The House sat from four o'clock on Tuesday till six on Wednesday.

The announcement of Mr. Gladstone's visit to Ireland later on in the year prompted a burlesque account of what his omniscience and omnivorous thirst for information would enable him to achieve. Nor could _Punch_ be moved to treat seriously O'Donovan Rossa's threat to introduce osmic acid--a forerunner of tear-shells--into the House of Commons. But it was beginning to be difficult to joke about Ireland, and there was grim point in Keene's picture of the native reassuring the English angler who hadn't a licence for salmon: "Sure ye might kill a man or two about here an' nobody'd say a word t'ye."

The death of Isaac Butt in the spring of 1879 marked the final close of the moderate stage of Parliamentary agitation; the reins of leadership had already passed into the hands of a bolder, more masterful and uncompromising chief--the "uncrowned King," as he was called, till the days of Committee Room 15. Moreover, discontent was aggravated by genuine distress in the South and West of Ireland, and here, unfortunately, benevolence was hampered by party politics, for the violent speeches made by Parnell in America at the close of 1879 were not exactly designed to assist the Duchess of Marlborough's Relief Fund. According to _Punch_, however, in his comments on "Irish Obstructives to Irish Aid," these speeches failed to influence the American public:--

[Sidenote: _The Zulu War_]

Uncle Sam is showing his sense by sending his liberal contributions in relief of Irish distress through all channels except the cruelly warped ones of Messrs. Parnell and Dillon. The arch-agitator has the impudence to accuse the Duchess of Marlborough's and all other relief agencies, except his own, of political bias. This is the Gracchi complaining of sedition with a vengeance! Pigs, we know, cut their own throats in trying to keep their heads above water. This Irish Mis-leader seems involuntarily to be imitating the short-sighted Irish animal. If any man _could_ have frozen the current of charity--in New World and Old--it would be such a bitter and malignant advocate of mutual hate, civil strife, anarchy, and insecurity of life and property, as CHARLES STEWART PARNELL.

Ireland was only one of many embarrassments to the Beaconsfield administration in its closing years. Early in that year _Punch_ published a cartoon on "Bull and his burdens"--John Bull as a patient ox carrying Russia; the Ameer; the Turk; a Glasgow Bank Director (commemorating a recent discreditable financial disaster); a striker; and last of all a Zulu jumping on behind. For this was the year of the unhappy Zulu war, which _Punch_ described as "one of the costliest blunders of modern times"--it cost ten millions--and again as "alike unnecessary, costly, and disastrous." He saw in Isandhlwana not merely a tragedy but a lesson, and enforced it in a cartoon showing a Zulu warrior writing on a slate, "Despise not your enemy." The accompanying verses, while deprecating rashness, assert that the dead must be honoured and avenged. The heroes of Rorke's Drift, Chard and Bromhead, are duly acclaimed, but _Punch_, true to an old and honourable tradition, prints a letter on behalf of the non-combatant officers who gallantly took part in the defence. As the only rampart which they had was made of meal-bags, _Punch_ ingeniously applies to them the phrase, "_Couvert de gloire et de farine_," which Voltaire had used of Frederick the Great, who spent his first battle sheltering in a mill behind sacks of flour. Cetewayo, the Zulu chieftain, was subsequently captured, brought to London and lionized, _Punch_ observing that "the great Farini [the _impresario_ who introduced Zazel, the acrobat who was shot from a cannon] suggests that he should be exhibited at the Aquarium."

Throughout the war and afterwards _Punch_ was a harsh and ungenerous critic of the policy of Sir Bartle Frere, whom he regarded as a prancing proconsul and nothing more. Nor was _Punch_ much happier in his treatment of the painful episode of the death of the Prince Imperial who, whether owing to his own rashness or the negligence or loss of nerve of his escort, fell to the assegais of the Zulus. _Punch's_ inveterate anti-Imperialism is betrayed even in the memorial verses:--

Talk not of plots and plans that, ripening slow, Are by this death struck down with blast and blight; We have no thought but for that mother's woe, The darkness of that childless widow's night.

Unfortunately, the raising of the question of a memorial to the Prince in Westminster Abbey induced _Punch_ to abandon his resolve of reticence, and prompted other "thoughts," which he expressed with more vigour than good taste. There is no proof that the suggestion emanated from Dean Stanley, as _Punch_ implies, though the Dean certainly favoured a proposal for which a strong precedent could be found in the burial in Henry VII's chapel of the Duc de Montpensier (the younger brother of Louis Philippe) who died an exile in England in 1807. Public opinion was divided, but democratic sentiment prevailed, and in deference to a hostile vote in the Commons the scheme was withdrawn.

[Sidenote: _Turnerelli's "Tribute"_]

The waning splendours of the Beaconsfield _régime_ were not revived by the launching of one of the last of his phrases, "_Imperium et Libertas_." _Punch_ only saw in it "the catchword of a self-seeking swaggerer." Great men suffer much at the hands of injudicious admirers, and the "People's Tribute" to Lord Beaconsfield organized by an amiable enthusiast, heavily weighted by the unpropitious name of Tracy Turnerelli, must have been a sore trial to the Premier, while it supplied _Punch_ with food for mirth for the best part of a year. The subscriptions of the million were invited to purchase a gold wreath, but after a little while Mr. Turnerelli had to appeal for further funds to clear off a deficit. Later on, when the Tribute had been finally refused by Lord Beaconsfield, Mr. Turnerelli offered to hand over the wreath to one of our great national museums, if a suitable case were provided. He also suggested that he might be reimbursed for his out-of-pocket expenses in getting up the Tribute. _Punch_ recommended that he should pocket the affront and hand over the "Tribute" to Madame Tussaud's, where he had already appeared in wax. This is what actually happened, and in November, 1879, _Punch_ sardonically records the fulfilment of his suggestion.

The disquieting news from the Afghan frontier led to a serious attack on the Government early in 1880, an attack in which _Punch_ vigorously joined, publishing a list of questions all animated by misgiving and by distrust of Lord Beaconsfield's phrases and Lord Lytton's policy and silence. The tension was relieved by Lord Roberts' famous march to Kandahar, and on his return to England in the autumn _Punch_ represented him as snowed under by invitations to complimentary banquets, and invoked the shade of Wellington to congratulate him on his celerity. Meanwhile, however, Parliament had been dissolved in March, and the verdict of 1874 completely reversed at the General Election. _Punch_ hailed Gladstone triumphing with his axe over Lord Dalkeith, and borne aloft on a shield by Harcourt, Hartington, and Bright, under the heading, "Hail to the Chief." As a pendant we have the cartoons in which Lord Beaconsfield is eclipsed by the sun of Liberalism or watches the sinking of the sun of Popularity, and the verses in which the parting Sphinx soliloquizes on his methods of leadership--appeals to sentiment and passion and the deft use and reiteration of phrases which intoxicate the masses.

When the House reassembled, it was to find the Irish Question still further complicated by the activities of the Land League and the No Rent Campaign. There was also another burning question--that of the Parliamentary Oath--which the return of Mr. Bradlaugh made a matter of urgency. _Punch_, as the "sturdiest of Protestants, was perforce the staunch supporter of the right of private judgment which is the corner-stone of Protestantism." Also he frankly admitted that he had no desire to see Mr. Bradlaugh made a martyr. His point of view is developed with refreshing common sense in the following argument:--

The House has swallowed such a succession of camels, Quakers and Separatists, Moravians and Jews, Latitudinarians and Platitudinarians, Unitarians and Humanitarians, Anythingarians and Nothingarians, and now it is straining over such a gnat as poor Mr. Bradlaugh, natural representative of the Northampton Shoemakers, who object to the immortality of the Sole, and spell the word indifferently with or without a "u" and an "e."

The time has surely passed when the House should seek shelter against objectionable beliefs or unbeliefs, behind such delusive defences as oaths and tests. "Let the Swearers swear, and the Sayers say," the Law has proclaimed, in all Courts. Why, then, not in the High Court of Parliament--the Court of Courts--the very conduit and fountain-head of Law?

[Sidenote: _Irish Troubles_]

Unluckily the collective wisdom of the House was slow to accept this view, and the inevitable conclusion was only arrived at after a great expenditure of time and a great loss of temper. Bradlaugh was ejected and finally admitted; but the pacification of Ireland seemed farther off than ever. Gladstone was anxious to proceed with the further instalment of his policy of conciliation inaugurated by the Disestablishment of the Irish Church in his previous administration, but _Punch_ summed up his difficulties pretty accurately in the cartoon of November 20, 1880, in which Law tells Liberty to wait until Ireland first learned to respect her. _Punch_ regarded the Land League as sheer anarchy; it was the League and not the Government who practised Coercion. He summoned up the shade of Dan O'Connell to condemn outrages and the tyranny of "Captain Moonlight." But posthumous evocations are seldom of any avail; and O'Connell's was no longer a name to conjure with. In the year 1880, "Boycott" ceased to be a surname, and became an engine of political intimidation, while in the House obstructionist methods continued, culminating in the suspension of some thirty Irish M.P.s _en masse_ early in 1881. Irish "scenes" were frequent and only excited _Punch's_ disgust. At the same time he administered a severe rap over the knuckles to the "Honourable the Irish Society of London" for maladministering their funds, pauperizing prosperous towns and neglecting to subsidize deserving poverty or encourage Irish industries. The appeal to the Queen, the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke of Connaught to visit Ireland, signed, "Larry Doolan of the Irish Jaunting Car," is shorn of all its cogency by the Transpontine Donnybrook Fair language in which it is couched. _Punch_ has been a frequent offender in this respect; and also in his representations of the Irish peasant. It did not really help the cause of Unionism to portray Fenians and Land Leaguers with baboon-like faces. Dan O'Connell, whom _Punch_ again evoked from the shades, this time to play Virgil to Gladstone's Dante in the Irish "Inferno," though he was a potato-faced Irishman, would have resented this method of criticism. As a matter of fact, _Punch_ was so seriously remonstrated with for his Irish cartoons that he published a long article in self-defence and justification of his methods, maintaining that he never hit the weaker side because it _was_ the weaker side, but because that side at the time appeared to be in the wrong:--

[Sidenote: _Punch and Ireland_]

The Ogreish character is the embodiment of the spirit of Lawlessness, of Anarchy, and of that Communism which, by its recent No Rent manifesto, has now drawn down upon itself the just condemnation of such men as the Archbishops of Dublin and Cashel. Houghing and mutilating dumb animals, maiming men and women, and shooting defenceless victims, are ugly crimes, and the embodiment of them in one single figure cannot be made too hideous or too repulsive. On the other hand, _Punch_ has consistently and persistently kept before the public his ideal classic figure of Hibernia, graceful, gentle, tender, loving but "distressful," as being more or less in fear of that Ogre, her evil genius, from whose bondage may she soon be free; and then, mistress of herself, with peace and plenty in her land, blessed with wise Administration and Local Government, in happy and unbroken union with her sister, England, with a regal residence in her midst, may she see the emerald gem of the Western World set glittering in the crown of one who will be no longer a stranger.

_Punch_ was moved to return to the subject in September, 1882, in order to repel the attacks made on him by the _Spectator_ and the _Nineteenth Century_. The latter had not been sparing of rebuke:--

"No savages have ever been so mercilessly held up to loathing mockery as the Irish peasants by the one comic paper in Europe which has been most honourably distinguished for its restraint and decorum and good nature."

Here the defence takes the form of an imaginary trial before L.J. Public Opinion, in which Hibernia gives evidence in _Punch's_ favour on the strength of cartoons published from 1844 onwards. Of course, _Punch_ is acquitted and pronounced to have triumphantly refuted a calumnious attack. This much, however, must be admitted to _Punch's_ credit, that he did not regard the campaign of outrage and defiance of the Law in Ireland as a reason for withholding remedial legislation, but supported Gladstone's measures designed to promote a settlement of the Land question.

Over the war with the Transvaal in 1881 _Punch_ found it hard to find the _justum medium_. The true estimate of the situation was no more to be found in the view of the "excellent law-abiding people who would send off a British army of 15,000 men to crush out a rebellious enterprise," than in the demands of the enthusiastic humanitarians who would give "a struggling community their legitimate liberty." _Punch_ frankly admitted that the Boers had been brutal to the natives, had shown an inability to govern themselves, and by their unfitness either to establish or extend civilization had almost jeopardized the hold of the white man on South Africa altogether. Yet he supported the Boers in their contention that the Proclamation of Sir Theophilus Shepstone in 1877 was invalid. There was wrong and right upon both sides. Writing in January, 1881, he expressed the hope that a pacific settlement might be arrived at by a Cabinet "not deficient either in the ready pluck which deals with pressing danger or the quieter courage that is not afraid of timely compromise." These hopes were not fulfilled, and _Punch's_ confidence in the pluck and courage of the Gladstone Cabinet was severely shaken in 1884 and 1885. In 1881 he was hardly a true interpreter of public opinion in his comments on the disaster of Majuba, when he excused the British defeat by the valour of the Boers. The cartoon, "_Fas est et ab Hoste_," and the verses on the inadequacy of our military training, rubbed in the lessons of the war with more point than consideration. The sequel of Majuba humiliated the majority of Englishmen: and the policy of compromise and concession failed to achieve a lasting settlement.

Lord Beaconsfield died in the spring, but _Punch_, though respectful and appreciative, added little in his memorial tribute to what he had said on many previous occasions in the way of criticism and eulogy. The insecurity of Russian rule had a year previously been recognized in a cartoon representing Nihilism lighting a torch in a cavern beneath the throne. The assassination of the Tsar Alexander II prompts an appeal to the "Northern Terror." Ordered Liberty must disown such fiendish methods. _Punch_, no lover of autocracy, admits that the Tsar was "the gentlest of his line," and implores the Russians to put manhood in their wrath, and "not foul the work they call divine with demon ruthlessness," an appeal that still remains unanswered. This was the year in which another, but an uncrowned Head, was laid low in President Garfield, and the loss of the United States is recognized as a common sorrow.

In Home politics no one is more frequently or unflatteringly referred to than Lord Randolph Churchill. Sambourne's "Fancy Portrait" represents him as a midge: in verse, bitter and derisive, he is dubbed "the coming mannikin." On the other hand, Mr. Balfour is welcomed as an accession of strength to his party, and his wit is commended as being no less pretty than his uncle's, though less explosive in its flashing forth. To this year also belongs the reaction of "Fair" against "Free" Trade; and the adoption of the new cry by Lord Randolph and Mr. James Lowther, amongst others, is alluded to in a parody of a once popular drawing-room song, "O Fair Dove, O Fond Dove." But these amenities and trivialities were soon forgotten. In May, 1882, came the terrible tragedy of the Phoenix Park murders--the first deliberate political assassinations that had stained our history for centuries--and if _Punch's_ references in prose and verse seem perfunctory and laboured, it may be pleaded in the words of the classic aphorism: "small cares are vocal, mighty woes are dumb." Better justice was rendered to the event in the cartoon of the "Irish Frankenstein" in which Parnell crouches horrified before the monster of his own creation. _Punch_ did not, however, despair of conciliation, and a fortnight later supported the Arrears of Rent Bill as "a gift badly wanted," though his support was tempered by the observation that "Ireland is to have a clean slate, and, as usual, at the expense chiefly of the British taxpayer. That patient Jackass is to be saddled with another burden."

In the latter half of 1882 Ireland gave place to Egypt as a storm-centre. Arabi's revolt, which involved us in another of our small wars, was speedily suppressed, after Alexandria had been bombarded by Admiral Sir Beauchamp Seymour, and the rebel forces on land had been routed at Tel-el-Kebir by Sir Garnet Wolseley, "our only General," as he was then called. _Punch_ celebrated his success and his peerage in an "Idyll of the Queen," beginning, "Garnet the brave, Garnet the fortunate." But he also recognized the strained relations with France which the campaign brought about, and uncompromisingly maintained our position in his cartoon, "The Lion's Just Share." Here the claims of all the other Powers are made ridiculous in comparison with those of Britain, France figuring as a poodle, Turkey as a fox, Spain as a mule, and Italy as a toy greyhound. It is not a conciliatory picture; _Punch_ was on safer ground in emphasizing the intrigues of Abdul Hamid and the unpatriotic sympathies of Mr. Wilfrid Blunt.

[Sidenote: _Parnell and his Monster_]

Ireland resumed the first place as a preoccupying factor in British politics in 1883, when the capture of Monaghan by the Parnellites inspired _Punch_ to depict him as cutting a bit off a coat labelled Ulster. Another cartoon, "Crowning the O'Caliban," prompted by the Irish leader's talk of the "moderation" of the Land League, shows him crowning a hideous figure, sitting on a barrel labelled Anarchy, Rebellion and Murder, and receiving from him a bag containing £40,000--in reference to the "Parnell Tribute" presented to the Irish leader in that year.

Lord Randolph is easily the chief butt of the year. He is the "bumptious boy," the 'Arry of the hunting field, disregarding the old whip, Stafford Northcote. Yet amid all this derision there is an uneasy consciousness that this aggressive and ill-mannered young man may yet "arrive." In another cartoon Lord Randolph is drawn as a small boy looking at Lord Beaconsfield's statue and saying, "Ah! They'll have to give _me_ a statue--some day." The twenty-fifth anniversary of John Bright's election for Birmingham, which fell in June, 1883, is treated in a very different spirit. _Punch_ disagreed with Bright over the Egyptian war, but strikes no jarring note in the verses on his political silver wedding:--

Mellower voice has never rung Round the lists of Party fray: Sharper scorn has seldom stung. Yet your Silver Wedding Day Wakes good wishes near and far E'en from fighters who have gone Dead against you in the war. Here's a health to you, Friend John.

That "annual blister, Marriage with deceased Wife's sister," as Gilbert called it, found _Punch_ still faithful to the cause of relief, and exceedingly and impartially wroth against clerical obstructors, Anglican or Roman Catholic, to the extent of depicting Cardinal Manning and Archbishop Benson in the guise of old women. Where the Liquor Laws were concerned, however, _Punch_ was frankly reactionary. In a "Look into Limbo" in July, 1883, he forecasts a general revolt against crotcheteers and faddists, his pet aversion being Local Option, which he defines as "a scheme for giving the six, who love spouting, supreme control over the liberty of the sixty or six hundred who dislike noise, and so hold their tongues until, in self-defence, they are compelled to use them."

[Sidenote: _German Militarism_]

Foreign politics do not obtrude themselves much on _Punch's_ vision during the Gladstonian administration. But he was alive to the menace of militarism contained in a characteristic speech by Marshal von Manteuffel, the sentiment of which curiously resembles some of the utterances of the ex-Crown Prince William:--

THE PSALM OF DEATH

"Gentlemen, I am a soldier, and war is the soldier's element; and well I should like again to experience the elevated feeling of commanding in a pitched battle, knowing that the balls of the enemy are every instant summoning men before the judgment seat of God."--Marshal von Manteuffel to the Provincial Committee of Alsace-Lorraine.

What the heart of the young Teuton said to the old Marshal is summed up as follows:--

Tell me not in mournful numbers Death is shocking. Not at all! Death clears off the scum that cumbers This o'er-populated ball.

Death is stirring, Death is splendid, (Death of other men, not mine) And its spreading is attended By a feeling great--divine.

* * * * *

Let us then be up and fighting (_A la_ Marshal von Manteuffel) Set the Mob to mutual smiting, While _we_ sing Death's O be joyful!

Gambetta's brief and stormy career had closed at the beginning of the year, and _Punch_ acknowledged the debt which France owed to his passionate patriotism and "wild strength" in a cartoon showing the Republic leaning sadly against his memorial bust while Bismarck, with arms folded, stands in the background.

_Punch_ had for some twenty years been, on the whole, a consistent supporter of Mr. Gladstone, but his loyalty was more severely tested in the years 1884 and 1885 than at any other time in the Liberal leader's career. Indeed, there were moments when it might be said to have broken down, and respect gave place to something like contempt. This mood was revealed in the very first of the Gordon cartoons early in 1884. Gordon is seen ploughing along through Egyptian difficulties with Gladstone, "The Grand Old Man of the (Red) Sea," complacently smirking on his back. In February _Punch_ demands instant action. An angry John Bull bids Gladstone unmuzzle the British Lion _at once_, and _Punch_ comments severely on the Premier's word-jugglery and sophistry. Later on we see Gladstone in the desert "after the Simoom," leading a camel. "Mirage" shows Gordon looking anxiously for relief from the battlements of Khartoum. A burlesque correspondence between a British Hero and the British Government pours satire on the cheap sympathy and lax opportunism of the Government, who are only concerned with saving their skin and their faces. The Premier's preoccupation with trivial home legislation comes in for indignant rebuke, and the Trelawny quatrain is adapted for the benefit of Gordon. The two cartoons in May are especially bitter. Mr. Gladstone, on the Treasury Bench, as Micawber, declares, "I am delighted to add that I have now an immediate prospect of something turning up. I am not at liberty to say in what direction." A fortnight later the Liberal Majority (or Mrs. Micawber) protests she will never desert Mr. Micawber--referring to the result of the Vote of Censure.

_Punch_, however, had no intention of crossing the floor of the House. The Conservative opposition to the Franchise Bill rekindled his Liberalism. Lord Salisbury's attitude in particular excited his hostility. He figures in verse as "The Losing Leader" (after Browning), and in a cartoon as the bell-wether followed into the pit by a flock of coroneted sheep. It was "no Curtius leap, but mutton madness," and the hotheads are compared to the Gadarene swine. _Punch_ heaped laboured ridicule on the great Hyde Park Demonstration, printed burlesque advertisements suggesting employment for peers after the abolition of the House of Lords, and indulged in prophetic forecasts of "What it may come to."

[Sidenote: _The Franchise Bill_]

The Opposition suffered from the defection or lukewarmness of some of the wiser peers--Cranbrook, Cairns and Wemyss--and finally withdrew on the unofficial but opportune publication in the _Standard_ of the outline of the Government's Redistribution Scheme. _Punch_ gives his own account of the incident, according to which the whole Cabinet was mesmerized into revealing the Government plans, and summed up the whole business in his cartoon, "'Bill' the Giant-killer." The little Franchise Bill is seen blowing his horn before a castle (the House of Lords) with Lord Salisbury, as a huge Ogre, looking over the battlements and dismayed to find that his castle is not impregnable against Truth. In this context we may note that the payment of members was foreseen by _Punch_ in a burlesque "Thumb-nail Summary for 1884," printed in the first issue of that year. Under July we read:--

Newly elected Parliament meets for the first time, and commences a campaign of active legislative reform by abolishing the Speaker.

The "Payment of Members Bill," involving a State income of £2,000 a year, the right to a stall at West End Theatres on first nights, family railway tourist-tickets during the summer season, and free dining for self and friend at the Holborn Restaurant while Parliament is in Session, carried without a division.

The "Payment of Members Bill," being thrown out by the Peers, the House of Lords is abolished by a short comprehensive Act, framed for the purpose, in one sitting.

Much aristocratic distress prevails towards the end of the month, and gangs of hungry Peers infesting the public thoroughfares are prosecuted daily by the Secretary of the Charity Organisation Society, and ultimately shipped to a Coral Island in the Pacific.

Mr. Gladstone's seventy-fifth birthday on December 29, 1884, was welcomed in a set of verses in which the eulogy is only tempered by a faint reserve as to his lack of youthful resolution and his excess of caution. Had the anniversary fallen a few weeks later, _Punch_ might have found it harder to pay such generous homage, for on February 7 appeared the unlucky cartoon which assumed that Gordon had been relieved. Yet even then, when the truth became known and while raising the cry of "Too late," _Punch_, though condemning delay and caution, deprecated party rancour:--

Not this the hour to echo faction's cry Of half-exultant chiding, or to ply The Party-phraser's venomed word-lash. No! But laggard wills, counsels confused and slow Should need no sharper spur, no keener goad Than this to urge them on plain Honour's road.

[Sidenote: _The Tragedy of Khartoum_]

_Punch's_ contribution to the Gordon "Memorial" was an ode from which we may quote one stanza:--

Gordon! A name to gild our island story, Opulent yet in many a noble name, With lustre brighter than mere statecraft's fame, More radiant than the warrior's glittering glory. Such lesser lights eclipse them in the fine Sun-glow of selfless valour such as thine, Soldier whose sword, like Galahad's, was not used To hew out honour, but to champion right; Plan-shaper who, in council as in fight, Wast endlessly resourceful, yet refused, Death-snared, an easy flight!

Other pens were busy over this episode, which inspired perhaps the most scarifying epigram of our times:--

Judas despairing died, his guilt confessed, But had he lived in this our age and city, He surely would have figured with the best Upon a Christ Memorial Committee.

The disaster, however, had one heartening result in the offer of military assistance from Canada, Victoria and New South Wales, duly recorded by _Punch_ in his cartoon of the Lion and the Colonial cubs. The year 1885 had opened with a sinister display of activity by dynamiters, and _Punch_ rebuked Sir William Harcourt for his alleged apathy and imperious resentment of criticism by calling him the "Not-at-Home Secretary." America promptly took legislative action, refusing sanctuary to dynamiters, and was loudly applauded, while Mr. Parnell, in _Punch's_ opinion, missed a golden opportunity for disavowing and condemning these outrages. In "What Mr. Parnell _might_ have said" _Punch_ printed the speech which he did _not_ make but ought to have made, "as a man, an Irishman and a Christian."

The days of the Gladstone administration were numbered, and the motion in favour of Proportional Representation excited but a languid and academic interest. _Punch_ thought the system far too complicated, and sought to reduce it to absurdity by a practical illustration. He was much more serious in his resentment at the hectoring attitude of Bismarck _à propos_ of a recent speech of the Imperial Chancellor. In "Lecturing a Lecturer--a Friendly Tip to the Teuton Titan," he showed Bismarck standing in a truculent pose before a map of Europe while _Punch_ looks on in amusement. The point of the accompanying verses is that Britain was not to be scared or scolded into submission:--

Orbilian Colossus, You'd chide us and spank us and goad us and toss us, But when Polyphemus world-wigging would try He may--pardon the _argot_--get "one in the eye." And _Punch_, Herr Professor, whose point seldom misses, Is ready if needful to play the Ulysses.

The attempt to represent Bismarck as a professor might not seem to show a very acute reading of the facts were it not that German professors proved the chief inflamers of militarism. It must be added that, as a set off to this expostulation, _Punch_ indited a remarkably genial poem to Bismarck a couple of weeks later on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. But this can hardly have atoned for the extremely acid and acute satire on the Spirit of German Colonization published about the same time. Here Germania declares her intentions to the native races in language which the treatment of the Herreros in German South-West Africa proved to be well within the mark:--

I haf brought you German culture for the poddy and the mind, Die erhabene Kultur of efery sort and efery kind; All the pessimistic dogtrines of the Schopenhauer school And the blessings of a bureaucratish-military rule. I shall teach you shplendit knowledge, vot you hitherto haf lacked, That religion is a fantasy, vhilst sausage is a fact; Ja, the mysteries of sauerkraut to you shall be made clear, And your souls shall learn to float on foaming waves of Lager-Bier!

I do not intend to long-while you mit missionary rant, But to brighten up your intellects mit Hegel and mit Kant. Mit our Army-Service system I'll begift you by-and-by, And mit all the priceless blessings of our Hohe Polizei. Ach! I lofes you as a moder, and your happiness, I shwear, Shall forefer be the von surpassing object of my care. _I'll_ civilize you, Kinder, mid dem edlen Gerstenbrei, And mit discipline, Potztausend!--or I'll know the reason vhy!

And then die hehre Göttin, hof'ring in the aether blue, Vill summon up her gunboats and her Pickelhauben too, Her bearded brawny varriors, vot nefer knew no fear, And troops of learned bureaucrats, all buttoned-up to here. Then if the shtupit natifes don't attend to vot she said, And makes themselves unpleasant, they must all be shooted dead; For trifles in the vay of German culture must not shtand-- Hoch soll der Bismarck leben! I drinks, "Our Fatherland!"

[Sidenote: _Lord Randolph Churchill_]

When the Government was defeated in June "on the Budget Stakes," as _Punch_ put it, he went so far as to accuse Gladstone of "riding to lose," and resented this action as not quite on the square. A month earlier he had shown Gladstone as the political Mrs. Gummidge, the "Old 'un" being Disraeli, whose portrait hangs on the wall. There was a rumour of Mr. Gladstone going to the Lords, and _Punch_ had a picture of Tennyson, in his robes in the "gay garden of elegant earls," inviting W. E. G. to "come into the garden," but Mr. Gladstone declines, preferring to paddle his own canoe. Lord Randolph was included in the Salisbury administration, which held office for six months, as Secretary of State for India, but his elevation to Cabinet rank did not appease _Punch's_ distrust--rather the reverse. He was not really an undersized man, but he invariably appears in _Punch_ about this time as a boy, a mannikin or some diminutive pest, while the vehemence of his language is resented in bitter criticism of his "mud-spattering" abuse, vulgar invective, and "Billingsgate Babel." In particular a speech which he delivered at a Conservative gathering at Canford Manor, Wimborne, excited _Punch's_ wrath, and prompted the picture of "Funny Little Randolph," as a "star comique" singing a topical song, "I don't care a rap," and exulting in his grimaces and bad manners. In the previous year _Punch_ had fallen foul of the "windy ravings of Loyalist Speakers" in Ireland, "the Loyalist Cæsar, and the Nationalist Pompey seem 'very much alike' indeed--in the matter of noisy mischief.... One feels that the Orange Champions would not hate 'disloyalty' so much did they not hate their 'Green' fellow countrymen more."

Yet in the autumn of 1885, when Lord Carnarvon was Viceroy, _Punch_ developed a strong distrust of the conciliatory policy of the Conservatives. In one cartoon he shows Captain Moonlight masked and armed at an open door, the bar of the Crimes Act having been removed. In October he wrote, "when Tyranny alone is free where is the safety--save for slaves." In another cartoon he showed the National League as the Irish Vampire, hovering over Hibernia in her uneasy sleep, and bade her awake and banish the hideous monster that was sapping her strength. _Mr. Punch's_ "Political Address," issued shortly before the resignation of the Salisbury Cabinet, claimed that he was the only real Independent Candidate, the nominee of no party, section, or sect; bound to no programme, but "all for the four P's--Principle, Progress, Patriotism and Peace"--in fine, "whichever Party he returned to office, _Mr. Punch_, the non-partisan Member for Everywhere, will be in power." The new cry of "Three Acres and a Cow" raised at the close of 1885 left him cold, witness Du Maurier's "Sauce for the Goose." The verses in the same number on "New Words and Old Songs" imply that it was a mere vote-catching device, and at the same time mock at the cadging tactics of the Knights and Dames of the Primrose League founded in 1884.

[Sidenote: _Home Rule Rejected_]

On the resignation of the Salisbury Cabinet, Mr. Gladstone returned to power with Mr. Morley as Chief Secretary for Ireland. The story of his conversion to Home Rule, his failure to convert his colleagues, the split in the Cabinet and the introduction and rejection of the Home Rule Bill of 1886 is well told in the series of cartoons which begin with "At the Cross Roads" in February. There Gladstone is shown hesitating between Land Purchase and Home Rule, while Chamberlain as the cowboy advises the former. In "The Thanes fly from me" we see Gladstone as Macbeth asking Morley (Seyton) to give him his armour: "This push will cheer me ever or disseat me now." The Home Rule Bill is typified as the "Divided Skirt." Gladstone as the Grand Old Man Milliner is trying in vain to reconcile Britannia to her new dress. The sequel is shown in the "Actæon" cartoon in which Gladstone is pulled down by his own hounds--Chamberlain, Hartington, Goschen--and in the adaptation of Meissonier's "Retreat from Moscow," where Gladstone figures as the defeated Napoleon. It is rather curious, by the way, to note that during the debates _Punch_, in his "Essence of Parliament," describes Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Labouchere as the "two drolls of the House" at Question time.

On the merits of Home Rule _Punch_ is rather non-committal, and speaks with more than one voice. The secession of the Liberal Unionists impressed him greatly; but he was bitterly antagonistic to the Ulster extremists, witness this epigram printed in May:--

_Lucus a non Lucendo_

Loyal? Nay, Ulster, you, for very shame Should cede your long monopoly of that name. Loyal--to whom--to what? To power, to pelf, To place, to privilege, in a word, to _self_. They who assume, absorb, control, enjoy all, Must find it vastly pleasant to be "loyal."

Lord Randolph Churchill's famous jingle: "Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right," inspired a prophetic forecast of the result of such action, in which Ulster does fight and is defeated:--

The battle had been severe, but it was over at last. Belfast was taken. Derry was in ruins. Everywhere the Orange faction had been outnumbered and worsted. The reverse was crushing and complete. "We shall now," said the General commanding the National forces, "be suffered, perhaps, to hold our Parliament on College Green in peace." He turned to a batch of captured officers as he spoke. They were a motley crew. Among them figured several wearing the Queen's uniform, while here and there stood some distinguished sympathizer with the beaten cause, who had thrown in his lot to support rebellion against Queen and Empire. Among these latter a scion of a Ducal House and former well-known Member of the House of Commons, was weeping over a broken drumhead. The General singled him out, and beckoned him to approach. He drew near, surlily: "Well, my Lord," continued the Commander, in a tone of banter. "How about your prophecy? Ulster will fight. Ulster will be right. Ulster has fought. Ha! Ha!"

"And she has been wrong!" was the submissive and humble reply.

[Sidenote: _Lord Randolph at the Tresury_]

This squib was written before the rejection of the Home Rule Bill, a result which _Punch_, or the writer, probably did not anticipate. The accuracy of the forecast, however, remains still to be tested.

The Elections went against the Government, and Lord Salisbury was returned to power, with Lord Randolph as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons. The verses which accompany and expand the cartoon of "The Grand Young Man" with the shade of Dizzy looking on, almost deviate into geniality. _Punch_ fancies that Randolph, in spite of his defects of taste and manners, is "more than a mere mime," but, in contrasting his career with that of Lord Beaconsfield, points out that he was born in the purple and that his rise to power was easier and quicker. This comparatively friendly mood soon gave way to the old distrust, and by October, in "Swag, or the political Jack Sheppard," we see Lord Randolph, anxious to eclipse Dizzy as a Tory Turpin and "disher" of the Whigs, rifling a chest labelled "Liberal Measures," while Mr. Gladstone peers into the room at the back. _Punch's_ distrust was partly justified by Lord Randolph's impetuous resignation in December. What might have been a great career was wrecked by an impatient temper. Immense ability, industry, courage and reforming zeal were there, and it was hardly fair to represent him as a modern Curtius leaping into the pit of Popularity. The Treasury was not the only Government Office in which reform was thwarted by obstruction and mismanagement. _Punch_ attacked the War Office in the autumn of 1886 for setting its face "not merely against change, but against experiments pointing to change," and scouting all inventors as nuisances. He simultaneously proposed the foundation of an official organ of the Admiralty to be called "Dowb," the burlesque prospectus of which obliquely satirizes the abuse of perquisites, bad stores, muddled finance, futile commissions of inquiry and general incompetence in high places. Home politics engrossed attention throughout the year, but _Punch_ did not fail to note the gathering clouds in the Balkans, when Prince Alexander of Battenberg, the hero of Slivnitza, a gallant and picturesque figure, had abdicated the throne of Bulgaria, Russian jealousy having rendered his position untenable. In the cartoon of "The Vanishing Lady," the Tsar is shown as a juggler using the cloak of diplomacy to extinguish the freedom of the country he had helped to emancipate. The same year which witnessed the disappearance from the political scene of Prince Alexander was marked by the birth of Alfonso XIII of Spain, and _Punch_ offered his ceremonial greeting to one of the few sovereigns who survived the monarchical _débâcle_ of the Great War of 1914.

The Victorian age reached its grand climacteric in 1887, the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee and the gathering of the Kings and Captains. Of the celebrations we speak elsewhere. _Punch_, no longer anti-Papist, linked them with those at the Vatican--in honour of Leo XIII, who had been ordained priest in 1837--in his lines on "Two Jubilees":--

St. Peter's and St. James's face to face Exchanging with a more than courtly grace Their mutual gifts and greetings!

A sight to stir the bigot; but the wise Regard with cheerful and complacent eyes This pleasantest of meetings.

And so on with praise of the Good Queen and Holy Father, _Punch_, as a "true freeman unfettered by servile fear or hate's poor purblind heat," being free to celebrate them both.

It was also the Centenary year of the United States, welcomed by _Punch_ in John Bull's song on Miss Columbia's Hundredth birthday to the air of "I'm getting a big boy now." Mr. Gladstone was invited to the celebrations but did not cross the Atlantic. John Bull abounds in professions of good-will, but there is a slight sting in the last chorus:--

You are getting a great girl now, May you prosper, and keep out of row; Shun Bunkum and bawl All that's shoddy and small, For you're getting a _great_ girl now.

The Salisbury Cabinet was strengthened by the inclusion of Mr. Goschen as Chancellor of the Exchequer--Mr. Goschen whom Lord Randolph "forgot," and whom _Punch_ styled the "Emergency man," a phrase now also forgotten, but then applied to the volunteers who assisted boycotted farmers and loyalists in Ireland. Mr. Balfour was at the Irish Office, the scene of his greatest administrative successes, and the Crimes Act and the Land Act were the two principal measures of the Session. In those days _The Times_ was the great champion of the Unionist policy, and in the summer of 1887 is shown prodding on Lord Salisbury and Mr. Balfour, armed with Crimes Act blunderbusses, in their attack on the Land League wild boar. The Land League was "proclaimed" in August; and already the controversy had begun between Mr. Parnell and _The Times_ over the former's alleged participation in the responsibility for the Phoenix Park murders. The question was raised in a series of articles on "Parnellism and Crime"; but the charges were not made specific until the following year. John Bright's secession from the Gladstonian Liberals had been a serious blow, and his contributions to the Unionist armoury were so vigorous and pointed, that it is rather strange to find _Punch_ assailing him in March, 1887, for his pacificist tendencies:--

The white flag, John, _may_ bid all battle cease, Not the white feather! In defence of right, Despite your dogmas, men perforce must fight With swords as well as words: be it their care With either, to heed honour, and fight fair. You would "speak daggers" only; be it so; But a word-stab may be a felon blow.

John Bright certainly spoke daggers against those who, in his own phrase, kept the rebellion pot always on the boil.

[Sidenote: _Germany's Momentous Year_]

The Earl of Iddesleigh, better known as Sir Stafford Northcote, died in January. There is an unmistakable reference to Lord Randolph Churchill's treatment of his one-time leader in the verses in which _Punch_ paid homage to a statesman "worn yet selfless, disparaged and dispraised," yet a "pattern of proud but gentle chivalry":--

So the arena's coarser heroes mocked This antique fighter. And his place was rather Where Arthur's knights in generous tourney shocked Than where swashbucklers meet or histrions gather: Yet--yet his death has touched the land with gloom; All England honours Chivalry--at his tomb.

Here the reference to Lord Randolph is inferential though unmistakable. But an opportunity for having a dig at him is never missed. When the Bulgarian throne was offered to Prince Ferdinand, and his cautious and diplomatic tactics resulted in long delays, _Punch_ in pure malice suggested that the crown should be offered to Lord Randolph. He may be forgiven, however, in view of the remarkably accurate estimate which he formed of the slyness, timidity and meanness of "Ferdinand the Fox," and the alternations of servility and insolence in his attitude towards Russia. Bismarck again comes in for honorific notice this year in the guise of Sintram, accompanied and menaced by Socialism (the Little Master), but confidently riding along on his steed Majority. But 1888 was a momentous year for Germany--the year in which two Kaisers died and a third succeeded to the heritage of the Hohenzollerns. The old Emperor Wilhelm, the "_Greise Kaiser_," died on March 9; within a hundred days his son, the "_Weise Kaiser_," had fallen to the fatal malady which had sapped his splendid physique, to be succeeded in turn by the "_Reise Kaiser_," the nickname bestowed on Wilhelm II for his passion for movement and travel. At the moment of his accession _Punch_ was not inclined to be critical. The cartoon of "The Vigil" in June of that year expresses no misgivings, but only sympathy for one called to bear so heavy a burden. And this view is amplified in the verses in which the lessons of the past are used to fortify the hopes of the future:--

THE VIGIL

"Verse-moi dans le coeur, du fond de ce tombeau Quelque chose de grand, de sublime et de beau!"

_Hernani_, Act iv, Scene 2.

The prayer of Charles, that rose amidst the gloom Of the dead Charlemagne's majestic tomb, Might fitly find an echo on the lips Of the young Prince, whose pathway death's eclipse Hath twice enshadowed in so brief a space. Grandsire and Sire! Stout slip of a strong race, Valiant old age and vigorous manhood fail, And leave youth, high with hope, with anguish pale, In vigil at their tomb! Watch on, and kneel, Those clenched hands crossed upon the sheathèd steel. Not lightly such inheritance should fall. Hear you not through the gloom the glorious call Of Valour, Duty, Freedom?

... And youth must face What snowy age and stalwart manhood found A weight of sorrow, though with splendour crowned. Young Hohenzollern, soldierly of soul, Heaven fix your heart on a yet nobler goal Than sword may hew its way to. Those you mourn Heroes of the Great War when France was torn With Teuton shot, knew that the sword alone May rear, but shall not long support a throne. William has passed, bowing his silver crest, Like an old Sea King going to his rest; Frederick, in fullest prime, with failing breath, But an heroic heart, has stooped to death: Here, at their tomb, another Emperor keeps His vigil, whilst Germania bows and weeps. Heaven hold that sword unsheathed in that young hand, And crown with power and peace the Fatherland!

Only a fortnight before the death of the old Emperor, Bismarck's Army Bill had awakened _Punch's_ misgivings. He reluctantly admired the strength of the lion combined with the shrewdness of the fox; and put into Bismarck's mouth the sonorous couplet:--

I speak of Peace, while covert enmity Under the smile of safety wounds the world.

But by September it was the young Kaiser, not Bismarck, who invited "A Word in Season." The counsel was prompted by a speech in which he declared, "It is the pride of the Hohenzollerns to reign at once over the noblest, the most intellectual and most cultured of nations," a sentiment mild when compared with later utterances, yet sufficiently thrasonic to earn a rebuke for indulging in demagogic flattery, coupled with the advice to read Lord Wolseley's article in the _Fortnightly_ on Marlborough, Wellington and Napoleon, and to emulate the reticence of Moltke. In less than a month the inevitable cleavage between the Kaiser and his Chancellor is foreshadowed in the splendid cartoon reproduced, where Bismarck as Dædalus warns Wilhelm as Icarus, in a paraphrase of Ovid:--

My son, observe the middle path to fly, And fear to sink too low, or rise too high. Here the sun melts, there vapours damp your force, Between the two extremes direct your course.

Nor on the Bear, nor on Boötes gaze, Nor on sword-arm'd Orion's dangerous rays; But follow me, thy guide, with watchful sight, And as I steer, direct thy cautious flight.

_Metamorphoses_, Book VIII, Fable iii.

For the establishment of the Triple Alliance _Punch_ held Bismarck responsible. The three high contracting Powers become the "Sisters Three," Italy as Atropos, Austria as Lachesis, and Germany as Clotho. The policy is expounded in "a Bismarckian version of an old classical myth." Bismarck claims to be working for peace so long as he is the cloud compeller. While he is in power it will be all well with Germany. Of Austria he is less certain, owing to the precariousness of her crown, but he counts confidently on Italy, and ends on an optimistic note, dwelling on the pacific aims of this new political pact. It is hard to tell whether this is irony on the part of _Punch_ or a genuine approval of the Triple Alliance. But there is no doubt of his mistrust of Germany's ulterior motives in undertaking to co-operate with England in suppressing the Slave Trade in Africa--a mistrust expressed in the quatrain:--

When Fox with Lion hunts, One would be sorry To say who gains, until They've shared the quarry.

[Sidenote: _Boulanger's Bid for Dictatorship_]

The sequel justified the suspicion, and less than a year later _Punch_ published a companion cartoon in which the Lion, coming round the corner, finds the Fox has pulled down the notice "Down with Slavery" and is about to put up a Proclamation in which "Up" takes the place of "Down."

Bismarck's hostility to the Empress Frederick was notorious. In her husband's brief reign there was a question of their daughter, Princess Victoria, marrying Prince Alexander, ex-sovereign of Bulgaria. _Punch_ represented Bismarck forbidding the banns, and putting an extinguisher labelled "Policy" on Cupid. It was stated that Bismarck threatened to resign if the marriage plan were proceeded with; _Punch_, the sentimentalist, believed that love would find out a way, and it did, but in a different direction. The Prince married, but the lady was not of royal or even noble birth, and as Count Hartenau he remained in obscurity and died while still a young man.

France also had her troubles in 1888, for this was the year of Boulanger, the _brav' Général_, who captivated the mob for a while, seemed at one moment to be within an ace of overthrowing the Republic and establishing a stratocracy, but collapsed ignobly in the testing hour. _Punch_ recognized the danger in his cartoon of France ruefully balancing the Cap of Liberty on her finger. But even in _L'Audace_, where Boulanger is shown climbing up a steep cliff, with "Deputy" at the bottom, "President" and "Dictator" at the top, and the Imperial Eagle peering over the summit--we are made to feel that the climber is not equal to the task. The conditions are exactly reproduced in the companion picture, "Many a Slip," only that Boulanger is shown rolling down the precipice.

New South Wales celebrated her Centenary on January 26, 1888, and _Punch_ added his tribute in a happily-worded greeting under the familiar heading, "Advance, Australia!":--

A hundred years! At Time's old pace The merest day's march, little changing; But now the measure's new, the race Fares even faster, forward ranging. What cycle of Cathay e'er saw Your Century's wondrous transformation? From wandering waifs to wards of Law! From nomads to a mighty nation! Belated dreamers moan and wail; What scenes for croakers of that kidney, Since first the _Sirius_ furled her sail Where now is Sydney!

A hundred years! Let Fancy fly-- She has a flight that nothing hinders, Not e'en reaction's raven cry-- Back to the days of Matthew Flinders, Stout slip of Anglo-Saxon stock Who gave the new-found land its nomen. Faith, memory-fired, may proudly mock At dismal doubt, at owlish omen. Five sister-colonies spread now Where then the wandering black-fellow Alone enjoyed day's golden glow, Night's moonlight mellow.

"The Island-Continent! Hooray!" Punch drinks your health in honest liquor On this your great Centennial day, Whose advent makes his blood flow quicker. We know what you can do, dear boys In City-founding--and in Cricket. A fig for flattery!--it cloys; Frank truth, true friendship--that's the ticket! Land of rare climate, stalwart men, And pretty girls, and queer mammalia, All England cries, through _Punch's_ pen, "Advance, Australia!"

The same year witnessed the starting of the Australian navy. "Naturally the biggest island in the world has the biggest coast-line, and so needs the biggest fleet." The lead was taken by Victoria. _Punch_ saw nothing but healthy rivalry between the different colonies as the outcome of the movement, but looked to Federation as the true means to prevent the different Australian Colonies from being at "Southern Cross-purposes" when they all had their navies. The trouble in the Soudan prompts a warning from the Shade of Gordon: "If you mean to send help, do it thoroughly and _do it at once_," but anxiety was allayed by the success of General Grenfell at Suakin, an example of prompt action worthy of the attention of "long-halting statesmen."

[Sidenote: _Parnell and "The Times"_]

The most important measure of the Session at Westminster was the Local Government Bill establishing County Councils. _Punch_ made considerable capital out of Mr. Chamberlain's _rapprochement_ to the Tory interests. At a meeting of the National Society, Archbishop Benson had referred amid cheers to the words of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain at the opening of a School Board in Birmingham, and his acknowledgment of the fact that Voluntary Schools must have their place in the education of the people recognized. Mr. Chamberlain's views on the Liquor question had shown a similar concession to the demands of the brewing trade. So _Punch_ represents the "Artful Joe" walking arm-in-arm with the Archbishop and "Bung," and observing, "What a lot of nice friends I'm making." Mr. Chamberlain is already acknowledged to be "incomparably the best debater in the House"; _Punch_ rendered full justice to his ability, but his chief cartoonist, Tenniel, though still capable of splendid work, never managed to seize and reproduce the alert vivacity of Mr. Chamberlain's features. The progress of the controversy between Mr. Parnell and _The Times_ impelled _Punch_ as an _amicus curiæ_ to suggest that one or other of the disputants should wake up the Public Prosecutor in preference to the appointment of a Special Commission. The latter method of procedure, however, was adopted. The course of the inquiry was followed by _Punch_ in a series of articles, and when Parnell was exculpated on the chief count by the breakdown of _The Times_ witness Pigott, who confessed to forgery, fled the country and committed suicide, _Punch_ exhibited the Clock-face doing penance in a white sheet with the lines, "His honour rooted in dishonour stood, etc." But when the Report of the Commission was finally published, _Punch_ found it a veritable chameleon, which disappointed both sides, because most of those interested wore party-coloured spectacles or else were colour-blind.

England was visited in 1889 by two of the most perturbing personalities in European politics, the Kaiser Wilhelm II and General Boulanger. _Punch_, however, resolutely and, as it turned out, rightly refused to take the _brav' Général_ seriously, though he found in him plenty of food for disparaging satire as a shoddy hero on his prancing steed, as a "General Boum" in real life (recalling the grotesque figure in _La Grande Duchesse_), and as an uninvited guest, whose unwelcome arrival John Bull took as an occasion for going off to the French Exhibition. In a burlesque cartoon on France's embarrassments in choosing the right form of Government, _Punch_ exhibited President Carnot, the Comte de Paris, Prince Jerome Bonaparte ("Plon-Plon") and General Boulanger dancing a grotesque _pas de quatre_ before the French Electorate. But Boulanger was already ended, though his death, by his own hand, did not take place till the autumn of 1891. His histrionic equipment was perfect, and the French, though the most logical of people, are often carried away by their theatrical sense. He had served with some distinction in the army, and he was a fine figure on a horse. But he lacked the inflexible will, the iron resolution and the ruthlessness which make Cæsars and Napoleons; and _Punch's_ epitaph is a closely-packed summary of the forces and influences which conspired to his undoing:--

So high he floated, that he seemed to climb; The bladder blown by chance was burst by time. Falsely-earned fame fools bolstered at the urns; The mob which reared the god the idol burns. To cling one moment nigh to power's crest, Then, earthward flung, sink to oblivion's rest Self-sought, 'midst careless acquiescence, seems Strange fate, e'en for a thing of schemes and dreams; But Cæsar's simulacrum, seen by day, Scarce envious Casca's self would stoop to slay, And mounting mediocrity, once o'erthrown, Need fear--or hope--no dagger save its own.

The Kaiser's visit to attend the Naval Review at Spithead is treated in a somewhat jocular and cavalier spirit in the cartoon, "Visiting Grandmamma":--

GRANDMA VICTORIA: "Now, Willie dear, you've plenty of _soldiers_ at home; look at these pretty _ships_--I'm sure you'll be pleased with _them_!"

[Sidenote: _Mistrust of the Kaiser_]

The Kaiser is shown with a toy spade making sand castles for his soldiers. Yet these soldiers were giving ground for anxiety--witness the cartoon in January on the armed peace of Europe with Peace holding out the olive in one hand, with the other on a sword hilt. The inevitable verses allude to the "truculent Kaiser" and evince mistrust of one who comes in such equivocal guise. _Punch_ credited Bismarck with exerting a restraining influence on the warlike activities of the Triple Alliance. He showed him in the spring playing Orpheus to this Cerberus, and lulling it to sleep. But the Kaiser inspired no such confidence, and at the close of the year he is shown posing as a peacemaker but preparing for war--fondling the dove on his hand, while behind is the eagle, with bayonets for feathers, feeding on the Army estimates.

Another sovereign whom _Punch_ failed to read with the same penetration was King Leopold II of the Belgians. On the occasion of the International Anti-Slavery Congress at Brussels in November, 1889, _Punch_, while very properly applauding the occasion as tending to the overthrow of "the demon of the shackle and the scourge," acclaimed Leopold II as a "magnanimous King." Cecil Rhodes, some years later, after an interview with the same monarch, said that he felt just as if he had been spending the morning in the company of the Devil.

_Punch_, like other critics, was happier in dealing with the dead than the living, and the death of John Bright in March inspired a generous though discriminating tribute to the memory and achievements of "Mercy's sworn militant, great Paladin of Peace":--

For Peace, and Freedom, and the People's right, Based on unshaken Law, he stood and fought; If not with widest purview, yet with sight Single, sagacious, unobscured by aught Of selfish passion or ambitious thought; Seeing day's promise in the darkest night, Hope for the weak 'midst menaces of Might: Careless of clamour as of chance-blown dust, Stern somewhat, scornful oft, and with the stark Downright directness of a Roundhead's stroke, Who drew a Heaven-dedicated sword Against the foes of Freedom's sacred ark, The friends of the oppressor's galling yoke, All fierce assailants of the Army of the Lord.

These memorial verses, however, if I may say so without incurring the charge of unfilial disrespect--suffer throughout this period from prolixity. The writer says excellently, but diffusely, in ninety lines what is summed up in the majestic quatrain of Scott which stands at their head:--

Now is the stately column broke, The beacon-light is quench'd in smoke, The trumpet's silver sound is still, The warder silent on the hill!

[Sidenote: _Dropping the Pilot_]

Mr. Gladstone's golden-wedding day in July furnished the theme for friendly and affectionate congratulations to a couple who stood for "Darby and Joan" _in excelsis_. Mr. Gladstone's domestic happiness was unclouded, but he was subjected to a painful ordeal in 1890 by the disclosures of the Parnell-O'Shea divorce case and the split in the Irish Party which followed. _Punch_ supported Gladstone in his breach with the Irish leader. He is shown in one cartoon refusing to give his hand to Parnell:--

The hand of Douglas is his own And never shall in friendly grasp The hand of such as Marmion clasp.

Gladstone is acquitted of "mere Pharisaic scorn." But an element bordering on the ridiculous enters into the succeeding cartoon of Gladstone and Morley as the Babes in the Wood, while Parnell and Healy as the wicked uncles are seen fighting in the background. The further developments of the struggle are shown in an adaptation of Meissonier's famous "La Rixe," in which Parnell is held back by Dillon and O'Brien from Healy, who is restrained by Justin McCarthy. Parnell's sun was setting in gloom and storm, but a greater than Parnell was passing from the stage of high politics in 1890. For this was the year of the dismissal of Bismarck by the Kaiser, commemorated in the issue of March 29 by Tenniel's famous "Dropping the Pilot" cartoon. _Punch_ saw no good in the change; he indulges in ominous speculations. Was Bismarck animated by faith or fear of the future in quitting his post? Would the new Pilot strike on sunken shoals or "wish on the wild main, the old Pilot back again"? The Kaiser's gifts are seen to be no solace for the wound of dismissal. As a matter of fact, Bismarck never used the ducal title of Lauenburg conferred on him. In little more than a month the Kaiser is shown as the Enfant Terrible of Europe, "rocking the boat," while France, Italy, Austria and Spain all appeal to him to be more careful and not tempt fate. The Kaiser's dabbling in industrial problems, in the hope of propping his rule by concessions to Socialism, meets with no sympathy. But a more serious ground for discontent arose over the cession of Heligoland. _Punch_ waxes indignantly sarcastic over Lord Salisbury's deal in East Africa by which Germany gained Heligoland as a bonus. It was "given away with a pound of tea"; Salisbury's weakness was worse than Gladstone's scuttle and surrender, and _Punch_ ruefully recalls the verses he printed nineteen years earlier:--

[Sidenote: _The Surrender of Helgoland_]

TIME THE AVENGER!

On June 24, 1871, _Mr. Punch_ sang, _à propos_ of the Germans desiring to purchase Heligoland:

Though to rule the waves, we may believe they aspire, If their Navy grows great, we must let it; But if one British island they think to acquire, Bless their hearts, don't they wish they may get it?

And they _have_ got it!

But the fashionable world went on its way unheeding. Du Maurier satirized this indifference in a picture in which one lady asks another: "_Where_ is this Heligoland they're all talking so much about?" and her friend replies, "Oh, I don't know, dear. It's one of the places lately discovered by Mr. Stanley."

Russia, it may be added, also incurred _Punch's_ censure in 1890, the legalized persecution of Jews forming the theme of a prophetic cartoon in August, in which the shade of Pharaoh warns the Tsar, as he stands with a drawn sword and his foot on a prostrate Hebrew: "Forbear! That weapon always wounds the hand that wields it."

In 1891 the new "orientations" of the European Powers attract a good deal of notice. The Franco-Russian _entente_ is symbolized by the Bear making France dance to the tune of the Russian loan. _Punch's_ distrust of Russia--semi-Asiatic and half-Tartar--dated from the 'forties. The tightening of the Franco-Russian Entente in 1891 gave him no pleasure. He quotes with manifest approval the comment of a daily paper on the infatuation of France:--

The success of a Russian Loan is not dearly purchased by a little effusion, which, after all, commits Russia to nothing. French sentiment is always worth cultivating in that way, because unlike the British variety, it has a distinct influence upon investments.

The cartoon of President Carnot embracing, and being hugged by, the Bear was founded on an episode at Aix-les-Bains where he kissed a little girl in Russian dress who gave him a bouquet, saying: "J'embrasse la Russie." _Punch's_ verses represent Carnot as fully conscious of his _blague_, yet with an uneasy consciousness that the Bear is going to squeeze him. Russia's religious intolerance again comes in for strong condemnation. The Tsar is shown wielding the knout on an aged Jew while the Emperor of China greets a Christian priest. This contrast was based on the issue of a decree in which the Chinese Government condemned anti-Christian excesses. In another cartoon the Tsar bids his minions remove another aged Jew on the familiar ground that Jews were always to the fore in Nihilist plots. The European Powers, it should be added, were not satisfied by China's official tolerance. The treatment of foreigners had provoked a collective protest, from which Russia abstained. So when John Bull, as a sailor, asks Russia to take a hand in controlling the Chinese Dragon, Russia replies: "Well, I don't know--you see, he's a sort of relation of mine!"

The admiration which _Punch_ had so often if reluctantly expressed for Bismarck in office yielded to something like disgust at his undignified bitterness in retirement, above all at his use of the "reptile press" as a means of attacking the Imperial policy and Caprivi, his successor as Chancellor. This feeling animates the "Coriolanus" cartoon in February, where Bismarck is shown with the _Hamburger Nachrichten_ in his hand. The death of Moltke a couple of months later is duly recorded in a versified tribute making all the usual points--on his taciturnity, composure, foresight and strategy. With his death Bismarck became the lonely survivor of "the Titanic three, Who led the Eagles on to Victory." Moltke died full of years and honours. It was otherwise with Parnell who at forty-five fell,

not as leaders love to fall, In battle's forefront, loved and mourned by all; But fiercely fighting, as for his own hand, With the scant remnant of a broken band; His chieftainship, well-earned in many a fray, Rent from him--by himself! None did betray This sinister strong fighter to his foes; He fell by his own action, as he rose. He had fought all--himself he could not fight, Nor rise to the clear air of patient right.

[Sidenote: _The Passing of Parnell_]

_Punch_ notes his coldness, his impassive persistence as an agitator, but says nothing of the ill-concealed contempt he showed for his followers, and the entire lack of geniality, _bonhomie_, and humour, which partly explained the mercilessness with which he was pursued once his power was shaken. As he had never won or tried to win their affection, he could not expect to find magnanimity in mean souls.

The wheels of the Parliamentary chariot drove heavily over the Land Purchase Bill. _Punch_ showed Mr. Balfour leading the poor tired little Bill through a maze of amendments. _A propos_ of its complicated nature and endless, obscure sub-sections, which aroused much hostile criticism in _The Times_, Mr. Balfour is made to say:--

_The Times_, too, may gird, and declare 'tis absurd not to know _one's own Labyrinth_ better; _The Times_ is my friend, but a trifle too fond of the goad and the scourge and the fetter.

This, of course, was in the days when _The Times_ was ultra-Unionist. However, the Bill finally passed through its various stages, and Mr. W. H. Smith exhibits it with the fruits of the Session in June, 1891, as a gigantic strawberry. The choice of this particular fruit as a symbol was dictated by the fact that both he and Lord Salisbury had exhibited strawberries at the Horticultural Show.

The relations of Canada with England and the United States provoked much discussion in 1891. _Punch_ expressed confidence in Canada's loyalty, and simultaneously published a burlesque "Canadian Calendar (to be hoped not prophetic)," foretelling complete absorption in the United States. It begins with Reciprocity with the U.S.A., and goes on with the dying out of trade with and emigration from the old country, the increase of improvident Irish, the request of Canada to be annexed to America, and finally her decline into a tenth-rate Yankee state. On the death of the Canadian premier, Sir John Macdonald, "old To-morrow" as he was nicknamed from his habit of procrastination, _Punch_ overlooked the thrasonical magniloquence criticized in an earlier poem, and only dwelt on his long services to the Dominion.

Earlier in the year _Punch_ had typified the Federation of the Australian Colonies in a boating cartoon, the British Lion from the bank applauding a racing eight, manned by cubs and coxed by a kangaroo, and bidding them swing together.

On the death of the old Duke of Devonshire at the close of 1891, and the accession of Lord Hartington to the title, Mr. Chamberlain became leader of the Liberal-Unionists in the Commons. Mr. Chamberlain, in spite of the _rapprochement_ already noted, was still looked upon in some quarters as a somewhat dangerous Radical, and in January, 1892, _Punch_ represented the clock-faced _Times_ lecturing him on his responsibilities. Mr. Balfour succeeded Mr. W. H. Smith on the death of that unselfish, honest and capable statesman, as Leader of the House of Commons. The shades of Dizzy and Pam are friendly in the cartoon which records the promotion; slightly anxious on the score of Mr. Balfour's youth--he was then forty-four--but on the whole inclined to think that he will do. Parliament was dissolved in June, the Liberals were returned at the Elections, and the new House met on the now ominous date of August 4.

NATIONAL DEFENCE

In the 'seventies _Punch_, as we have seen, was decidedly non-interventionist. By the middle 'eighties he found it harder to preserve a middle course between the extremes of Jingoism and Pacificism, though he bestows impartial ridicule on both "Scuttle and Grab" in his burlesque forecast of the alternate foreign policies of the ultra-Imperialists and the ultra-Radicals. This was published early in 1885, when the Liberals were in power, and though deliberately fantastical and even farcical, shows how the wildest anticipations are sometimes verified by fact. Four periods are chosen. In 1890 the Grab Party inaugurate a forward policy all round by spending fifty millions upon the Army and Fleet, and are turned out by John Bull when it is found that their schemes involve

the seizure of sixteen islands, conquest of five native races, absorption of fifty thousand square miles of--useless--new territory, seven small wars, two large ones, four massacres, and an Income-tax of five shillings in the pound.

The Scuttle Party is installed in power in 1895 with a big majority and bigger promises:--

Finishes off all wars by caving in all round, retiring everywhere and relinquishing everything. Cuts down Army, and resolves to sell half the Ironclad Fleet as old metal. Power which buys it immediately utilizes it against us. Another Fleet has to be ordered at once at fancy prices in response to Press clamour. Scuttle Party, in cleft stick, halts between two opinions; in pursuit of peace is found fighting all over the world, and after frantic efforts at economy, runs up Income-tax to six shillings in the pound. John Bull turns out Scuttle Party.

Then we jump to A.D. 2000, but even then the wildest stretch of _Punch's_ imagination does not exceed the establishment of conscription and the raising of the Army to a million men. Finally in his last forecast _Punch_ is reduced to solving the problem by an insurrection under a popular soap-boiler, the seizure of the leaders of the two parties, and the banishing of both "Scuttle" and "Grab" from the political dictionary.

[Sidenote: _Snubbing the Volunteers_]

With the return of the Conservatives to power, we find that _Punch_, so far from rebuking the Government for their expenditure on bloated armaments, develops into something like an alarmist on the subject of national preparedness and the folly of "cheap defences." The inefficiency of the Army and Navy is a constant theme from 1887 onwards. The bursting of big naval guns, the badness of munitions and designs for battleships are dealt with in bitter satirical verses: while the damaging report of the Parliamentary Committee on Army equipment and stores prompts a series of advertisements of the "Benevolent Bayonet," the "Blazing Breech-loader," the "Comic Cartridge," and so on. Dishonest contractors and incompetent officials are attacked as "the Vultures of Trade" and "the Vermin of Office and Mart." The persistent discouragement of volunteers by the military authorities was an old grievance of _Punch's_, and it crops up in this year in connexion with the removal of the camp from Wimbledon by order of "George Ranger." Indeed, the bitterness of _Punch's_ attack on the Duke of Cambridge revives the memories of the 'forties, when a duke, royal or otherwise, was his favourite cockshy:--

Some prate of patriotism, and some of cheap defence, But to the high official mind that's all absurd pretence; For of all the joys of snubbing, there's none to it so dear, As to snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

A patriotic Laureate may bid the Rifles form, And Citizens may look to them for safety in War's storm; But Secretaries, Dooks, and such at this delight to jeer, And to snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

A semi-swell he may be, but he may be a mere clerk, And he's an interloper, and to snub him is a lark. Sometimes he licks the Regulars, and so our duty's clear, 'Tis to snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

He hankers for an increase in his Capitation Grant, It's like his precious impudence, and have the lift he shan't. What, make it easier for him to run us close? No fear! We'll snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

He has a fad for Wimbledon, but that is just a whim, And as eviction's all the go, we'll try it upon _him_. _He's_ not an Irish tenant, so no one will interfere, When once more we snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

His targets and his tents and things are nuisances all round, As Jerry-Builders, Dooks, and other Toffs have lately found, Compared with bricks and mortar and big landlords he's small beer, So we'll snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

The Common's vastly handy, there's no doubt, to chaps in town, And crowds of Cockneys to the butts can quickly hurry down; But what are _all_ Town's Cockneys to one solitary Peer? No; let us snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

Your Citizen who wants to play at soldiers need not look To have his little way as though he were a Royal Dook; With building-leases--sacred things!--he must not interfere, So let us snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British Volunteer!

If he _must_ shoot his annual shoot somewhere, why, let him go To Pirbright or to Salisbury Plain, or e'en to Jericho. But out from his loved Wimbledon he'll surely have to clear, A final snub, snub, snub, snub, snub to the British Volunteer!

_Punch_ was not generous or just in representing the Duke of Cambridge as a mere obstructive; and the sequel has not verified his forecast. Wimbledon Common remains a great playground of the people, and the annual meetings of the National Rifle Association, held at Wimbledon from 1860 to 1888, have not suffered in prestige or value since the move to Bisley in 1890.

References to the inadequate state of the national defences reach their highest frequency in 1888. We have the duel between Lord Randolph Churchill preaching retrenchment and Lord Charles Beresford advocating expenditure on an increased Navy. This is followed up by _Punch's_ "Alarmist Alphabet" dedicated to our naval and military experts, to whose warnings our rulers attach no particular importance:--

A's the Alarm that the Country's defenceless. B's the Belief such assertions are senseless. C's the Commission that sits with regard to them; D's our Defences--the one topic barred to them! E's the Expense--it's supposed we shall grudge it! F is the Fear of increasing the Budget. G stands for Guns, which we thought we had got. H is the Howl when we hear we have _not_. I's the Inquiry, abuses to right meant; J is the Judgment (a crushing indictment!); K is the Knot of red tape someone ties on it; L's Limbo--where no one will ever set eyes on it! M is the Murmur, too quickly forgotten. N is our Navy, which some say is rotten. O's the Official who bungles with _bonhomie_. P's Party-Government--all for Economy. Q is the Question engrossing our Statesmen. R is Retrenchment, which so fascinates men. S stands for Services, starved (out of Policy). T is the Time when--too late!--we our folly see. U is the Uproar of Struggle Titanic; V is the Vote we shall pass in a panic. W's War--with the Capture of London. X our Xplosions of fury, when undone. Y is the Yoke we shall have to get used to. Z is the Zero our Empire's reduced to!

[Sidenote: _The Race of Armaments_]

Simultaneously Britannia figures in a cartoon as the "Unprotected Female" surrounded by a litter of burst guns, broken contracts, broken blades, unfinished ships, etc. Then we find _Punch_ suddenly appearing at Downing Street at "the first meeting of the Inner Cabinet," and shattering the complacent satisfaction of the Premier and the War Secretary by a peremptory and menacing demand for speeding-up in the supply of rifles and more energetic recruiting. In July, under the heading of "_Punch's_ Parallels," the tercentenary of the Armada is celebrated in a satiric perversion of the famous game of bowls into "a nice little game of Ducks and Drakes--with the public money," in which Lord George Hamilton, the First Lord of the Admiralty, is attacked as a lethargic aristocrat. Another cartoon shows Moltke rebuking the Duke of Cambridge for persistently discouraging the volunteer movement; while the enforced expense of life in the regular army is condemned in "The Pleasant Way of Glory." Commenting on the swamping of the subaltern's pay by compulsory but unnecessary outlay, _Punch_ remarks that "the life of the British officer, as thus revealed, seems to resolve itself into a prolonged struggle to keep up a false position on insufficient means"; and he regrets that Lord Wolseley seemed to acquiesce in the evil instead of encouraging British officers to be more frugal. Such criticisms are not unfamiliar even to-day, for the old traditions die hard. On the general question of national and especially naval defence, _Punch_ was not by any means a voice crying in the wilderness. Public opinion had been worked up by other powerful advocates, amongst whom _Punch_ rightly mentions Mr. W. T. Stead. The debate on the Address in the session of 1889 was prolonged and acrimonious. Early in March, however, Lord George Hamilton moved a resolution, on which the Naval Defence Bill was founded, authorizing an expenditure of £21,500,000 on the Navy. The measure, of course, met with some opposition from various quarters, but public opinion was manifestly in its favour, and it received the Royal Assent before the end of May.

Throughout this campaign it is interesting to note how the personality of the German Emperor obtrudes itself as a disquieting factor in the international race in armaments. At the close of 1891 a lady with alleged abnormal "magnetic" power was giving performances at the Alhambra, and _Punch_ adapts the incident in a cartoon suggested by the Kaiser's _dictum_--inscribed in the Visitors' Book of the City Council at Munich--_Suprema Lex Regis Voluntas_. The accompanying verses on "The Little Germania Magnate" are derisive, not to say abusive, with their references to "Behemoth Billy," "Panjandrum-plus-Cæsar," "Thraso" and "Vulcan-Apollo." _Punch_ was evidently inclined to regard the German Emperor as one of those "impossible people" who, as _The Times_ had suggested in a happy phrase, ought to "retire into fiction." Unfortunately he remained a fact, and was not to be killed by _Punch's_ mouth.

MEN AND MASTERS: WORK AND WAGES

In the preceding volume I endeavoured to trace and account for the waning of _Punch's_ reforming zeal and democratic ardour, and to illustrate his gradual movement from Left to Right Centre in the 'fifties, 'sixties, and early 'seventies. Many abuses had been remedied, the barriers of class privilege had been broken down, the cleavage between the "Two Nations" was less glaring, national prosperity had increased, the ladder of learning had been set up by Forster's Education Act. Free Trade and Gladstonian finance had eased the burden of the working man and the taxpayer. England was not a Utopia, but she had travelled far from the days of the Hungry 'Forties. In December, 1883, the late Sir Robert Giffen, one of the most trustworthy and deservedly respected of the much abused tribe of statisticians, published a comparative table of the consumption of the agricultural labourer in 1840 and 1881. _Punch's_ comment takes the form of an imaginary letter from a farm hand under the heading of "Food and Figures":--

"Sir, Maister _Punch_,

"Look 'ee here, Sir. Squire Giffen, a-spoutin' tother night about I and we country folk, stuck to it that we wur better fed nowadays than we wur forty-one year ago; and them as 'eard 'im say that there, they up and swore as how we wur a grumblin', cantankerous, discontented, set o' chaps as didn't knaw naught of our own jolly good luck. Now look 'ee 'ere, Maister _Punch_; 'ere be Squire Giffen's figures. Says he that forty-one year ago, that be in 1840, I eat this 'ere in the first column, say in about a couple o' weeks, and that now I gets through this 'ere, wot he's set down in the second, in the same matter o' time."

[Sidenote: _Food and Figures_]

The table follows, and then Hodge continues:--

"Now addin' all that there up, that be for 1840, about 69 lbs. of food for I; while now he says, says he, 'Hodge, you old pig, you swallows 373 lbs.--that be six times as much--just as easy in the same time, and you grumbles at it too!' Now look 'ee 'ere, Maister _Punch_, if I does that there--and figures is figures--well ain't it plain that a feed up like that must give I such a fit o' blues from indigestion, as sets I hankerin' about franchise and land stealin', and such like things o' which I knows and cares just naught, and gets I called by a set o' chaps, as wants nothin' more than to make summat out o' me, yours all of a puzzle,

"DISCONTENTED HODGE."

"Appetite comes with eating"; and here we have a concrete and "luciferous" example of the somewhat grudging approval which made _Punch_ acknowledge improved conditions, while at the same time he expressed his misgivings at the leverage which the improvement furnished to agitation and unrest. In the 'forties _Punch_ had recognized that the legitimate grievances of the underfed masses were a real danger. He now recognized, or at any rate implied, that when well-fed they might become equally dangerous under the guidance of extremists. He still believed that there was a great fund of inert anti-revolutionary sentiment amongst the rank and file of the people, but long before the days of "direct action," was alive to the possibilities inherent in the oligarchical rule of Trade Unionism. He saw that a well-organized minority in a key industry might dislocate the whole fabric of production, and when in 1877 the miners attempted to restrict output in order to keep up the price of coal and the rate of wages, addressed the following remonstrance to Mr. Macdonald, the mining M.P.:--

THE ARGUMENT A MINORI

So you suggest that they our coals who quarry Should shorten shifts to raise black diamonds' price? But, if so, why should other workers tarry, Each in his craft, to follow your advice? Till soon, hauled o'er the coals, like spark in stubble, Over-production's doctrine goes ahead, And all trades work half time, and come down double For beef and beer, for house, and clothes, and bread!

Towards the close of the 'seventies industrial distress was so general that in January, 1879, _Punch_ abandoned his critical attitude and appealed for united effort and a cessation of party strife to drive the wolf from the door. The "New Charity" that he recommended was a voluntary curtailment of the luxuries of the rich--balls, entertainments, dinners, and theatre parties, the purchase of jewels, wines, etc.--in order to help in relieving distress. This involved a surrender of his old argument in favour of the production of luxuries on the ground that they provided lucrative employment. At the same time, the terrorism applied to non-Unionists by the "Rebecca" gangs in Durham moved him to vigorous protest, and in the verses on "blacklegs" in April he writes:--

Blackleg _versus_ Blackguard be it! Let's see which shall have their way!

[Sidenote: _Henry George and Socialism_]

Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_, which attained a wide circulation in 1883, comes in for a good deal of hostile criticism. It was an epoch-making book; and though, as water to wine when compared to the strong drink of modern anti-capitalistic literature, it was thought worthy of serious attention by _Punch_. In his cartoon in January, 1884, Red Riding Hood is confronted by the Wolf of Socialism, with Henry George's book peeping out of his pocket. _Punch_, who reminds us that Mr. Labouchere called the author "George the Fifth," admits that gross inequalities existed, but saw no remedy in Henry George's policy, which he regarded as wholesale robbery, and in "St. George and the Dragon" ranked the American author along with Proudhon, the author of the saying "Property is Theft." Yet a few weeks later he rebukes the Duke of Albany, who, in a speech at Liverpool, had recommended that the poor should be taught cookery. _Punch_ was a great believer in cookery, but held that your hare must be caught first:--

Prince, you spoke a word in season 'Gainst uncleanly plates and slops, But the workman cries with reason "Teach me first to catch my chops."

In 1886 the number of the unemployed rose to a formidable figure. There was rioting in Pall Mall and Piccadilly on February 8th after a meeting in Trafalgar Square, and _Punch_, under the heading, "Sneaking Sedition," indulged in a violent tirade against the "firebrand fanatics," Messrs. Hyndman, John Burns, and Champion. It is headed by a picture in which _Punch_ is gleefully stringing up three puppets whose faces are portraits of the three "blatant trumpeters of sedition who prated a mixed mob to passion heat, and then discreetly withdrew whilst that passion found vent in wrecking and ruffianism." The writer denies with an exuberance of fiery rhetoric that they represented the unemployed, or anything but "fanatic hatred and shallow conceit--that is to say, themselves." They were "cowardly Catilines of the gutter," recruiting sergeants of the "Army of Anarchy," "Sedition-spouters," who egged on "the drunken, violent _un_working-Man" to outrage. _Punch_ appealed to all honest working men to repudiate these so-called but misrepresentative leaders, and "sweep these social democrats for ever from the land." It is a tremendous tirade, but disfigured by a great deal of sheer abuse, and the cause of law and order was not assisted thereby. Sedition cannot be quelled by strong language, and _Punch_ admitted that honest wage-earners were exploited by Capitalists, Monopolists, and Middlemen; that all must compassionate the workless working man, and that all should help him by friendly aid at the moment and hereafter by well-considered reform. In the same number a strong appeal is made to the opulent to help the Mansion House Fund for Unemployed, and not to be scared by frothy street sedition. There had been wild talk at the Trafalgar Square meeting about gallows and lamp-posts for Ministers and Members of Parliament, and _Punch_, who on occasion was a true prophet, may be pardoned for his failure to foresee a time when John Burns would be denounced as a crusted bureaucrat and Mr. Hyndman publish an enthusiastic eulogy of the Clemenceau whose motto was "_Je fais la guerre_."

[Sidenote: _Unemployed and Unemployables_]

The contrast between the unemployed and the unemployables is repeatedly emphasized in these years. Works were closed down because the hands took themselves off to join a procession of unemployed. Wasters refused work, preferring hymn-singing in the streets and levying doles from credulous householders. A cartoon in 1887 shows one of the "real unemployed" exclaiming: "How am I to make my voice heard in this blackguard row?" Socialism is seen "Sowing Tares"--after Millais's picture. Anarchy as the tempter prompts unemployment to plunder, looting, and riot--the wrong way. But _Punch_ was not content with chastising sedition-mongers, and in another cartoon rebuked callous complacency as a real danger in a time of serious distress. The contrasts of splendour and discontent were curiously illustrated in these years. In the spring of 1886 there was a "scene" at the Opera when the scene shifters struck work in the middle of the performance, and appeared on the stage begging for money. In 1887, the year of the Queen's Jubilee, special constables were sworn in, and Mr. Gladstone as the "Grand Old Janus" is shown with one face applauding a constable "downing" an English rough, while the other frowns on an R.I.C. man standing over a rebellious Irishman. It was in the same year that the growth and popularity of street processions moved _Punch_ to protest against the invasion of the Parks by public meetings, which drove away quiet people who used them for recreation from fear of King Mob and the rabble rout. The procession habit has long since come to stay, though it is only of recent years that the presence of children has become a feature in these demonstrations. As for the Hyde Park stump orators, the types genially satirized in one of the _Voces Populi_ series in 1889 include the Elderly Faddist, the Irish Patriot, the Reciter, and the Physical Force Socialist. The Reciter, who dates back to the time when the Latin satirist spoke of him as a nuisance in the dog-days, has disappeared from the Parks, though he flourishes in Georgian coteries. The other types remain with us, together with some new varieties. But there is little new under the sun. In 1887 the Annual Register mentions the exploit of a political agitator who chained himself to the railings in a conspicuous position in Central London, thus depriving the militant "suffragettes" of the credit of introducing this method of protest.

[Sidenote: _Praise for Cardinal Manning_]

In the great dock strike of 1889 _Punch_, on the whole, showed a disposition to side with the men. In his first cartoon in September the working man appeals to the employer to think less of his luxuries, more of Labour's needs. A week later _Punch_ appeals to the working man not to kill the guinea-fowl (Trade), that lays the golden eggs, by striking. In October, employer and employee are shown at the game of Beggar-my-Neighbour, the master playing Lock-out against Strike. _Punch_ pleads for give-and-take. _Both_ will lose by the game they are playing. The same argument is further developed a few months later in another cartoon in which the foreign competitor is the _tertius gaudens_. The foreign Fox goes off with Trade, while the two dogs, Capital and Labour, are asleep. To return to the dock strike, we may note that Cardinal Manning's intervention was warmly applauded. _Punch_ thought the Cardinal ought to have been made a Privy Councillor and Lord Mayor Whitehead a baronet for their services as conciliators. Praise for a Cardinal and a Lord Mayor is indeed a wonderful change from the _Punch_ of forty years earlier. The settlement of that "deed of darkness," the gas strike in 1889, prompted the cartoon showing the indignation of Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger over the frustration of their plans. Industrial troubles were rife in 1890. The Labour May Day, already instituted, inspires a set of verses after Tennyson, in which an enthusiastic operative sings,

"Toil's to be Queen of the May, brother, Labour is Queen o' this May!"

The introduction of an eight hours' day, already vigorously agitated for, set _Punch_ thinking on what would happen if the principle were logically applied all round--to the Courts, restaurants, theatres and the medical profession. He returned to the subject in the following year, and came to much the same conclusion--that it would turn out a new bed of Procrustes, on the ground that the universal uniformity of hours of work could not be established without inflicting serious injury on the workers. Socialism still continued to preoccupy _Punch_ in 1890. This time it is depicted as a snake attacking an eagle in mid-air, rather a strange inversion of natural history. The eagle is _Trade_, the wings are _Labour_ and _Capital_. The prosaic critic will ask how the snake got there except on the wings of a soaring imagination. John Burns is still a favourite _bête noire_, and is severely rebuked for his dictatorial and aggressive speeches at the Trade Union Congress and his action in connexion with industrial trouble on the Clyde, the ghost of Robert Burns being invoked to chastise his namesake in an adaptation of "The Dumfries Volunteer." At the Congress John Burns had said that he was "in the unfortunate position of having probably to go to Parliament at the next election, but he would rather go to prison half a dozen times than to Parliament once.... He must know on what terms he must do the dirty work of going to Parliament." This was not a happy utterance, though it hardly merited _Punch's_ bludgeoning. Burns was "perhaps Boanerges spelt little": he "laid about him like mules who can kick hard"; "the mustard had gone to his nose," etc. But in view of the way in which Mr. Burns sank without a ripple from public notice in August, 1914, there is point in the caution:--

[Sidenote: _The Coal Strike of 1890_]

Be warned in good time--why there isn't a man, Sir, Or at most one or two, whom the universe misses; You strut for a moment, and then, like poor _Anser_, You vanish, uncared for, with splutter and hisses.

To modern readers, however, the most instructive passages dealing with industrial unrest in 1890 relate to the Coal Strike. In March of that year _Punch_ published a prophetic journal of events, looming possibly somewhere ahead, of life in London after being without coal for sixteen weeks. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the realities of 1921. According to the prophet, people have burned their banisters and bed furniture; a syndicate of noblemen start boring for coal in Belgrave Square, but are stopped by the sanitary inspector. The wood pavement is pulled up and riots have broken out. The Archbishop of Canterbury preaches on the Plague of Darkness in the Abbey by the light of a farthing candle, which goes out; etc. Even if the recent stoppage had lasted sixteen instead of thirteen weeks, it is more than doubtful if _Punch's_ prophecies would have been fulfilled. At best they are an exercise in burlesque, and lacking in circumstantial imagination. _Punch_ might have foreseen the scenic possibilities of a long coal stoppage and its clarifying effect on the atmosphere. And with his belief in the solid sense of the people he ought to have refrained from the suggestion of riot. But he may be pardoned for failing to foresee how oil would come to our rescue. At the close of the same month _Punch_ addresses a versified remonstrance to the miners. He admits that pay should be liberal for dangerous underground work, but deprecates the use of the strike weapon as ruinous to trade and other industries by the laying up of ships and the closing of factories and railways. So, just two years later, in a cartoon on "Going on Play," he condemns the miners' strike, which aimed openly at creating an artificial scarcity, and thereby kept up wages. A poor clerk is seen expostulating with a working man: "It's all very well, but what's play to you is death to us." In the omnibus strike of 1891 _Punch_ was decidedly sympathetic towards the overworked drivers and conductors, just as he backed up the hairdressers in the same year when they agitated for an early closing day and better and healthier conditions. The verses on the Democratic Village of the Future, a paradise of sanitation in which there would be no more "bobbing to their betters," and the rule of Squire and parson would cease, are largely ironical, and the Socialist appropriation of May Day inspires a long warning to this "new May Day Medusa"--the International--in a "Hymn of Honest Labour" in May, 1892.

[Sidenote: _Bidding for the Labour Vote_]

Irony predominates, again, in the cynical verses of a year earlier satirizing the tendency of all parties to bid for the Labour vote:--

STRIKING TIMES

New Version of an Old Street Ballad (By a Labouring Elector)

Cheer up, cheer up, you sons of toil, and listen to my song, The times should much amuse you; you are up, and going strong. The Working Men of England at length begin to see That their parsnips for to butter now the Parties all agree.

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way, And their prospect of obtaining it grows brighter every day!

It isn't "Agitators" now, but Parties and M.P.'s, Who swear we ought to have our way, and do as we darn please. Upon my word it's proper fun! A man should love his neighbour, Yet Whigs hate Tories, Tories Whigs; but oh! they all love Labour!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

There's artful Joey Chamberlain, he looks as hard as nails, But when he wants to butter us, the Dorset never fails; He lays it on so soft and slab, not to say thick and messy, He couldn't flummerify us more were each of us a Jesse!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

Then roystering Random takes his turn; his treacle's pretty thick; He gives the Tories the straight tip--and don't they take it--quick? And now, by Jove, it's comical!--where will the fashion end?-- There's Parnell ups and poses as the genuine Labourer's Friend!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

Comrades, it makes me chortle. The Election's drawing nigh, And Eight Hours' Bills, or anything, they'll promise for to try. They'll spout and start Commissions; but, O mighty Labouring Host, Mind your eye, and keep it on them, or they'll have you all on toast!

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way, They'll strain their throats--you mind your votes, and you may find it pay!

We have now seen _Punch_ more as the critic than the friend of organized Labour, and it will be remembered that even in his most democratic days he evinced a deep-rooted distrust of delegates and Union officials. But there is another side to the picture, in which the old championship of the poor and oppressed is as vigorous and vocal as ever. If _Punch_ was more mistrustful of Trade Unionism, he was at least as unsparing as in his early days in pillorying examples of the greed and tyranny of masters and employers who misused their opportunities of exploiting unorganized or partially organized labour. In the notes made for this section during this period the very first relates to the sinking of the _La Plata_ and the burning of the _Cospatrick_, two emigrant ships, in 1875, and the indignation felt when it was found that the cargo of the latter vessel was highly inflammable and the boats inadequate in number. The scandal moved _Punch_ to rewrite Dibdin, with compliments to Mr. Plimsoll for his campaign against coffin ships, which had not yet been carried to its successful legislative conclusion. He also published, in January, 1875, a mock inquiry--after the manner of Dickens's Bardell _v._ Pickwick trial--by shipowners into the loss of the emigrant ship _Crossbones_. The Court exculpates the offenders after finding that the cargo--containing all sorts of combustible and inflammable materials--was of the most harmless description, adding as a rider that the boats should in future be always launched keel upwards. The old abuse of the "climbing boys" still reared its unsightly head; Lord Shaftesbury, in the debate on his Chimney Sweepers' Bill, in May, 1875, quoted the remark of a master sweep: "In learning a child you can't be soft with him; you must use violence," and _Punch_ enlarged on this text in his best manner. No appeal on behalf of children left him unmoved. When subscriptions were invited in 1878 to lay out a children's playground near St. Peter's, London Docks, he suggests that the fortunate children of the West End should help to give this playground to their less favoured brothers and sisters of the East. As a lover of children, _Punch_ was quick to recognize those who had laboured on their behalf.

[Sidenote: _George Smith of Coalville_]

In the Christmas number of 1879 he tells the life story of George Smith, of Coalville, who began life as a poor lad in the brickfields; worked his way up to the post of foreman and manager; and then devoted his life to calling attention to the cruel overwork and ill-treatment of the children whose labour he had once shared. In spite of neglect, opposition, and obloquy, he secured the passing of an Act which brought these hopeless little outcasts under the eye of Inspectors, limited their hours of labour, and secured them some measure of teaching. Though his action gave grievous offence and he lost his job, he set to work to render a similar service to the children of the bargees, and was the main agent in passing a law for the registration and inspection of canal boats. In these labours he sacrificed not only his time, but his means, and _Punch_ appealed to his readers to contribute to the support of "this practical preacher of good will to man, this friend of the friendless, this helper of those who, till he came, had none to help them."

In 1881 the hard time of boys in attendance on weighing machines, said to be on duty for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, aroused _Punch's_ sympathy and ire. Invention, however, rather than philanthropy, furnished a remedy in the "automatics."

In the same year _Punch's_ appeal for the fund to provide poor children with country holidays, embodied in "The Children's Cry," enabled him to forward £280 to the promoters. In 1885 the "almost formidable success" achieved by the experiment of Poor Children's Play-Rooms, in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, delighted his heart. In 1888, _Punch_, in "Cramming _versus_ 'Clemming'" emphasizes the need of providing free meals for poor children. At the very end of the period under review in this volume I have come across a notice of a book purporting to show up the cruelties practised on young people and animals in training them for acrobatic performances. The book was poor as literature, but if true called for searching inquiry. Children have, we may safely assume, been long safeguarded from the mishandling alleged to have been possible in 1892; but at the moment of writing these lines--August 11, 1921--an inquiry is being held into the treatment of animals by showmen and conjurers.

Nor was _Punch_ less concerned with the conditions of women workers. In his "Dream of Fair Women" suggested by factory inspectors' reports in 1875, he points to lack of combination among women as the incentive to slave-driving on the part of "foggers". He prefaces a set of verses in October with a passage from a Report on the Black Country:--

The women are said to take the place of fathers as well as husbands, while the men are idle and drunken.... At Bromsgrove I heard also of the growing custom of idle, lazy young lads looking out for skilled industrious wives, in order to obtain an easy life.

[Sidenote: _Men, Women and Dogs_]

It was, as _Punch_ puts it, an inversion of the old legend of Penthesilea and the Amazons. Women were unsexed by labour and serfdom. As for the men:--

_You_ loaf, train your whippets, and guzzle and gorge, While they sweat at the anvil, and puddle and forge.

So at the time of distress in the mining districts in 1875 the miners are accused of using charitable relief for the welfare of their dogs rather than of their families. "How is it," asks a benevolent directress, "you've brought two cans to-day, Geordie?" And a miner on strike replies: "The yain's for my mither, marm, and t'uther for the greyhound."

There is little mention of the hardships of life on the land, though labourers' wages were still very low; but the rise of the farmer class to "gentility" is noted in 1885 in the picture of the farmer's daughter seated at the piano and declaring that she would rather go as a governess than help in the dairy. _Punch's_ sympathies were more readily enlisted on behalf of shop and saloon girls. The movement began in Bristol in 1876, where a number of ladies issued a circular to employers asking that chairs should be provided for shop girls; the plan was adopted in Manchester, and, following the lead of Lancashire, _Punch_ repeatedly urges the plea for more considerate treatment. The matter was "beyond a joke," and _Punch_ recommended ladies to patronize shops where they were allowed, and boycott others. The subject was taken up by the _Lancet_, and the movement spread to Scotland, where a group of ladies made a personal tour of inspection in Edinburgh to see which shops provided seats. One of _Punch's_ pictures in this year shows a considerate customer handing a chair over the counter to a tired shop-girl, and a set of verses describes a girl driven into sin by need of rest. As he put it in his plea for "More Seats and Shorter Hours," "A country where humanity interposes on behalf of an over-driven cab-horse will surely not go on suffering hard-working, weak and defenceless girls to be driven to death with impunity." There was only one other place in which seats are not allowed. "That is the House of Commons, but there the torture is only inflicted on one-half of the Members." We hear little nowadays of the hardships of shop-girls, but the seating accommodation of the House of Commons is even more inadequate than in 1880. _Punch_, however, discussed Sir John Lubbock's Shop Hours Bill in 1887 with an impartiality that borders on inconsistency, showing the other side of the question and the popular preference in poor districts for shopping in the evening, districts in which "St. Lubbock" was looked upon as a well-meaning but fussy philanthropist.

[Sidenote: _"The Cry of the Clerk"_]

As an individualist, a lover of independence, and an opponent of monopoly, _Punch_ was in a difficult position. Some, at any rate, of the monster shops led the way in the humane and considerate treatment of their assistants. But the freezing out of the small shopkeeper struck him as an undoubted hardship, and in 1886 he published a prophetic article describing an interview in the "dim and distant future" between a Stranger and the last shopkeeper in London. It is an allegory of the tyranny of capitalism and monopoly, of the cult of bigness and universality, the triumph of ubiquitous caterers. That "dim and distant future" has not yet arrived, and after thirty-five years the small shopkeeper is still going almost as strong as in the days when _Punch_ uttered his dismal prophecy. But his most impassioned plea in the 'eighties was not uttered on behalf of the working man or woman, or the small shopkeeper. It was reserved for the victims of State parsimony, underpaid clerks and Government officials. The campaign on behalf of these new _protégés_ of his opened with "The Cry of the Clerk," a long wail, charged with sentiment, uttered by an overworked and underpaid drudge:--

I don't growl at the working man, be his virtue strict or morality lax; He'd strike if they gave him my weekly wage, and they never ask _him_ for the Income-tax! They take his little ones out to tea in a curtained van when the fields are green, But never a flower, or field or fern in their leafy homes have my children seen. The case is different, so they say, for I'm respectable--save the mark! He works with the sweat of his manly brow, and I with my body and brain--poor Clerk!

* * * * *

Why did I marry? In mercy's name, in the form of my brother was I not born? Are wife and child to be given to him, and love to be taken from me with scorn? It is not for them that I plead, for theirs are the only voices that break my sorrow, That lighten my pathway, make me pause 'twixt the sad to-day and the grim to-morrow. The Sun and the Sea are not given to me, nor joys like yours as you flit together Away to the woods and the downs, and over the endless acres of purple heather. But I've love, thank Heaven! and mercy, too; 'tis for justice only I bid you hark To the tale of a penniless man like me--to the wounded cry of a London Clerk!

The verses lack the desperate poignancy of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," but they made their mark and were quoted in their entirety in _The Times_. Subsequent articles and verses especially single out the telegraph clerks as the victims of State slave-driving. _Punch_ declares that there was no rest for the telegraph "operator," and describes a letter of appointment from the Government to one of this class as being really a death warrant, offering £65 a year with the prospect of rising to £160 after twenty years' service. Early in 1881 he writes under the heading, "Wiredrawn Salaries":--

The giggling girls, precocious boys, and half-starved clerks, who form the Telegraphic Staff of that money-grubbing department of Government--the Post Office--have petitioned for a slight increase of pay, and have been officially snubbed for their pains. They have petitioned for eight years, and for eight years they have received no answer. The Manchester clerks were too wise to petition. They struck, and their demands were at once attended to.

[Sidenote: _New Views of the Strike Weapon_]

This is not very polite to the ladies, but the comment is significant, since it shows that _Punch_ was, on occasion, ready to abandon his old view of the inefficacy of the strike weapon. In June of the same year he announced that "The worms have turned":--

The chief art of Government is to do nothing with an air of doing much. The best administrators are those who have thoroughly mastered the axiom that zeal is a crime, and who are clever at sitting upon troublesome questions. Unfortunately there are questions that will not be sat upon, and the grievance of the Telegraph Clerks is one of them. The Government have "considered" this grievance so long and so dreamily, that at last the discontented Clerks have threatened to strike. They may not at present have the organization and the command of funds of the "working man," who is always on the verge of striking, but these will come in the fullness of time. The Government have roused a spirit of self-reliance in these overworked and underpaid servants of a money-grubbing department, which no tardy concessions can destroy. The patronizing, not to say fatherly articles in some of the newspapers will encourage this spirit, for under the tone of warning is an ill-concealed fear that skilful telegraphists are not to be obtained from the fields and gutters. How much better it would have been to have "considered" less and acted more, and have yielded gracefully.

The Government were not, however, the only offenders whose parsimony excited _Punch's_ indignation. In 1878, when the wages of the railwaymen on the Midland were reduced, he prophesied increased inefficiency and more accidents. Railway servants were, in his opinion, overworked and underpaid. Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1890, Major Marindin, in his report on the collision at Eastleigh, found that an engine-driver and stoker had failed to keep a proper look-out, but noted that they had been on duty for sixteen and a half hours. _Punch's_ comment took the form of the cartoon of "Death and his brother Sleep" on the engine. The overloaded country postman had excited _Punch's_ compassion in 1885, and in the same year the outrageously long hours--sixteen a day and seven days a week--imposed on tram drivers and conductors had come in for severe censure in an article which also mentions the sweating of East End tailors' apprentices. It was this scandal, and the campaign which it provoked, that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission with Lord Dunraven as Chairman. _Punch_ joined in the controversy with a whole series of articles, cartoons, and verses. His first contribution was headed with a picture of a fat fur-coated contractor raking sovereigns out of the "sweating furnace," and took for its text Lord Dunraven's statement that "as regards hours of labour, earnings, and sanitary surroundings, the condition of these workers is more deplorable than that of any body of working men in any portion of the civilized or uncivilized world." A set of ironical advertisements followed of clothes made by sweated labour, including "The Happy Duchess Jacket--straight from a fever-stricken home," and "The Churchyard Overcoat," the product of slave-labour in the East End. Then we have "The modern Venus attired by the Three Dis-Graces"--a stalwart fashionable lady waited on by three starveling sempstresses; a mock Ode on the Triumph of Capital, full of ironic eulogy of Mammon; and, most remarkable of all, a long sardonic poem, published in September, 1888, under the heading, "Israel and Egypt; or Turning the Tables," which is at once an indictment of, and an apology for, the Jew Sweaters.

_Punch_ prefaces the poem with two extracts:--

"The Children of Israel multiplied so as to excite the jealous fears of the Egyptians.... They were therefore organized into gangs under taskmasters, as we see in the vivid pictures of the monuments, to work upon the public edifices. 'And the Egyptians made the Children of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in the field.'"--Smith's _Ancient History_.

"The Sweater is probably a Jew, and, if so, he has the gift of organization, and an extraordinary power of subordinating everything--humanity, it may be, included--to the great end of getting on.... The conditions of life in East London ruin the Christian labourer, and leave the Jewish labourer unharmed."--_The Spectator_ on _Sweaters and Jews_.

[Sidenote: _Jews and Gentiles_]

The verses compare the treatment of the Israelites under Pharaoh with the modern sweating of the Gentile by the Jew middleman:--

Yes, the Gentile once "sweated" the Jew, But the Hebrew has now turned the tables; Dunraven will tell you that's true.

The moral is summed up in the last four lines:--

And, behold, though the Sun-God is silent, the Son of the Sun-God asleep, Still merciless Mammon is master, the slaves of the Gold-God still weep; Be his ministers Hebrew or Gentile, his worship is cruelty still; Still the worker must sweat 'neath the scourge that the stores of the tyrant may fill.

Lord Dunraven withdrew from the Commission, and _Punch_ congratulated him on his retirement, though it "seemed caused by a fad," when the Report was published in 1890. The recommendations were inadequate, in _Punch's_ view. He spoke contemptuously of applying the "rose-water cure" and whitewashing the sweater, whom he depicts as a monster vampire. Socialism, as we have seen, was a serpent of the boa constrictor type. The tendency to big combines was typified by an octopus, labelled Monopoly, controlling cotton, iron, coal, salt and copper, and threatening a distressful lady (Commerce) perilously navigating a frail canoe.

Bumbledom was not dead, but its activities were less blatant. _Punch_ gibbets the stinginess of the Lambeth Workhouse when in 1875 the Guardians decided that Christmas pudding was too rich in good things and recommended a plainer variety. Fourteen years later, under the sarcastic heading, "Luxury for Paupers," we encounter the following elegant extract from the _Standard_ of December 5, 1889:--

"At the Chester Board of Guardians yesterday, a discussion took place as to whether, in view of the Christmas dinner, it would be advisable to allow the inmates to have knives to cut their meat. It was explained that at present the paupers had to tear the meat to pieces with their fingers and teeth.... The Rev. O. Rawson proposed that they should buy knives and forks.... Mr. Charmley, farmer, opposed the proposal.... The motion to hire knives and forks on Christmas Day only was put, and carried by thirteen votes to ten."

[Sidenote: _Manchester under the Microscope_]

The negligence and delay in administering Parish relief moved _Punch_ in 1876 to declare that sick paupers were worse treated than sick cows or horses. As an illustration of "The way we die now," there are further exposures of cruelty in lunatic asylums, and the hard-heartedness of Guardians in harrying "bundles of rags." But these revelations are fewer than in former years, and dwell more on mismanagement and extravagance than actual inhumanity. Thus the report of the committee of inquiry into the administration of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1885 revealed gross waste and extravagant consumption of wine and stimulants, not by the patients, but by the officials. _Punch_ was "so long accustomed to hear of the wondrous doings of 'Manchester the Great' and the grand example she set to the rest of the Kingdom in all that constituted good and pure government and sound finance," that he could not repress a certain malicious satisfaction at the result of the audit of the accounts of her Corporation by the "Citizens' auditor," published in the autumn of 1884. The first instalment, reviewed in October, is an entertaining document winding up with an allusion to the pantomime of the _Forty Thieves_, fully justified by the further revelations summarized by _Punch_ a month later:--

MANCHESTER'S PLUCKY AUDITOR

This bold Gentleman continues his amusing revelations to the apparent delight of the ratepayers, and the disgust of the bumptious Corporation. We can only make room for one or two extracts. This is the bill for a dinner, at the Queen's Hotel, for the Members of the Baths and Wash-houses Committee, at which it will be seen that they drank punch, sherry, hock, champagne, claret, port, gin, whiskey, brandy, _liqueurs_, and mild ale:--

"To Twenty-one dinners, caviare, turtle, etc., 15s. each, £15 15s. 0d.; sherry, 16s.; hock, 50s.; punch, 7s. 6d.; champagne, 138s. 6d.; claret, 50s.; port, 25s.; mild ale, 1s.; liqueur, 20s.; coffee, 10s. 6d.; cigars, 64s. 6d.; soda, 22s. 6d.; gin, 2s. 6d.; whiskey, 15s.; brandy, 27s. 6d.; service, 21s.

"In addition to the above, the Committee had sent up to the Baths the day before the opening, one dozen bottles of whiskey, 48s.; one dozen gin, 36s.; half-a-dozen brandy, 84s.; half-a-dozen port, 48s.; half-a-dozen sherry, 48s.; two dozen soda, 4s. 6d.; one dozen lemonade, 4s. 6d.; one dozen potass, 4s. 6d.; two boxes cigars, 22s. 6d. each; and half-a-dozen bottles of St. Julien, 36s.; making a total of £52 2s. paid to the proprietors of the Queen's Hotel."

He adds that strenuous efforts have been made to find out the Gentleman who called for Mild Ale, and, when got, consumed a shilling's-worth of it.

If there were many such auditors, audits would form a most amusing portion of our comic literature.

In these circumstances _Punch_ expressed a natural joy that Municipal Reform was tackled at last in Sir William Harcourt's Bill, while in his "Bitter Cry of Alderman and Bumble" he showed these two worthies bursting into tears over the iniquities of "Werdant 'Arcourt."

The housing problem comes up early in 1877 _à propos_ of the late Sir B. W. Richardson's hygienic theories. _Punch_ admits that he was probably on the right track, but waxes sarcastic at the expense of crotchety alarmists, and his own suggestions are more whimsical than helpful. It was not until 1883 that he began to take the problem seriously. I deal in another section with the fashionable craze for "slumming," which _Punch_ ridiculed as insincere and absurd. But there is genuine indignation in his verses on a judge's remarks at Manchester, and on the report of an inquest, at which it came out that a whole family occupied one bed on the floor; in the poem (after Hood) on the Real Haunted House, comparing slum dwellers with rural labourers; in the cartoon, "Mammon's Rents," on the text, "Dives, the owner of property condemned as unfit for habitation, is getting from 50 to 60 per cent. on his money"; and in "The Slum-dweller's Saturday Night" (after Burns), where _Punch_ drives home his old point of the futility of foreign missions when we had all this unreclaimed slum savagery at home. The personal investigations of slum areas undertaken by Sir Charles Dilke, then President of the Local Government Board, traced the evil to the greed of grasping landlords.

To this year belong _Punch's_ tirades against the iniquity of unjust rates. In December he has quite a long article based on the hardships of shopkeepers, small and large. He quotes two cases. The first is that of a small shopkeeper. The street in which he lived had been recently widened. Immediately his landlord raised his rent £30 a year, and his rates were at once raised from £16 to £30. Another victim carrying on business in a principal City thoroughfare paid a rental of £800 a year, his gross profits being £1,500. The street was improved; his rent was increased to £1,000; and £40 a year were added to his rates in consequence of an improvement which had already cost him £200 a year, which the landlord had received without the expenditure of a single shilling. One does not expect to find precise information on rating and rentals in a comic journal, but in the 'eighties at any rate _Punch_ did not shirk such topics.

[Sidenote: _Housing and Health_]

In the issue of December 8, 1883, _Punch_ ventured to remind his readers that on the 16th of that month, exactly forty years had elapsed since Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt" appeared in his pages; but it was perhaps an overstatement to say that the "Bitter Cry" was as "loud and heart-rending" then as in the 'forties. The handling of the Housing Commission in 1884 is decidedly irreverent, and the account of its meetings and the speeches of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield), and Mr. Jesse Collings borders on the burlesque. Only towards Cardinal Manning does _Punch_ extend a limited measure of sympathy. There was, however, no alloy in his praise of Sir Edward Guinness's gift in 1880 of £250,000 for the better housing of the poor. When Christ Church Cathedral was restored in Dublin by the liberality of a wealthy distiller, a poor Irishwoman, as she gazed on the building, remarked: "Glory be to God! To think that whisky could do all that!" _Punch_ more discreetly commended "good Edward Guinness" as the "munificent host of 'The Tankard.'"

This was the year of the Health Exhibition, the second of that annual series which was a special feature of the 'eighties. On their recreative aspect I speak elsewhere. It may suffice here to say that _Punch_ summed up the conflict of aims which they represented in the phrase "Commerce _v._ Cremorne." His anticipatory notice of the "Healtheries" abounds in burlesque suggestions for hygienic exhibits; in the account of the opening praise is largely tempered with irony; and his "insane-itary guide" shows how largely these Exhibitions depended on _al fresco_ entertainments, illuminations, and bands.

The growth of the modern mania for amusement was still in its infancy, but _Punch_ has some instructive remarks on the decline of the many institutions which had begun with the highest instructional aims and aspirations:--

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham ... commenced its career with the highest aspirations. The British Public were to be shown the architectural glories of the Alhambra and Pompeii, and soon found themselves watching the evolutions of Léotard and Blondin. In like manner the Westminster Aquarium was inaugurated by the Duke of Edinburgh, as a sort of supplement to "the mission of Albert the Good," but soon had to fall back on Zazel and a "Variety entertainment."

_Punch_ accordingly prophecies a similar evolution in the character of the South Kensington Exhibition, and the sequel proved that here, at any rate, he was a true prophet.

Students of Criminology will find much to interest them in _Punch's_ pages during this period. We have already seen that he had abandoned his objection to capital punishment in the 'sixties. Commenting on the debate in June, 1877, _Punch_ defended the maintenance of the gallows as an _ultima ratio legum_--much on the lines of J. S. Mill, who had, more than anyone else, converted him from his old view. Later on, when the abolition was rejected by 263 votes to 64, he writes:--

We keep our gallows for the brute whom no rope weaker than the hempen halter will bind, and no terror less terrible than Tyburn Tree will hold in awe. There are such ruffians; and for them the gallows is, and will be, kept for the present standing.

In 1879 the trial of Peace, the murderer, gave _Punch_ a good opening for condemning the undue prominence given in the Press to the personalities and tastes of criminals. He makes a good point against papers which speak with two voices: filling their news columns with personal details of murderers and denouncing the cult of the criminal in their leading articles. Such inconsistencies, however, still continue to grieve the judicious. In the early 'eighties the urbane inefficiency of the Police Force, and especially of the detective side, is a frequent theme of criticism, both burlesque and serious. The most amusing entry relates to a constable alleged to have reported: "At 1.45 this morning, found an earthquake opposite No. 207." _Punch_ christened the C.I.D. the "Defective Police," but proved his impartiality by handsomely admitting the heavy odds against which constables had to contend--the truncheon was no match for the burglar's revolver.

[Sidenote: _Crime in Whitechapel_]

Frequent allusions to hooliganism and armed burglars occur in 1882. _Punch_ speaks of a "Mohock Revival," and asks, "Is the Police Force no remedy, or must we all carry revolvers?" For a while complaints against the impotence of the police cease, or take a new form, as when _Punch_ turns his attention to the disgraceful conditions prevailing at the Central Criminal Court, where respectable men and women subpoenaed as witnesses were exposed to hustling and insults from roughs--and constables. In 1887 he extended his censure to the shocking condition of the prisons in which unconvicted prisoners were lodged awaiting trial. For the conduct of the police during the Jubilee Celebrations he has nothing but praise, and waxed lyrical in "_Punch_ to the Peelers" over their humanity and courtesy.

But a far more severe ordeal awaited the police in 1888, the year of the crime wave in Whitechapel. Sarcastic allusions to the inefficiency of the Force are renewed. One cartoon represents them blindfolded and stumbling about amongst jeering criminals. _Punch_ was nearer the mark in the cartoon headed, "The Nemesis of Neglect"--based on a letter from "S. G. O." in _The Times_ pointing out that East End slums invited crime--and in his admissions that the numbers of the police were inadequate and that their inefficiency was largely due to the publicity given to the movements of detectives, and the measures taken by the authorities, by sensational interviewers in the cheap press. The amateur "crime investigator" unfortunately continued to flourish in spite of _Punch's_ censure. Hideous picture-posters, vividly representing sensational scenes of murder, exhibited as the "great attractions" of certain plays, are also condemned as a blot on civilization, a disgrace to the Drama, and a suggestion of crime. It should be added that _Punch_ expressly exempted Sir Charles Warren from blame, and indignantly dissociated himself from the attacks of those who joined in making him a scapegoat:--

The Police Force requires strengthening, and Sir Charles is perfectly alive to the fact. What on earth can it matter if, in number, our Police compare favourably with the Police Force at Constantinople, or St. Petersburgh, or Vienna, or Jericho, if we have not sufficient Police to protect life and property in the Metropolis? Socialistic sensational Journalists and rowdy demagogues would like to see the Police Force reduced to one in every two thousand, until they fell to fighting among themselves, when they would be the first to yell out "Police!" and scream for the intervention of the enfeebled arm of the law.

In April, 1889, the proposed flogging of dangerous criminals excited a good deal of controversy. In _Punch's_ cartoon in April Bill Sikes protests as an injured innocent against the cat on the ground that it will make a brute of him. _Punch's_ attitude was strongly anti-sentimentalist, but he held that the lash should be used with discretion.

In the summer he renews his demand for increasing the police. The new Chief Commissioner, Monro, is shown telling John Bull that he can have any number of policemen _if he likes to pay for them_, while Policeman X, Junior, declares that the Force is overworked. It is curious to note that, in the list of police difficulties, besides Whitechapel murders, _Punch_ includes the control of Salvation Army processions and obstructions. But in these days even so wise and good a man as Huxley did not hesitate to label--and libel--Salvationism as "Corybantic Christianity."

On the everlasting Drink Question _Punch_ sided with the moderate reformers, disapproved of coercion or Prohibition, and found confirmation of his views in the testimony of the Howard Association in 1876 that moral persuasion and improvement in the conditions of living afforded the only real remedy. Recreation, as an alternative to and distraction from the public-house, he always advocated. When the Sunday opening of galleries and museums was again rejected in 1879, _Punch's_ cartoon took his familiar line that Sabbatarianism drove men to drink. "Bung" congratulates Archbishop Tait on the support of the Episcopal bench in defeating the measure. But in the same month, in "Friend Bung's Remonstrance," _Punch_ inserted a protest against the notion that all public-housekeepers would support Sabbatarian legislation. That he was sensitive to foreign criticism is shown by his skit on M. Millaud's articles in the _Figaro_ in 1880 in which the drunkenness of London had been unfavourably commented upon.

[Sidenote: _Licensing Anomalies_]

The "marvellous magisterial licensing system" of the period, which was "vexatious, inconsistent, and meddlesome," is repeatedly criticized in the year. In an article on the degeneracy of the Aquarium, _Punch_ gives a full account of its vulgar, inane, and sensational shows, and alludes to the nocturnal orgies enacted at that place of entertainment. Music and dancing licences, he declared, would be applied for by the ten thousand if there were freedom and wisdom, instead of the chaos and vested interest maintained by "Maw-worm" and "Meddlevex" (Middlesex) magistrates. The result was that London was "a city of unmitigated pot-houses." Yet drinking, judged by the test of state finance, was decreasing. The revenue from intoxicants in 1882 had fallen 2½ millions in seven years, and _Punch_ indulges in ironical comment. The picture in the spring of 1883 of the "Temperance Budget" shows the financial conditions of the country as only fairly satisfactory, and represents John Bull as saying: "I have been too sober--_Nunc est bibendum_." This was obviously ironical, but it was irony that might easily be misread. _Punch_ would probably have endorsed Archbishop Magee's famous dictum: "Better England free than England sober." Teetotalism was to _Punch_ inextricably associated with cranks, faddists, and fanatics. He was a robust humanitarian. Cock-fighting was a barbarous pastime, but he resented the unfair differentiation which punished working men who indulged in it with a heavy fine, while rich and aristocratic pigeon-shooters went scot-free. Dr. Carver's shooting performances at the Crystal Palace in 1879 are specially praised because he did not exhibit his skill by the slaughter of pigeons. So in 1876 _Punch_ had supported Mr. Flower's agitation against the use of bearing-reins for horses. Cruelty to animals he detested; but, on the burning question of vivisection, firmly upheld the practice, in the interests of humanity, when guarded by stringent regulations, and sided with Lister and Paget against Lord Shaftesbury, whose opposition he deeply regretted.

Wages, as I have remarked above, were still remarkably low, judged by our post-war standards. In 1880 _Punch_ quotes an advertisement from the _Lincoln Gazette_ for an "active young town crier and bill-poster who can live on 1s. 3d. a week." But prices were low also, and by the mid 'seventies cheap railway fares and excursions had led to a great increase of travelling among the working classes. The "cheap tripper" figures largely in _Punch_ throughout these years, and his (and her) manners and customs lent themselves more readily to satire than sympathy. _Punch_ was still the friend as well as the critic of the masses, and when in 1883 the steam launch nuisance on the Thames was exciting a good deal of inflammatory comment, published his "Sunday School for the Upper Classes," in which a laundress and charwoman is seen giving a lesson to young gentlefolk, turning the tables on their Sabbatarian teaching, and asking them to give up the river on Sunday to those who worked all the week. But here, as so often, _Punch_ showed his habitual impartiality by simultaneously admitting that the state of the river was a scandal, and welcoming an official inquiry by the Thames Conservancy Board. A year later he emphasized Sir Charles Dilke's statement that the river was "a sort of savage place," with no real police to enforce the law; _Punch's_ picture of the Thames on Bank Holiday exhibits a carnival of rowdyism, collisions, and upsets. The steam launch was no favourite of _Punch_. He had already shown it as an intruder on the waterways of Venice, crowded with 'Arries and 'Arriets emitting characteristic comments on the Bridge of Sighs.

Throughout the 'eighties all the unlovely and odious attributes of lower middle-class vulgarity were concentrated by _Punch_ in a series of verses directed against 'Arry, who takes the place of the "snob" and the "gent" of the 'forties and 'fifties. One sometimes wonders whether the late Mr. Milliken, the creator of _Punch's_ 'Arry, was not intoxicated by the exuberance of his own invention, by the deftness of his patter, and exaggerated the atrocities of the original. For there is no redeeming feature in 'Arry, or in 'Arriet, who is indeed the worse of the two." ... Modesty? Meekness? Thrift? Oh, Jiminy! Ladies of Fashion ain't caught now with no such moral niminy piminy." Their lingo is extensive, peculiar, and unpleasant, and much of it has mercifully passed into the limbo of lost words--"rorty," for example, and (let us hope) "lotion" for drink. 'Arry, as depicted in these monologues, is always the Cockney; the withers of the provincial are unwrung in contemplating his excesses. He is sometimes a clerk, though not of the class whose "Cry" had evoked _Punch's_ sympathy, sometimes a counter-jumper, but always a cad. He and his partner are always drawn in such a way as to lend point to the cynical saying that "life would be endurable but for its amusements." His notion of pleasure is largely made up of din and destruction. If he takes a holiday in the country, he disturbs its sylvan seclusion by tearing up ferns and tearing down branches. But he is in his true element at the seaside--witness _Punch's_ gruesome adaptation of Southey's lines on Lodore, under the heading "The Shore."

[Sidenote: _'Arry and 'Arriet_]

'Arry figures in a less repulsive mood when visiting the Paris Exhibition of 1889--"'Arry in Parry." He is very far from belonging to the submerged classes, and has generally plenty of money to spend on his amusements and creature comforts. But he is not enamoured of hard work. The competition of the German clerk in 1886 fills him with fury. He is disgusted with the "Sossidges" for ousting Englishmen from their jobs, but is not prepared to emulate the industry of the foreigner:--

Young Yah-Yah 'as nobbled my crib, turns his pink shovel nose up, old man. _He_ may live upon lager and langwidges, Charlie; sech isn't _my_ plan.

Mr. Gladstone had appealed to the Englishman to prove himself the better man by competing with the German on the ground on which the latter excelled. The Cockney clerk retorts that it isn't good enough, and clamours for the expulsion of the industrious aliens who undercut him.

Mixed up with 'Arry's selfishness, greediness, and general lack of decency and good feeling there is a certain element of shrewdness, of practical common sense, but it is always exerted on behalf of Number One. Taken all round, he is easily the most disagreeable of all the types created by _Punch_ in a period in which his former complacency had given place, at best, to a somewhat peevish optimism, sinking at times, as we note elsewhere, to dismal laments over our decadence. But, in justice to _Punch_, it is right to add that by far the most severe denunciations are reserved for the degenerates in high places. The 'Arry poems do not show _Punch_ in the light of a Jeremiah or a Juvenal. Taken together, they form a sort of composite photograph of the mean Cockney who belongs neither to the classes nor the masses, who lacks the breeding and reticence of the one and the primitive virtues of the other. Moreover, the unabashed and undefeated complacency of these monologues, apart from their shrewdness, inspires a certain grudging admiration for this entirely impenitent "bounder."

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Army_]

But we part from him without regret, and with a feeling that he is almost too odious to be true to type. He bulks so largely in the pages of _Punch_ as to obscure the evidences of abiding friendliness to the true democracy on which 'Arry was a mere excrescence. The manners of the cheap tripper might offend _Punch_, but he was genuinely delighted when bands were introduced in the Parks on Sundays to the discomfiture of Sabbatarians and Pharisees; and we find him contrasting the activity of the police in suppressing gambling in Bermondsey with the tolerance extended to certain West End clubs. There was nothing new in this attitude, but we may note a change in regard to his views on emigration, which in earlier days _Punch_ had supported with enthusiasm. In 1877 a curious letter, guaranteed genuine, is published from a settler in Australia, describing the conditions there, and strongly deterring emigration to a country where there were no comforts, and nothing was cheaper than in England save meat.

In the earlier volumes of this survey it has been shown how deep-seated was the prejudice against the Army amongst respectable middle-class and working people. In his earlier and anti-militarist days _Punch_ had shared this feeling, and even denounced the recruiting-sergeant as an ogre or worse. From the Crimean War onward this hostility gave place to the wiser and saner view that the men who served their country bravely and faithfully should be decently treated, properly fed, and encouraged in self-respect by the community which they defended. How far public opinion fell short in this regard may be seen in the excellent appeal headed "Men Wanted" which _Punch_ issued in January, 1875. The Army was greatly in need of recruits, and the evidence taken before the Recruiting Commission proved that "the want of respect shown by civilians to Her Majesty's uniform had a great deal to do with the Army's loss of popularity." Whereupon _Punch_ proceeds to point out:--

1. That the intellectual training of Soldiers is now a matter of paramount importance, and that the Privates of many Regiments can compare favourably with civilians as regards education.

2. That through the exertions of H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge, Recreation Rooms and Libraries have been established in all the Barracks, with the object (an object that has been attained) of fostering refinement in the ranks.

3. That, during the recent series of Autumn Manoeuvres, the Armies in the Field have gained golden opinions from all with whom they have come in contact.

4. That most Soldiers, when they leave the Service, are found to be admirably adapted to fill the positions of clerks, railway-guards, policemen, and other posts of importance and responsibility.

5. That a Colour-Sergeant is a Non-Commissioned Officer in command of some sixty or a hundred men, who has been promoted after many years' service in the ranks, in recognition of zeal, cleverness, and good conduct.

Having made these observations, Field-Marshal _Punch_ is forced to record his deep regret:--

1. That a Magistrate speaking from the Bench should have thought proper to inform a Recruit that to join the Army was to take a false step in life, which might possibly entail the breaking of his parents' hearts.

2. That a Non-Commissioned Officer should be refused admission to the best seats in a place of public entertainment because he (the Non-Commissioned Officer in question) happened at the time of purchasing his ticket to be wearing the should-be honoured uniform of Her Majesty the Queen.

Field-Marshal _Punch_ consequently feels it to be his duty to issue the following orders:--

1. In future, City Aldermen, in their official capacities, will refrain from making remarks calculated to bring the Army into ridicule, hatred, or contempt.

2. If any regulation exists preventing soldiers in uniform from appearing in the better seats of places of entertainment, the rule in question must be immediately abolished.

In conclusion, Field-Marshal _Punch_ is strongly of opinion that recruiting will continue to remain slack until the difference existing between the social conditions of the British Soldier in the present, and the Negro Slave in the past, is thoroughly understood and admitted by the public in general, and the people to whom this circular is addressed in particular. It must be remembered in future that the Livery of Her Majesty is worn by warriors, and not by flunkeys.

[Sidenote: _Mismanagement at Reviews_]

The remonstrance was well needed, though many years were to elapse before the second of these orders was acted on. Yet if _Punch_ had little mercy on those who imagined that _all_ soldiers were "brutal and licentious," he had no compassion on those who disgraced their uniform. In the controversy which arose in 1880 between Dr. W. H. Russell and Sir Garnet Wolseley over alleged breaches of discipline among our troops during the Zulu campaign, _Punch_ held that the war correspondent's was a "true bill," and actually advocated the reintroduction of flogging in the Army for "exceptional cases of brutality which degrade the soldier to the level of the garrotter or the wife-beater."

The allusions to the Volunteer Review in the Great Park at Windsor in July, 1881, dwell chiefly on the habitual neglect and lack of consideration meted out to the Army on these occasions:--

HOW TO TREAT THE ARMY

Select the hottest day you can possibly find for a perfectly useless sham fight and send the men out with the heaviest, clumsiest, most antiquated, and unseasonable headgear. When a few of them perish, as a matter of course, of sunstroke, express the utmost astonishment that anybody can die from such a cause in such perfect uniform in a temperate climate.

HOW TO TREAT THE VOLUNTEERS

Encourage fifty thousand men to attend a Review, and then tell them coolly that your military organization is quite unequal to the task of giving them a day's food.... As they are nearly all respectable middle-class members of Society, give them a shilling apiece to take care of themselves, and trust to their decency not to abuse such extraordinary liberality.

_Punch_ gave credit to the Duke of Cambridge for his efforts to improve the amenities of barrack life, but came down heavily on him for opposing the introduction, when the late Duke of Devonshire was at the War Office, of neutral-tinted uniforms on active service. The Duke of Cambridge thought it a good thing for a soldier that, when in action, he should be visible, and _Punch_ dealt faithfully with this ducal ineptitude:--

"THE THIN RED LINE"

(Horse Guards Duo.)

Pro.

Who says a soldier's a thing ready made Of a suit of grey and a service-spade?-- That there's pluck in picking a 'vantage ground, Then digging a hole and heaping a mound? The notion's preposterous, laughable, quizzible! By Jove, Sir, a soldier--he ought to be visible!

Con.

I grant you all that; but when Six-foot Guards Like ninepins go down at a thousand yards, 'Tis time to note that, if work's to be done, A field to be saved, a day to be won, It won't be by speeches as firework as fizzible, But by getting well home with movement invisible.

Pro.

Pooh! Stuff, Sir! What served us at Waterloo? Your neutral tint, or your washed-out blue? Digging and dodging?--I rather opine A rush with a cheer of a "thin red line," In the midst of a hailstorm of all things whizzible! Don't talk, Sir, to me of a coat that's not visible!

Con.

No use, my good friend; for though you may bless The days that departed with Old Brown Bess, If you make that "red line," that never will yield, A target for every shot in the field, Of your foemen you'll stir the faculties risible-- For neither your troops nor your brains will be visible!

[Sidenote: _Heroes, Charlatans and Criminals_]

Nor did _Punch_ in his zeal for the soldier on active service forget the claims to grateful recognition of the ex-service man. In 1890 we find an indignant appeal for the survivors of the Balaklava Charge, showing how they had been forgotten--except in music-hall recitations. To reinforce the appeal, _Punch_ printed a picture contrasting a Balaklava survivor, dying in a garret, with the well-remunerated professional "fasting man," one of whom was much in the public eye just then. An even more lurid contrast in modern hero-worship is exhibited in the sardonic description of the fêting and glorifying of criminals. The verses "I'd be a criminal" show how fashion, pseudo-science, sensational journalism, and sentimental folly conspired to apotheosize the murderer.

THE STATUS OF WOMEN

[Sidenote: _Undomestic Daughters_]

The history of modern England as set forth in the files of _Punch_ is largely a record of the education of the average man; and there are few, if any, aspects of this education during the period under review in this volume in which greater changes are observable than in _Punch's_ altered view of the _status_ of women. Even in his earliest days he had "rounded Cape Turk"; he had never favoured an Oriental seclusion of his womankind. But an element of condescension and patronage mingled with his chivalry. Their efforts to emerge from the sphere of domestic duties met for the most part with amused ridicule. For the rest the phrase "pretty dears" fairly sums up _Punch's_ earlier view of the place of women in the universe. This view had already been largely modified. We have seen how he had been shaken over the question of the suffrage, how he had been converted to women's invasion of the medical and other professions, and to their election to the London School Board. The progress of this recognition continues throughout this period; the competition of women sometimes excites chaff, sometimes misgiving, but it is no longer regarded as futile. Their solid achievements in a variety of spheres of activity are handsomely acknowledged. We hear less of the "pretty dears" and "ducks"; they are increasingly credited with the capacity to hold their own intellectually with the lords of creation. A conspicuous proof of this altered view is to be found in the texts which accompany the "social cuts" in the 'eighties and 'nineties. It has been said that "the ball of repartee cannot be kept up without constant repercussion," but in the days of Leech the repercussive quality was denied to the fair sex. This defect has _now_ been so completely redressed that the balance inclines rather to the other side, and in Du Maurier's pictures the "score" is generally given to the women. The day of the domestic "doormat" was passing, and grown-up girls are no longer at the mercy of pert or tyrannous schoolboy brothers. True, this self-assertion was far from complete. The solidarity and cohesion of the family circle was substantially unimpaired. Bachelor girls and revolting daughters were a negligible minority; and in the 'eighties the number of professional women was so small that unmarried aunts still played a considerable part in the domestic system, and are frequently found in charge of their small nephews and nieces. It was not until 1890 that _Punch_ included in his series of "Modern Types" that of "The Undomestic Daughter"; and even then her self-expression is circumscribed by lack of opportunity and, in the portrait given, can only find vent in fussy and futile philanthropy. She is a dreary rebel, with a genius for discomfort, who neglects her family when they need her most, ultimately contracts an unromantic marriage, and ends up as a domestic tyrant--a sort of variant on Mrs. Jellyby, but hardly recognizable as a forerunner of the emancipated daughter of to-day.

_Punch_ was already a convert to the higher education of women within certain limits. His reservations are shown in 1875 in an interview between Professor _Punch_ and an ideal candidate for the Ladies' University as it should be. Domestic economy comes first in the curriculum, the humanities second. A picture in the following year would seem to indicate that _Punch's_ ideal was inverted, for one Girton student is shown reading to another a valentine headed with the famous lines from the _Antigone_ of Sophocles beginning [Greek: Erôs anikate machan].[3] "How much jollier," she observes, "than those silly English verses fellows used to send!" Classics were still the predominant partner, and in 1878 _Punch_ notes and resents the attempted revival of classical costume inaugurated by a fashionable poetess. 'Arry's tirade against the higher education of women in 1879, blaspheming against the whole movement as ridiculous and unnatural, is heavily ironical, for in the same year _Punch_ has some friendly verses on the extension of Girton and Newnham, and in 1880 congratulates Miss Scott on being bracketed eighth Wrangler. _Punch_ simultaneously congratulated Mrs., afterwards Lady Butler, on being elected an A.R.A., and rejoiced that the doors of the Academy had been reopened to the sex once honoured in the days of Sir Joshua:--

Mrs. Butler, née Elizabeth Thompson, _Punch_ takes off his hat to you as the first Lady Associate. Your predecessors, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, sprang into being full-blown R.A.'s.

This is as it should be. At last _Punch_ may say, and with pride he says it, the Ladies are looking up--looking up to the high places of Science and Art, which should never have been held beyond their reach, and which will be graced by their occupancy.

But when the Academy doors are reopened to the Ladies, let them be opened to their full width. Let us not hear of any petty restrictions or exclusions from this or that function or privilege of R.A. What these letters bring men let them bring to women.

_Punch's_ congratulations were premature. Forty years have elapsed, and no women have yet been elected Associates.

[Footnote 3: The quotation reminds me that, when I was an undergraduate at Oxford at this time, the handmaiden at a certain lodgings was called "Annie Katie" by successive generations of undergraduates. These were not her baptismal names: they had been bestowed upon her by an ingenious scholar because her surname was Macan.]

[Sidenote: _A Song of Degrees_]

It was in 1880 again that _Punch_ backed the appeal of Girton for funds to carry out the extension scheme and supported the petition of women for university degrees. Here he represents the would-be woman graduate as Vivien endeavouring to win over the recalcitrant academic Merlin:--

In Arts, if once examiners be ours, To take degrees we must have equal powers; The loss of these is as the loss of all.

It is the little rift within the lute, That soon will leave the Girton lecturer mute; And, slowly emptying, silence Newnham Hall.

The little rift in academic lute, The speck of discontent in hard-earned fruit, That, eating inwards, turns it into gall.

It is not worth the keeping; let it go: But shall it? Answer fairly, answer no; And take us all in all or not at all.

The decision of Durham University to grant women the B.A. degree in 1881 is cordially applauded, though the welcome is impaired by the facetious heading, "'Ducks' at Durham"; and the liberality of Cambridge in admitting women to the Tripos Examination is contrasted with the churlishness of Oxford. As I write the tables have been turned and Oxford is the paradise of the girl graduate.

In his earlier days _Punch_ never wearied of insisting on the importance of cookery, but a set of verses in 1881 marks an altered mood towards the old "woman in the kitchen" cry. Here the suggestion is even made that _men_ would be benefited by a course of lessons in cooking, and there is obvious irony in the concluding lines:--

This is woman's true position-- In the kitchen's inmost nook; And a lady's noblest mission Is to cook.

The two moods are subtly combined in Du Maurier's famous and unforgettable picture of the cynical widow advising a wife of two years' standing to "feed the brute."

[Sidenote: _"Punch's" Misgivings_]

From the 'eighties onward physical culture plays an ever-increasing part in the education of girls. _Punch_ went astray in assuming in 1883 that bicycling was impossible for women, but in this and the next year we find him encouraging gymnastics for girls, though there is a touch of satire in Du Maurier's fashionable mother, who boasts to an eligible aspirant that every one of her daughters can knock their father down. The invasion of the domain of pastime and athletics by women and girls will be noted later on. For the moment I am concerned with their intellectual rather than their physical development. Little is said of girls' schools, though an interesting sidelight is shed on the methods of the old-fashioned boarding-school in the picture of the charming girl who explains to a Frenchman her fluency in his tongue: "At school the girl who sat next me at dinner used to eat my fat, and I used to do her French exercise for her; so I got lots of practice." Girls were becoming more studious, more highly educated, but they were not all female Admirable Crichtons. In 1885 _Punch_ chronicles the ingenuous remark of a young lady to her friend, "Only fancy! _As You Like It_ is by Shakespeare!" He welcomed the admission of lady graduates to the Convocation of the University of London in 1884, but misgiving mingles with admiration in his forecast of the omniscient "Woman of the Future" in the same year:--

The Woman of the Future! She'll be deeply read, that's certain, With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton; She'll puzzle men in Algebra with horrible quadratics, Dynamics, and the mysteries of higher mathematics; Or, if she turns to classic tomes a literary roamer, She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.

You take a maiden in to dine, and find, with consternation, She scorns the light frivolities of modern conversation; And not for her the latest bit of fashionable chatter, Her pretty head is wellnigh full of more important matter; You talk of Drama or Burlesque, theatric themes pursuing, She only thinks of what the Dons at Oxford may be doing.

* * * * *

The Woman of the Future may be very learned-looking, But dare we ask if she'll know aught of housekeeping or cooking? She'll read far more, and that is well, than empty-headed beauties, But has she studied with it all a woman's chiefest duties? We wot she'll ne'er acknowledge, till her heated brain grows cooler, That Woman, not the Irishman, should be the true home-ruler.

O pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerning To overload a woman's brain and cram our girls with learning, You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing, To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. Leave one or two nice girls before the sex your system smothers, Or what on earth will poor men do for sweethearts, wives, and mothers?

Here we find _Punch_ reverting to his earlier attitude. Moreover, as I have shown elsewhere, in the middle 'eighties he was in a decidedly pessimistic frame of mind, and inclined, like Porson, to "damn the scheme of things in general." The dismal mood passed, and _Punch_ is himself again and obviously rejoicing in his own malice in the verses on an imaginary episode at Girton, where a breakdown in health, attributed to the excessive study of Browning, is traced to over-indulgence in chocolate creams by the members of the Browning Club. _Punch's_ claim to be regarded as an expert authority where women's colleges are concerned is seriously invalidated by his confusing the sites of Newnham and Girton and, worse still, by calling the former "Nuneham" in the same year. But he redeemed himself triumphantly in his study of "The Girton Girl" (No. IX, and by far the best, of his series of "Studies from _Mr. Punch's_ Studio") in December, 1886. I have the testimony of a distinguished Girton student of nearly twenty years later that _Punch's_ sketch remained even then a masterly dissection of the "mentality" of the Girton Girl, and reveals an inside knowledge, both of generalities and details, which no mere man could have attained. The Girton Girl of fact is carefully distinguished from the Girton Girl of superstition. The latter is fast becoming as extinct as the Dodo:--

[Sidenote: _The Girton Girl in 1886_]

The modern schoolgirl is taking her place, no longer the giggling, flirting maiden of fiction, but an ascetic and hard-working young woman. Work has been her lot since the day when she stepped out of her cradle to combine education and amusement in the arrangement of alphabet bricks; and she looks back with a wistful incredulity to the time when the mystic letters, B.A., were to her nothing worse than the voice of the black sheep in the nursery rhyme. She inclines by instinct towards æstheticism in dress, affecting the limpest materials and the strangest hues, and making a compromise in the matter of collar and cuffs by wearing at neck and wrists a piece of very _écru_ lace, turned down the wrong way. Her boots are the terror of stray blackbeetles, for a course of lectures on Hygienic clothing early taught her to view with horror and distrust a slim ankle and a pointed toe. She has a scholarly touch of shortsightedness, which she corrects by free use of the tortoiseshell _pince-nez_ that dangles from her neck.

Her sense of duty is remarkable, and appalling. She virtuously accepts the onerous office of secretary to innumerable societies. Countless notices, in her bold and clear handwriting, may be seen day after day upon the College notice-boards, some of them of a sufficiently pathetic character. "Will the following members be so very good as to pay their subscriptions due the _term before last_ to the 'Society for promoting Masculine Intelligence'?" She does not even resent her appointment as sub-officer of the Fire Brigade, the duties of which position involve a constant personal supervision of two or three repulsively oily little hand-engines, which she tends and lubricates with loving care, till she has reduced her hands and face to the colour of the brown holland apron which enshrouds the rest of her person. Not even the horrors of an alarm practice can daunt her, though she may just have settled herself to revel for an hour in the pleasant byways of Professor Sidgwick's _Ethics_, when screams of "Fire!" rushing footsteps, and an alarm-rattle, such as heralds a bump in the May races, compel her to leave her books, and fly to the Hall. Then the canvas buckets must be produced, her corps arranged in alphabetical order, and marched off to the supposed scene of action. All this she does in an incredibly short time; and when, at the discretion of the head captain, the pumping of engines and passing of buckets is allowed to stop, she returns to her work with fortitude and resignation past belief.

Yet in spite of her multifarious and strenuous activities the Girton Girl is not inhuman or immune to the appeal of her less serious-minded fellow students, and the sketch ends with a really charming portrait of a witty, incorrigibly frivolous, generously hospitable and irresistibly popular member of the college. At once critical, judicial, and genial, the study is a little masterpiece of its kind. The verses, published some months earlier, on a young Spanish lady who took her doctor's degree at Barcelona at the age of nineteen, are appropriately cast in Swinburne's "Dolores" stanza (as that was her Christian name) with the refrain, "Our M.D. of Spain," but are not remarkable either as a parody or an appreciation. Much happier in every way is the well-known picture of Miss Ramsay (afterwards Mrs. Montagu Butler) entering a first-class carriage "For Ladies Only" on the occasion of her being placed Senior Classic in 1887, an exploit which caused _Punch_ once more to raise his voice on behalf of the bestowal of degrees on women.

An even more remarkable success was achieved by Miss Philippa Fawcett, who in 1890 was declared to be "above the Senior Wrangler," and _Punch_, in "Topping the Tripos, or Something like a Score for the Sex," while congratulating the daughter, did not forget her father, always one of his heroes:--

Above the Senior Wrangler! Pheugh! Where now are male reactionaries Who flout the feminine, and pooh-pooh Sweet Mathematic Megs and Maries? Who says a girl is only fit To be a dainty, dancing dangler? Here's girlhood's prompt reply to it: Miss Fawcett tops the Senior Wrangler!

Would it not have rejoiced the heart Of her stout sire, the brave Professor? Agneta Ramsay made good start, But here's a shining she-successor! Many a male who failed to pass Will hear it with flushed face and jaw set, But _Mr. Punch_ brims high his glass, And drinks your health, Miss P. G. Fawcett!

[Sidenote: _The Eternal Feminine_]

Yet along with his acknowledgment of these scholastic triumphs, _Punch_ was equally ready to welcome evidences of feminine weakness in the haunts of austere study. In 1888 Miss Helen Gladstone recalled the fact that when she was at Newnham, a motion had been brought forward at the Debating Society that "life without gossip was not worth living" and carried by a large majority, and _Punch_ alluded to the incident under the heading, "_Nous_ at Newnham."

To round off _Punch's_ educational record in this period, I may add that in 1892 he alludes to that irrepressible controversialist, Sir James Crichton-Browne, the champion of mutton chops, and common sense, who had condemned the higher education of women from the medical point of view. _Punch_ professes himself converted by a young Amazon who reduces him to pulp and humiliation by her prowess at games of all sorts.

The entrance of women into existing professions or the creation by them of new callings is in the main viewed with sympathy and benevolence. In the controversy that arose in 1875 between Mrs. Nassau Senior, who had been appointed an inspector of Female Pauper Schools, and Mr. Tufnell, an official of the L.G.B., _Punch_ espoused the side of the lady, who, he considers, had the best of it both in temper and argument. The statement in April of the same year that a lady had been engaged by a firm of solicitors as consulting counsel at a high salary, quoted from a Liverpool paper, was probably apocryphal; but it prompted _Punch_ to observe that the more employments fit for gentlemen that are opened to ladies the better. Any such calling is better than marriage accepted merely as a situation.

[Sidenote: _"Jills in Office"_]

Unfortunately some doubt is thrown on the sincerity of this testimonial by the sketch "Portia in Petticoats" in 1882--a burlesque description of a solicitor's office where only women clerks are employed. After a week's absence the head of the firm returns to find that they have mostly disappeared, eloped or got married. The election of Miss Maude Stanley, a cousin of the Dean, as a Guardian in 1877 is the subject of a friendly notice at the expense of Bumble, who regards it as a "most unporochial innowation." In the same year _Punch_ views with admiration the beneficent work of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, established twenty years earlier to inculcate the value of healthy, sensible habits by means of lectures, tracts and handbooks. The suggestion made by a Hastings doctor in 1879 that women might be employed as dispensers is praised, though not without some reserves, in "Girls among the Gallipots," and the new "Ladies' Association for the Promotion of Horticulture and Minor Food Production" founded in the same year by Mrs. Thorne meets with _Punch's_ unqualified approval. This is the first mention that I have met in _Punch_ of a movement which led to the establishment of the horticultural schools at Swanley and elsewhere and the numerous poultry farms run by women all over the country. The institution of the "Royal Red Cross" decoration for nurses in 1883 is welcomed in friendly doggerel. As Bumble had condemned women guardians, so Mrs. Gamp is now represented as very indignant and contemptuous of the "nursing sisters," their position and recognition. But _Punch_ had no use here for amateurs. There is excellent point in Du Maurier's picture of the applicant for the post of matron or head nurse to a hospital who based her claim on being "not trained but gifted." By 1885 the female commercial traveller was apparently already in existence, but _Punch_ treated this innovation with jocular suspicion:--

I know a Maiden with a bag, Take care! She carries samples in a drag, Beware! beware! O Draper fond, She is fooling thee!

She has the true "Commercial" style, Take care! To which she addeth woman's guile, Beware! beware! O Grocer goose, She is plucking thee!

And so on with other shopkeepers.

On the efficiency of female clerks _Punch_ speaks with two voices in 1887, under the heading "Jills in Office." First of all we have an unflattering picture of the rudeness and inattention of the girls in one of those joint establishments--half shop and half post-office. In the next number we are given the reverse of the medal; the public are the offenders, and the girls act up to their names--Miss Goodchild, Miss Meekin and Miss Mannerly. The announcement in the same year that ladies were to be allowed to take diplomas in dentistry prompts _Punch_ to some frigid pleasantries; but this is a subject on which it has always been difficult to joke with discretion. _Punch_ found a happier theme in the institution of the "Lady Guide Association" in 1888. He applauds the scheme which aimed at "providing remuneration and employment for intelligent gentlewomen debarred by the present overcrowded labour market from earning a livelihood," but he recognized that the guides would have to be very formidably accomplished persons, since their duties comprised the giving advice and information to newcomers on every possible subject. As a "preliminary examination" was spoken of, _Punch_ supplied a test paper containing, _inter alia_, the following questions:--

1. A four-wheeled cab, containing five inside passengers, two children on the box, and seven trunks on the roof, is taken from Liverpool Street Station to the extreme end of Hammersmith, and the Lady who has secured your services as guide, after having made the cabman carry the seven trunks up to the third storey offers him, as his fare, two and ninepence, which he indignantly refuses. On his subsequently claiming thirteen and sixpence, and taking off his coat and offering to fight the gentleman of the party for that amount on the steps of the house in the presence of a sympathizing crowd, what speedy measures, if any, should you adopt to effect a compromise?

2. You are engaged to conduct an intelligent, scientific, and inquiring party of sixteen people over Windsor Castle, the Marylebone Workhouse, the Thames Tunnel, Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the London Docks. Do you think that your thorough knowledge of English history, your acquaintance with the working of the Poor Laws, your grasp of the progress of European Art, and your general familiarity with all the great political, commercial, engineering, economic and other problems of the hour are such as to warrant you in facing the coming ordeal with a jaunty confidence?

3. You are required by an economical Duke to provide a cheap wedding for his only daughter, and he has stipulated that the breakfast shall not, at the outside, cost more than ninepence a head. With a four-and-sixpenny bridal cake, and a sound champagne that must not exceed fifteen shillings a dozen, how do you propose to make the thing go off with _éclat_?

In 1890 the "Dorothy" Restaurant was started for "Ladies Only," but this condition, though the _raison d'être_ of the venture, was soon modified: men were admitted from 6.30 to 10 P.M., and _Punch_ was unchivalrous enough to make humorous capital out of the concession.

In regard to the suffrage and "Women's Rights" _Punch_ remained on the side of the fence where he had got down after a good deal of vacillation. In 1879 he publishes what is apparently a _bonâ fide_ letter from "A Lancashire Witch" protesting against Miss Lydia Becker's claim to represent the general feeling of the district. "I assure you," she writes, "that Miss Becker's followers are chiefly ladies of her own pronounced politics, or semi-foreigners, and not Englishwomen _pur sang_." _Punch_ observes that "no Lancashire Witch need fear to be mixed up with the Representative Gathering of vote-claiming Spinsters which Miss Lydia Becker threatens to bring down on the Free Trade Hall. Witches who know whence comes the real potency of their charms will certainly not seek to mix voting-powder in the cauldron." This was not friendly to the Suffragists, but the tone is preferable to that of 'Arry's views on Women's Rights in 1881 after attending a lecture. There is a certain admixture of shrewd commonplace in his remarks, but the verses are chiefly remarkable as a storehouse of cad-slang, fortunately mostly obsolete. Female emigration comes up for comment in the same year, but, as the object was avowedly matrimonial, the scheme had no political significance. The picture of the large, self-indulgent, sultanic brother advising his adoring sisters, cousins and aunts to assert their rights by learning to be more independent of men is purely ironical and has no bearing on the problem of women's economic dependence. The dialogue in two scenes between Edwin and Angelina in 1883 on the working of the new Married Women's Property Act is a rather cynical burlesque. The first scene shows the Act as it is expected to work, to the advantage of women; in the second we see it as it is sure to work--to the confirmation of the _status quo_, the woman continuing to leave her money affairs entirely in her husband's hands.

[Sidenote: _Women Jurors_]

Sambourne's prophetic picture of "The Angel in 'the House'" in 1884 is an improvement on _Punch's_ earlier fancy portraits of women legislators, but it does not render prophetic justice either to Lady Astor or Mrs. Wintringham. _Punch_ refers more than once in 1885 to the Parliamentary candidature of Miss Helen Taylor who stood for Camberwell, but her nomination papers were not accepted. _Punch_ offers "Helen of Camberwell" his condolences, but they are shorn of all grace by his previous comparison of her to the Three Tailors of Tooley Street and other acidulated puns. Du Maurier's picture in 1887 of a Jury of Women antedates reality by more than thirty years; while the tension of party feeling in 1888 is illustrated by the genuine advertisement of a governess seeking work who had been "dismissed from a Conservative Clergyman's family for her Gladstonian views." Lady canvassers were already beginning to make their influence felt, and _Punch_ recognizes their value in a "lay" which gives an entertaining account of their "unscrupulous, seductive, siren ways." At any rate they could not be ignored. The temper of "The Political Woman"--one of the "Modern Types" series--in 1890 is acid and disparaging throughout:--

Having left school with an ill-assorted mass of miscellaneous knowledge, she will show her contempt for ordinary feminine accomplishments by refusing to attend dances, and by crushing mild young men whom misfortune may have thrown in her way. Having discovered from one of these that he imagines the Rebecca Riots to be an incident of Old Testament History, and has no definite views upon the currency question, she will observe in a tone of some bitterness, that "These are our Governors!" and, having left him in a state of collapse, will scale the ramparts of political discussion, in company with a Professor, who happens to be unmarried and a Member of Parliament. After making love for some months, by means of an interchange of political tracts, these two will be married in a registrar's office and will spend their honeymoon in investigating the social requirements of Italian organ-grinders.

Thenceforward she exists chiefly as a member or president of innumerable committees; she neglects her husband and the son "whom, in a moment of regrettable absent-mindedness, she bore to the professor and brings up on Spartan principles and little else." Her home is a centre of slatternly discomfort:--

She will eventually fail to be elected a member of the School Board, and having written a strong book on a delicate social question, will die of the shock of seeing it adversely reviewed in _The Spectator_.

Sir Albert Rollit's Bill for extending the franchise to women was introduced in the early summer of 1892, and defeated on the second reading by only twenty-three votes. _Punch_, in his "Essence of Parliament," refers to an uproarious meeting in St. James's Hall, and to Mr. Asquith's "merciless logic" in demolishing the Bill. The Women's Liberal Federation had declared for the suffrage, and _Punch_ illustrated the situation in a picture of two political lady cricketers appealing to the G.O.M. at the wicket: "A team of our own? I should think so! If we're good enough to scout [i.e. field] for you, why shouldn't we take a turn at the bat?"

Women's clubs increased in numbers throughout this period, but met with little encouragement from _Punch_. In 1877 they are satirized as enemies to domestic life; as the haunts of semi-detached, smart women--types which _Punch_ portrayed in his "Dream of Queer Women" (after Tennyson) in the same year, wherein mention is made of the "shrieking sisterhood," realistic novelists, "art-beauties," shrewish suffragists and shady adventuresses. When the project of a Women's University Club was mooted in 1886, _Punch_ takes a less lurid view of its possibilities. Smoking, card-playing and billiards are indicated, but at worst the ladies will only be mild, if sedulous apes of the male clubman. Gossip will predominate, and _Punch_ suggests that the new venture should be called "The Blue-Stocking." As for smoking, in 1888 _Punch_ registered a protest under the title, "To a Fair Nicotian," in which the Laureate remonstrates with Lady Clara. He likes his own yard-long Broseley clay pipe, but disapproves even of a cigarette in the lips of lovely woman.

[Sidenote: _The Athletic Woman_]

Towards the athletic woman _Punch_ was, on the whole, more benevolent. In 1883 he pays graceful homage to a woman with the engaging name of Jessie Ace who had saved a man from drowning. In the same year young ladies are gently chaffed for beginning to affect a knowledge of the technicalities of pastime and sport. But if _Punch_ is to be believed, it was still sketchy. Rugby and Association football are mixed up with cricket, and the two charming girls at the Eton and Harrow match at Lord's mistake the two umpires for the two headmasters. The slightly more serious view taken in 1884, when several cricket matches were played by women, is noted elsewhere. Fencing and boxing for women, under male instructors, French and British, are depicted by Du Maurier as "the last new fad" in 1886. The former, at any rate, came to stay and deserved to. Ladies had long figured in lawn tennis tournaments, but in his "Caution to Championesses" in 1887, _Punch_ displayed some misgiving as to the development of this competition. Nor did he approve of the novelty of women riding astride in 1890, begging them to do anything but that, and rewriting the old nursery rhyme for these new Amazons:--

Ride a cock-horse, To Banbury Cross To see a young lady A-straddle o' course!

The _Almanack_ for the same year gives four types of model middle-class wives. The French keeps her husband's accounts; the German is the _Hausfrau_ and cook; the American is an intellectual; the English plays lawn tennis. The "Manly Maiden" (No. XXII in _Punch's_ "Modern Types") described in December, 1890, is less closely observed and far less interesting than _Punch's_ "Model Fast Lady" of forty years earlier. The sketch is a rather cruel caricature of the persevering but inefficient sportswoman who is always in the way, and is destined to "develop from a would-be hard-riding maiden into a genuinely hard-featured old maid." In agreeable contrast to this acid study is _Punch's_ homage to the exploits of a Guernsey rifle-woman, Miss Leale, at Bisley in 1891, and his welcome to Mrs. Sheldon, the American traveller, on her return from her travels in Africa, in which he suggests that in time to come Stanley may be known as "the male Mrs. Sheldon." The exaggeration may be ironical, but the irony is so well veiled as to be almost imperceptible. In the years that were to come the achievements of Mary Kingsley and Gertrude Bell were beyond the reach of the most subtle disparagement.

[Sidenote: _Women Workers_]

On the subject of women workers _Punch's_ utterances are apparently but not really irreconcilable. The "Wail of the Male; being a British workman's view of the cheap female labour question, respectfully submitted to the Trade Union Congress" in 1887, is a protest against women undercutting men in the labour market. But the voice is the voice of 'Arry, not of _Punch_--shrewd, glib and entirely selfish. The speaker has just got the "bullet"--having been sacked without notice--and speculates on further possibilities:--

Look here, Bill! If they shunt You and me, and our like, as they're doing all round, Because Women are cheap, and there's heaps to be found, Won't it come to this, sooner or later, my boy, That the most of us chaps will be out of employ, Whilst the Women will do all the work there's to do, And keep us, and the kids, on about half our "screw"? Who's a-going to gain by that there but the boss? And for everyone else it is bound to be loss. A nice pooty look-out! Oh, I know what they say-- That the women work better than us for less pay, And are much less the slaves of the pint and the pot, What's that got to do with it? All tommy rot! We have all got to live, and if women-folk choose To collar our cribs or to cut down our screws, _They_ will have to be bread-winners, leaving us chaps To darn stockings at home with the kids on our laps. Well, I hope as they'll like it. I tell you what, neighbour, The world's being ruined by petticoat labour. Besides, Mate, in spite of this Woman's Rights fuss, Work don't make 'em better _as_ women, but wuss. It mucks 'em for marriage, and spiles 'em for home, 'Cos their notion of life is to racket and roam. Just look at that work-girl there, her with the fringe! She's a nice pooty specimen! Makes a chap cringe To think of that flashy young chit as a wife. That's what cheap woman labour will do for our life. Oh, give 'em the Vote, and the breeks, while you're at it, Make 'em soldiers, and Bobbies, and bosses. But, drat it, If this blessed new-fangled game's to prewail, I pities the beggar who's born a poor Male!

Against these arguments, illustrative of a certain habit of mind, which at best excite a grudging acknowledgment of their coarse common sense, one may set the "Dream of Unfairly Treated Women" (after Tennyson) in 1890, describing the hardships of sempstresses, governesses, "slaveys" and shop-girls, the victims of sweating, greed, and worse, which unhappily were all too prevalent so recently as thirty years ago.

_Punch_, in fine, exhibits through this period a progressive acknowledgment of women's claims to be regarded as an intelligent being, tempered by moments of reaction. In 1875 he has a picture of an evening party at which all the men are anxious to be introduced to the wonderful Miss Pynke, that _rara avis_ "who has never written a novel or contributed to a magazine." In 1887 the "score" is given to the professor in his retort to the "high-brow" lady:--

MISS HYPATIA: "Yes, now that we are gradually educating ourselves up to your level, you Men ought at least to meet us halfway."

THE PROFESSOR: "Meet you halfway? How? By gradually _un_educating ourselves down to yours?"

[Sidenote: _Feline Amenities_]

In 1890, again, the amusing series of "Feline amenities" continued for some years, though they are a tribute to the wit of women, are invariably based on a denial of the quality of magnanimity. In this context I am minded to include a curiosity, dating from the year 1886, in the shape of an imaginary letter signed "Elizabeth Fry Romper," which is of interest as showing the change in the attitude of philanthropic women during the century. The writer describes how "of course on the hottest day of the whole summer" she was told off to take a lot of Sunday school girls for "a day in the country" to Greenwich, "which is supposed to have an elevating effect upon them for the rest of the year." Of all the disagreeable things she ever has to do, this is "far the worst." The picture given is decidedly realistic:--

It is no joke waiting for an hour at a suburban station, with eighty "young girls"--_real_ young girls--pouring in by detachments, all in the wildest state of excitement, and decked with the entire contents of their jewel-cases. Of course, the first thing they did was to rush, helter-skelter, into a wrong train, and all the railway staff hardly sufficed to pull them out again before the train started. I had a whole compartment to look after, and felt rather nervous at the thought that the next one was filled with men--smoking shocking tobacco, by the way--and that the _talk_ was distinctly _audible_.

I was truly thankful to reach Greenwich, and trusted that the girls might be fully occupied in getting tea, and that the heavy cake might calm down their excitement a little. So we all set to with a great deal of unnecessary bustle, and were flattering our elderly hearts that everything was going off splendidly, when, on the bell being rung--we had brought one on purpose--for the girls to be seated, the Superintendent looked round for the head girl to lead the singing grace. Instead of pious music of any sort, our ears were greeted with a shout of discordant laughter, which was found to proceed from some broken ground in the distance, where the _whole_ of our first class were engaged in playing _Kiss in the Ring_ with a party of soldiers from the neighbouring barracks. My dear, if you could have seen the picture, you would never have forgotten it. I thought I should have died of laughing on the spot. The hot, dishevelled, romping girls, and the smart soldiers, quite unconscious of the awful face of the Superintendent, as she advanced towards them, and the way the damsels scuttered off as she let fall a few words of rebuke--it was the funniest thing I ever saw. She succeeded in driving her flock, sheepish but giggling, before her; all but one, who stoutly declined to leave her soldier, declaring she didn't want no tea, but would 'ave a spree in the merry-go-round with 'im. A separation was ultimately effected, but the gloom that hung over that meal I never shall forget. It was a mercy everyone else took it so seriously, or I couldn't have held out; as it was, when I got home, I laughed myself nearly into a fit.

The combination of duty, detachment and a sense of humour is not commonly credited to Victorian girls. But the problems that had to be tackled were very much the same, and so was human nature.

EDUCATION

Hasty generalizations from the study of _Punch_ throughout this period might easily lead one to the conclusion that the two great evils in national education were the craze for athletics in Public and Preparatory, and over-pressure in Board and Elementary, Schools. A more detailed examination of his pages tends to correct or modify this view. _Punch_ was in the main a firm believer in the public school system as an instrument of character-building, and he was no enemy of the ladder of learning which had been erected by Forster's Act of 1871. But while he detested snobbery, extravagance and complacent Philistinism, he was by no means satisfied that the State was getting good value for its constantly increasing expenditure on education. Thus to take the Elementary schools first, we find continual references, mostly unfavourable, to the administration and working of the Board School System. In 1875 he falls foul of the pedantry of over-zealous officials--the red-tape methods of inspectors, and the action of visitors who sent children back to school before they were free from infection. These inquisitorial activities roused _Punch's_ old democratic sympathies, and some ten years later we find him suggesting that a similar method might fairly be applied to the upper and upper middle classes--that what was sauce for the goose in the slums might be served up to the gander in the squares.

In the series of articles on "Education Made Easy" in 1887, _Punch_ sympathizes with the mothers who were constantly harried by "attendance officers" for neglecting to send their children to the Board Schools. Ignorance was a great evil, but the Board Schools were attempting too much. The essentials were not thoroughly taught; pupil-teachers were overworked; there was too much of the 'ologies, and the three R's were in danger of going to the wall. The reactionary protest against the teaching of music--"We don't want Grisis at Board Schools"--is ironical; but _Punch_ espoused the cause of those who condemned over-cramming in Board Schools, and based their crusade on Sir James Crichton-Browne's Report on over-pressure in 1884. But his great point was that there was too much teaching of the things that did not matter. His "Indignant Ratepayer" in 1887 welcomes the decision of the London School Board to hold an inquiry into the curriculum of their schools. The special committee were also to report "whether such changes can be made as shall secure that children leaving school shall be more fitted than they now are to perform the duties and work of life before them." One of the speakers had declared that "the boys educated in public elementary schools scorned all handicraft work, and wanted to be clerks, while girls in like-manner scorned all domestic service." The "Indignant Ratepayer" congratulated the School Board on turning over a new leaf, though it had taken them sixteen years to realize that they were on the wrong tack.

[Sidenote: _Indignant Ratepayers_]

A week later _Punch_ published another letter from another "Indignant Ratepayer," deprecating the congratulations as premature and indiscreet:--

I, too, _Mr. Punch_, am a ratepayer; I have seen my rates trebled since the creation of the School Board; and I am now told that I ought to thank my stars that, after sixteen years' work, they have at length displayed a glimmering of common sense. There seems to be something ominous in this term of sixteen years, for it appears that it is just for this period that we have been supplying the Army with bayonets that won't stab, and the Navy with cutlasses that won't cut. We are always calling ourselves, though nobody else does, a practical people. But what care we for the opinion of our neighbours, so long as we are happy in the calm contemplation of our superiority?

"The unexpected always happens," so said Beaconsfield, and it seems he was right, for who would have ever dreamed that the School Board would have ever made such a confession? But although they confessed much, they did not confess all. They said nothing of the numberless half-starved children whose health has been impaired or ruined by the tasks imposed upon them. Nothing of the hundreds of thousands spent in bullying and worrying their poor parents. Nothing of the money spent in endless litigation. On all such subjects the Board are discreetly silent. They draw attention only to the outcome of their labours, namely the boys and girls whose education has been completed--the survival of the fittest in short--but who are fit for nothing.

"No handicraft work for the boys, no domestic service for the girls." The boys all want to be clerks; what the girls want to be we are not informed, but domestic service is not to be thought of, so the sooner my wife and daughters take to such work the better. And for this have I paid trebled rates. For this have we been passing Code after Code, and fixing Standard after Standard, to find at last that the whole work must be begun afresh. I too am indignant, as well as your Correspondent, not that the School Board have been telling the truth, but that they have been so long in telling it.

I protest against my money having been spent in injuring the health of half the poor children of London, and of injuring the morals of the other half.

_Punch_ was ready to give a hearing to economists who really felt the burden, but he had no sympathy with the "old gang" of City Fathers who were frankly obscurantist on the subject of education, while they were proud of having dined and wined themselves into the possession of "first class stomachs":--

"WHERE IGNORANCE IS BLISS," ETC.

That not particularly learned body which rejoices in the name of the Commissioners of Sewers of the City of London, held a Special Meeting at the Guildhall last week, to discuss the terribly extravagant conduct of the London School Board in adding one penny in the pound to the amount of the rate to be levied in the wealthy City of London for the ensuing year. Much burning eloquence, of the peculiar City type, was used on the occasion, and a statement by one highly excited member that there were no fewer than 313 Board Schools in the Metropolis in which the great work of education was being successfully carried on, and that the cry was still for more, was received with as terrible a groan of horror as if it had been announced, on authority, that there were to be no more "Cakes and Ale" for the Sewage Commissioners.

In vain was it stated by those who, apparently, love light rather than darkness, that whereas the population of London some ten or twenty years ago was one of the most ignorant of any capital of Europe, it was now, thanks to the School Board, assuming its proper place in this respect, by giving all its children a good education. They were met by a shout of derision from an angry Commissioner, who demanded to know "why they didn't try to teach a cow to win the Derby," which brilliant interrogation elicited great applause.

In vain was it suggested that this sudden affectation of sympathy with the poor Ratepayer for having to pay this additional penny for education, was but a blind to screen their own increased rate of double the amount, for a purpose of not one-tenth the importance. The Sewage Commissioners listened with impatience, reserving their enthusiastic approbation for the very demonstrative gentleman who addressed them after their own heart; and in language that all could understand and thoroughly sympathise with. He was quite willing, generous soul, that the poor children should have bread, but what he objected to was rumpsteaks! and he concluded his brilliant oration with the following magnificent peroration:--"Everybody should have his meal, but he must have a stomach of the highest class before they could give him turtle soup and port wine!"

Who but a member of the City Corporation could have contrived, when discussing the question of the education of the Poor, to have brought in those two gods of his idolatry, turtle soup and port wine? And in combination too!

[Sidenote: _Under-feeding and Under-housing_]

This well-merited castigation preceded the protests of the "Indignant Ratepayers" by a couple of years, but it is more truly representative of _Punch's_ convictions on the main question. We had to educate our masters, and we must not squeal over the bill--provided the education was sound. On that point _Punch_ was by no means satisfied, and in 1887 he invokes the testimony of the British workmen, who is made to protest against the unpractical nature of modern education, and the undue prominence assigned to the 'ologies and 'ometries. A cartoon in 1888 represents Education betrayed by its "friends"--pedantry and jobbery. Over-pressure was aggravated by under-feeding and under-housing. As for the former, _Punch_ prints an East End remonstrance against the penny rate: "When we wants daily bread it ain't any good saying you only wants 'that there penny.'" But the steady growth of State expenditure on education is resented on the ground that it was devoted to inappropriate or unnecessary objects. In 1891 _Punch_ publishes a forecast of the Exasperated Public protesting against the ever-increasing extravagance of the London School Board, who have taken to building observatories and raised the salaries of elementary teachers to £2,500 a year.

This is burlesque, but there is criticism and dissatisfaction at the back of it. So when the Bill providing for "assisted" (i.e. Free) Education, for which the Budget surplus of £2,000,000 was to be devoted, was introduced in the same year, _Punch_ represented the cross-currents of the Unionist Party in his cartoon. Mother Goschen, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is seen introducing her adopted child (Free Education), whom she had found in Birmingham, to the Old Tory Party (Mrs. Gamp), who doesn't like the looks of him at all. But Goschen carried his point--that the Government were pledged to alleviate the burden which compulsory education had, in recent years, imposed upon the poorer portion of the people; and by September 1 the free education proposals of the Government were generally adopted throughout the country by both Board and Voluntary Schools.

The old question of corporal punishment comes up in 1880 and 1881, but in a new light. There was "one law for the rich and another for the poor," but here, at any rate, it could not be maintained that the poor were oppressed. Already flogging was only commonly resorted to in the schools for the upper classes, and _Punch_ emphasizes the contrast in his dialogue between the Peer and the Peasant. The Peasant observes that when he is tapped over the head with a cane, his mother goes and bashes the teacher over the head with the poker and gets him fired for assaulting her son. The Peer, on the other hand, owns to having been "swished" four times in a fortnight without attempting reprisals. Whereupon the Peasant suggests that he should have sent _his_ mother to go and bang his old master. If _Punch_ is to be believed, conflicts between teachers and parents were pretty frequent at this time. They are not unknown even to-day; but parents are less inclined to take the law into their own hands.

[Sidenote: _Literature and Crime_]

The education of the million, however, was not confined to school hours, and with the decline of illiteracy the growth of the reading habit brought its perils as well as its privileges. Juvenile criminality was no longer the result of ignorance and neglect--at least to the same extent. _Punch_ was inclined to trace the evil largely to the low tone of the cheap literature provided for the young. In the Diary of a Boy Burglar in 1886, his downfall is ascribed to his putting into practice the principles imbibed by a perusal of _Jack Sheppard_. A somewhat alarmist article in the _Fortnightly Review_ on "What Boys Read" declared that while many boys' books were healthy and helpful, the majority of the journals supplied for the children of the working classes were devoid of every element of sweetness and light. "They are filled with stories of blood and revenge, of passion and cruelty, as improbable and almost impossible in plot as they are contemptible in literary execution."

The solution of the matter by Press censorship, advocated by the writer, presented difficulties which _Punch_ did not shirk, and his own views, though strong, are tempered by sound common sense:--

Ainsworth's story may serve the turn of an Opéra-bouffe Librettist, and the scamp himself be played by a sprightly actress without much harm being done to anybody. _Jack Sheppard_, for instance, ought not to be sanctioned by the Licenser any more than _Claude Duval_, _Dick Turpin_, or any other drama of a like kind, of which the recognized motive is the veiled incentive to crime. Still, a raid on Harrison Ainsworth, notwithstanding the acknowledged mischief that has been done to the young and ignorant by a perusal of his cracksman's romance, would scarcely be the same thing, and yet the cases are sufficiently parallel to admit at least of argument. We should be inclined to suppress such romances as _Jack Sheppard_, _Rookwood_, Bulwer's _Claude Duval_, and also _Eugene Aram_, which was so severely and so justly satirized by Thackeray in _Mr. Punch's_ pages. For the truth about Jack Sheppard our readers have only to refer to one of the earliest volumes of _Mr. Punch's_ series, where they will find his character as described by Ainsworth, and his true character as given in the Newgate Calendar, displayed side by side in parallel columns. _There was no sort of romance about the real Jack Sheppard._

Meantime, for want of a better remedy to meet the evil, let parents and guardians, and those who have charge and direction of the young idea, keep their eyes open and have a special regard to the direction in which it shows inclination to shoot. It is just as ready to derive its nutriment from the "penny healthful," as from the "penny dreadful," and as a mere matter of commercial enterprise, the former could be as easily forthcoming and available as the latter. Philanthropy is continually actively busying itself about the education of the young--here is something practical for it to do--let it look to the quality of its _Magazine literature_. It wants some energy and some capital, but both in these days ought to be forthcoming. To drive the penny dreadful out of the literary field is not a task beyond the powers of organization and enterprise. And it is in this direction that the first steps will be taken in the material and moral amelioration of "What boys read."

The subject recurs in 1889 and 1890, when sensational juvenile literature is again denounced; but the new stories are more vigorously condemned than the old, and the Ghost of Jack Sheppard, in a conversation with the Shade of Dick Turpin, scouts the notion that _they_ could upset the minds of the young. Why, they weren't in it with the papers read by everyone everywhere! _Punch_ vigorously supported the efforts of those who sought to abate the evils of child insurance, and welcomed the intervention of Magee, then Archbishop of York, who died while on a visit to London to attend a Committee of the House of Lords on his Infant Insurance Bill, in May, 1891. But when the Prevention of Cruelty Bill was in Committee in the summer of 1887, _Punch_ strongly supported the Attorney-General's amendment to omit from the Bill the words prohibiting the employment of children under ten in theatres and licensed places of public entertainment. Mr. Mundella, who was in charge of the Bill, accepted the amendment, but "Dick Temple, Sam Smith and other superlatively good people objected," and it was defeated both in the Committee and the Report stages, to _Punch's_ undisguised annoyance. After the Bill became law in July, he added "one word more," and his arguments, if not convincing, are at least consistent with his life-long sympathy with the professional actor:--

[Sidenote: _The Stage and Education_]

Well-intentioned persons do a heap of mischief, and talk and write a lot of nonsense about what they don't understand. There are dangers to morality ("who deniges of it?") in the Theatrical Profession, as in every other profession; but these affect the amateur, and those who go on the stage late in life, not those who are to the manner born. The loves of poor, honest, hard-working theatrical families, where the sons and daughters obtain theatrical employment at an early age, are thoroughly respectable. Their stage-work is not only compatible with their receiving a sound education, but is a complement of it. Habits of strict discipline, cleanliness, and domestic thrift are inculcated; the little children, from the biggest down to "the Widow's Mites" engaged in a Pantomime, are seldom sick, and never sorry, but do their work with pleasure, and would probably be willing to undertake even "more study," rather than be deprived of their theatrical employment which brings in the money, pays the school, and helps to keep a happy family together under one roof, which, "be it never so 'umble," is styled by that dear old English word "home"--and there is no place like it. The efforts of those who would exclude children under ten from theatrical work may cause great misery and break up many such happy homes. We say this in serious earnest, and, from practical experience, we do know what we are talking about.

_Punch_ resented pedantic, official, or fussy interference with children whether at work or play. A Children's Party at the Mansion House in January, 1881, provokes well-merited ridicule. No mixed dancing was allowed; the only diversion was provided by some "hideous negro entertainers" and, by way of compensation, a sermon by Mr. Spurgeon! After 11.30 P.M. young ladies were allowed to dance, but _only_ with young ladies; and the young gentlemen with young gentlemen. At the same time _Punch_ was a believer in the cane, when administered with discretion, and a resolute discourager of precocity. The full-page illustration in the _Almanack_ of 1884, "Education's Frankenstein," representing the omniscient child of the future, ruining all professions, as everyone can do everything, is an extravagant burlesque, but it foreshadows the complaints we have had of late of the "unfair competition" of the infant author and artist with the adult practitioner. In 1885 Du Maurier's Child of the Period gravely rebukes her grandmother who speaks of a "puff-puff"--"The locomotive, I suppose you mean, grandmamma." But this is a form of joke which recurs throughout the ages.

_Punch's_ "Winter Exhibition of the Works of Young Masters" in 1888 is a really illuminating piece of prophetic satire. The exhibitors are all children, and the works shown all belong to the Nursery Period. We may take one example:--

Billy Bolaine, born 1868, flourished 1880-2. No. 3. _Landscape, with horse, ducks and figures._ Silvery effect of about eight o'clock in the morning anywhere. The animals have given rise to some discussion, but the general impression seems to be that the artist, who never depicted anything without a subtle meaning, originally intended at least one of them for a cow.

Altogether this is an excellent skit on the critics who greet all the efforts of the young with a foolish voice of praise. Self-conscious, aggressive and complacent precocity _Punch_ could not endure; the small American child who treats a bishop, who had endeavoured to repress him, as a back number, is clearly regarded as a nuisance. But in his plea for the unhappy infant prodigy _Punch_ recognized it as a real grievance that child performers were overworked by over-practising and continual travelling. In 1888 it was borne in upon him that, whether from the engrossing nature of modern girls' and boys' occupations, or their preference for contemporary and realistic fiction, the study of Fairy Tales and Nursery Lore was fast falling into neglect if not into positive contempt. To avert what he considered a national calamity, he felt it his duty to suggest to parents that no child should be allowed on any pretext in future to leave the Nursery for School until it had passed an examination in these subjects.

[Sidenote: _Fairy Tale Test Papers_]

_Punch's_ test papers are all excellent, but I can only find room for the General and the Pantomime Papers:--

CRITICAL AND GENERAL.

1. What is your opinion of the intelligence of Giants as a race? Of what substance were they in the habit of making their bread? Would you draw any and what distinction between (a) Giants and Giantesses, (b) Ogres and Ogresses, (c) a Mamma Ogress and her daughters?

2. What is a Roc? What do Rocs feed on? If you were on the edge of steep cliffs surrounding an inaccessible valley, strewn with diamonds and visited by Rocs--how would you proceed in order to obtain some of those diamonds? Give the reply of the Slave of the Lamp to Aladdin's request that a Roc's egg should be hung up in his dome.

3. Mention instances when (a) a Wolf, (b) a Bear, (c) a Cat, (d) a Harp, are recorded to have spoken, and give the substance of their remarks, when possible, in each case.

4. Write down the name of any hero you can remember who suffered inconvenience from (a) the imprudence, (b) the disobedience, of his wife.

5. How would you act if you were invited to go to a party on the opposite side of the way, and had nothing to go in but a pair of Seven-Leagued Boots? Compare the drawbacks and advantages of going to a State Ball in glass slippers.

6. State which family you would rather belong to: One in which there was (i.) a Wicked Uncle, (ii.) an Envious Sister, (iii.) a Jealous Brother, or (iv.) a Cruel Stepmother? Give your reasons, and illustrate them by examples. How many Wicked Uncles do you remember to have read of? Are Wicked Uncles ever sorry, and, if so, when?

7. Give any instances that occur to you where it is stated that the chief personages of the story "all lived happily ever afterwards." Are there any exceptions to this rule?

PANTOMIME PAPER.

(Optional, and for those Students only who may decide to "take up" this branch of the subject.)

1. Did the manners, language, and general deportment of the various Kings and Queens you have seen in Pantomimes correspond at all with what you had expected them to be from the books?

2. Mention any fairy tale in which (1) long ballets, (2) allusions to subjects in last year's papers, (3) jokes about "drinks" and "pawn-tickets," (4) comic duets which you didn't quite understand, and (5) men dressed up in women's clothes, occur. Mention (if you can) any Pantomime in which they do not.

3. Were you surprised to hear at Drury Lane that the King who befriended the Marquis of Carabas was originally a Potman? Do you remember this in the original text?

4. Why do you suppose that the Wicked Brothers in this year's Pantomime were frightened by green snakes, pink lizards, and enormous frogs? Did their own explanation that they had "the jumps" convey much to your mind? Did this scene make you laugh?

5. Give as clear and intelligible an account as you are able of the story of any one Pantomime you have been to, mentioning where--if at all--it departed from the version you have studied, and whether or not you considered such departures (if any) to be improvements.

6. Investigate the principal peculiarities of Pantomime Animals. How do they chiefly differ from other animals? Describe the effect of kindness upon a Pantomime Donkey, and account for it.

N.B.--Not more than four questions need be attempted in each of the above papers. Candidates are advised not to leave any question unattempted from a mere inability to answer every part of such question.

The Pantomime Paper conveys some excellent dramatic criticism, which is needed as much to-day as thirty years ago, but it may be permitted to stand in this educational context. As a counterblast to the charge of indifference towards fairy tales on the part of the modern child, it is only right to add that in 1892 Du Maurier's picture, "A Warning," shows a touching belief in the actuality of Bluebeard:--

ARCHIE (to his Sister, who has been reading him Fairy Tales): "Won't there be a lot of Us, if none of us go and get married? Worse than Hop-o'-my-Thumb!"

SISTER: "Yes; but you know I mean to be married!"

ARCHIE: "Do you mean to say you'd go and live alone with a Man after reading Bluebeard?"

When we turn to the Public and Preparatory Schools we find that _Punch's_ criticisms resolve themselves into a triple indictment of their costliness, their curriculum and their undue exaltation of athletics. The attack on the athletic craze begins in 1875, when _Punch_ published an imaginary Report of a boy's work for 1895 at St. Paul's, Eastminster, which deals with nothing but his progress at games and sports.

[Sidenote: _The Fetish of Games_]

The charge had a good deal to justify it, but the choice of a name was not happy, since Colet's famous foundation has in its recent phase never invited criticism on the score of any slackness in studious industry. _Punch_ renews the attack more than once. In 1880, in a burlesque account of a Prize Day, brain-work is just tolerated; athletic prowess is the only thing really encouraged and rewarded. Yet simultaneously we encounter Master Freddy from Eton, who considers that energy of any sort is "bad form." "Good form," in _Punch's_ view, might easily degenerate into a snobbish fetish, and in one of his "International Comparisons," in the _Almanack_ of 1879, he emphasizes the comprehensiveness of French public schools as contrasted with the class distinctions observed in England. It was in the same year that an inquiry was held into the administration of Wellington College and the alleged departure from the intentions of the founders. _Punch_ took the line that what was meant to be a military orphanage had become a rather costly public school of the common type, and noted that Mr. Gladstone defended the change because Benson, his son-in-law, was head master. This was a partial error. Gladstone's son-in-law was Wickham, who had succeeded Benson as head master. But the sting remained. _Punch_, it may be added, was thoroughly consistent in his attitude of antagonism to the diversion of old foundations from their original aims.

The costly inefficiency of the public schools came up again in 1880, _à propos_ of a correspondence in _The Times_, in which a "disappointed mother" recounted the experience of her two sons who, on leaving a public school at the age of nineteen, had forgotten all they knew before they went there:--

Hence a justly "Disappointed Mother" naturally enough concludes that "_Our great schools want inspection sadly_." Experience has certainly given her some cause to compare them unfavourably with private schools; although as to the latter she generalizes rather widely in saying that they "must teach, or close." Too many of them do neither.

Her boys, at any rate, both of them learned at a Private Boarding School enough to enable them to pass the Junior Oxford Local Examination at an early age. Unquestionably they were taught so much; but then how were they taught it? In such a style that they have now, at an adult age, to be taught it over again.

So it seems that a "Disappointed Mother's" two sons were educated at the Private Boarding School as the bottles are aërated in a soda-water manufactory. Information must have been forced into the former as carbonic acid gas is pumped into the latter. The gas is retained in the bottles whilst corked down, but escapes on the removal of pressure; so, if the boyish minds are left open, their school-learning, set free from forcible compression, goes off in youthful effervescence. Admirable system, by which our youth at an early age are enabled to pass the examinations, for which at maturer years they have to be crammed all over again!

[Sidenote: _Classics v. Commerce_]

The inspection of public schools has remained a subject of acute controversy ever since; and it is not clear whether _Punch's_ approval would have extended to Government inspection. It was in the same year, by the way, that Du Maurier illustrated the dialogue between Sir Gorgius Midas and an aristocratic Colonel. Sir Gorgius's main regret was that he had never been at a public school; the Colonel, who was once at Eton, laments that he suffers from a neglected education. Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of _Punch_ in 1880, was also an old Etonian, but was not on that account prepared to grant his old school a complete immunity from criticism. The "Diary of a Present Etonian," which appeared in 1885, is in the main jocularly descriptive, but illustrates a prevalent Philistinism, the habits of ragging and borrowing money, and tells of a week with only one whole school-day and two whole holidays. Yet while fully alive to the waste of time and money which went on at the public schools, _Punch_ was very far from embracing the creed of the revolutionary utilitarians who would scrap the old curriculum wholesale. In 1887 he printed an ironic account of the "Public School of the Future," thoroughly impregnated with the Commercial Spirit. The hero, the new "Tom Brown," develops a talent for finance so remarkable that his father longs to see him loose on the Stock Exchange.

_Punch_ did not believe in compulsory classics, because he disliked dons, pedants and academics; but in his parody of "The Isles of Greece" from the point of view of a British schoolboy, he made it abundantly clear that he had no love of the purely commercial "bread-study" view of Education:--

Oh feed me not on mythic lore, But Science and the Modern Fact; Teach me Electric Fires to store, The difference 'twixt "Bill" and "Act." Why should a Cockney care a "cuss" For Homer or for Æschylus?

For who _are_ they? But what art thou, My Country? On thy fertile shore The heroic lyre is tuneless now; To scheme for dividends, dig for ore, _These_ are the things we hold divine, Not Homer's long-resounding line.

In dealing with University Education _Punch_ maintained his attitude of a moderate reformer. Keble College, Oxford, dates from 1870; in 1878 _Punch_ twice over displays a keen hostility to the Anglican spirit of its founders and the "gingerbread and gilt" of Butterfield's architecture. He seizes the occasion to belittle Keble's poetry, to attack Pusey, Burgon and Liddon, and to describe the college in the following contemptuous quatrain:--

Half withdrawn in ways ascetic, Half with modern notions stirring; Half athletic, half æsthetic, Neither fish, flesh nor red herring.

_Punch_ did not share the late Canon Liddon's pessimism over the new Science degree at Oxford in 1879. Liddon is quoted as saying that without the habits of exactness and precision acquired by classical studies it was impossible to reach the higher characteristics of an educated man. The argument was naturally resented by those who maintained that "exactness and precision" were precisely the qualities inculcated by scientific training, and in an ironical dialogue _Punch_ derides specialization as compared with the "humanities." In 1885 the neglect of English literature at the older Universities is satirized in the picture of the undergraduate reading out his illiterate letter, in which the first and third persons are hopelessly mixed up.

In 1886 the spread of free education to the Universities is foreshadowed in a description of the Slade Professor at Oxford lecturing to a mixed audience of coal-heavers and undergraduates; and the "Progressists' Calendar" indicates a revolt of Ratepayers against their new burdens. In the same year the "Studies from _Punch's_ Studio" include a portrait of the new type of University don. "Wyckham of Jude's," who displays much versatile energy and a wide range of interests--athletics, music, philosophy, Browning and psychical research--ultimately goes to Australia as a Professor of Greek. The reference to "Eleutheria Hall" foreshadows Ruskin College, which was founded in 1899, and in other ways _Punch's_ fancy portraiture illustrates the changes which had come over the spirit of Oxford's dream. We note, for example, the allusion to the new cosmopolitanism--the invasion of foreigners, white and coloured, anticipating the time some thirty years later which gave birth to one of the best of modern Oxford anecdotes. A film was being exhibited showing a large canoe manned by Hawaiian natives, whereon a voice arose from the audience, "Well rowed, Balliol!"

[Sidenote: _The Value of Modern Languages_]

The proposal, since realized, to introduce Agriculture as a subject for study at Oxford is jocularly treated early in 1887 in the form of a diary of a candidate who is ploughed for his unorthodox views on potato culture. As for modern languages, the advantages of a foreign education--social and artistic as well as commercial--are excellently summed up in the same year in Du Maurier's picture of the industrious and accomplished young man from Hamburg, who is not only a skilled pianist but can speak six languages, live on a pound a week, work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, and do without a holiday!

* * * * *

In 1875 _Punch_ dwelt sympathetically on the still surviving prevalence of classical learning amongst statesmen. The occasion was furnished by Disraeli's florid eulogy of the imagination of the English School of Art at the Royal Academy banquet:--

"HE TOO WAS BORN IN ARCADIA"

(Matthew Arnold on Disraeli at the R.A. Dinner).

Born in Arcadia! Ay, he knew Pan's cloven foot-print on the dew, And heard, the mystic woods across, Aigipod[=e]s, Philokrotos, "The bright-haired god of pastoral,"[4] With pipings to his wood-nymphs call. Yes, but a nobler sound there came-- The clarion of imperial Fame, By which our greatest are withdrawn From the serene Arcadian lawn.

Derby and Gladstone felt the breeze That urged their sails to Homer's seas; Yet in the Senate found their fate, And drank the hot wine of debate. Perish the thought that England's realm Should e'er have dullards at the helm! Far from us be the stolid serf Who ne'er has trod Arcadian turf, Nor heard, amid the glimmering trees, Pan's happy Orestiades.

[Footnote 4: Chapman: Homeric Hymns.]

Probably the exigencies of the metre are responsible for the strange lapse which made _Punch_ substitute "Orestiades" for "Oreades." Greek was not then in the "last ditch," though the following advertisement, which _Punch_ reproduces in the same year, seems to show that its study did not conduce to opulence:--

A Bachelor, elderly and somewhat infirm, having a moderate acquaintance with the Latin and Greek languages and who is likewise expert with a weeding hoe, seeks a HOME and EMPLOYMENT. A bracing air and easy access to the services of the Church indispensable.--Address, &c.

Nowadays one of our leading literary weeklies talks of the "Hyperion Spring." But as early as 1891 the question of Compulsory Greek was attracting a good deal of attention, and _Punch_ sided with _The Times_ in expressing his disbelief in "protected studies." He also took occasion to criticize the narrowness of the old curriculum in his picture deriding the ignorance of Dante shown by classical students. It is just as well that he heads the picture "Too much Greek," for no good Virgilian would ever have laid himself open to such a charge.

[Sidenote: _Too Much Greek_]

At the beginning of this period _Punch_ undoubtedly showed a good deal of mistrust of the new methods of elementary education, in so far as they encouraged literary aspirations among the masses and tended to convert the artisan into the clerk. At its close he strikes a different and decidedly more democratic note in his ironical proposed "inscription for a Free Public Library" under the heading, "_Laissez Faire_":--

Here is an Institution doomed to scare The furious devotees of _Laissez Faire_. What mental shock, indeed, could prove immenser To Mumbo Jumbo--or to Herbert Spencer? Free Books? Reading provided from the Rates? Oh, that means Freedom's ruin, and the State's! Self-help's all right--e'en if you rob a brother-- But human creatures must not help each other! The "Self-made Man," whom Samuel Smiles so praises, Who on his fellows' necks his footing raises, The systematic "Sweater," who sucks wealth From toiling crowds by cunning and by stealth-- He is all right, he has no maudlin twist, He does not shock the Individualist! But rate yourselves to give the poor free reading? The Pelican to warm her nestlings bleeding, Was no such monument of feeble folly. Let folks alone, and all will then be jolly. Let the poor perish, let the ignorant sink, The tempted tumble, and the drunkard drink! Let--no, don't let the low-born robber rob, Because--well, that would rather spoil the job. If footpad-freedom brooked no interference, Of Capital there might be a great clearance; But, Wealth well-guarded, let all else alone, 'Tis thus our race hath to true manhood grown: To make the general good the common care, Breaks through the sacred law of _Laissez Faire_!

_Laissez Faire_ in the family circle was another matter. The authority of the father in domestic affairs is represented as still unquestioned even by the mother as late as 1879. But, just as you can always find proverbs which are mutually contradictory the one of the other, so the pages of _Punch_ constantly provide simultaneous illustrations of opposing tendencies. In the very same year in which the doctrine of patriarchal rule is shown to be still firmly established, _Punch_ exhibits a highly modern aspect of the relations between the two generations. Squire Quiverfull's son, who pays 60s. a hundred for his cigars, rebukes his father for paying 3d. each for _his_: "If I had as many children to provide for as you, I wouldn't smoke at all."

RELIGION AND THE CHURCHES

In the previous volume it was shown how _Punch_ ranged himself on the side of the determined Protestantism of the mass of the English people against the growth of Ritualistic opinions and practices in the Church of England.

The tone of _Punch's_ remonstrances was not always judicious or considerate, and it would be easy to overrate their influence. Still, they were not unrepresentative, and undoubtedly played a part in the movement which led to the introduction in the spring of 1874 of the Archbishops' Bill for the Regulation of Public Worship. As it was originally drafted, the directory power as to worship was given to the Bishop, assisted by a board of Assessors, clerical and lay, with an appeal to the Archbishop with a Board of Assessors whose decision should be final. The provisions of the Bill were criticized by Lord Salisbury, the Bishop of Peterborough, and Lord Shaftesbury, but of the amendments proposed those of Lord Shaftesbury carried the day, viz. that an Ecclesiastical Judge should preside in the Courts of Canterbury and York, to be appointed by the two Archbishops with the approval of the Crown, and that before this Judge, and not before the Bishop, such case of complaint, if not dismissed by the Bishop as frivolous, was to go for trial; one appeal should lie from this Judge to the Privy Council. These amendments gave the final character to the Act.

So far the Ministers had not committed themselves, and grave differences of opinion were known to exist in the Cabinet. On the introduction of the Bill into the Commons further cross-currents were revealed. Mr. Gladstone declared uncompromising war on the Bill, on the ground that it was not asked for by the Bishops, and as now modified was "manufactured not by the two Primates but by members of Parliament independently of them"; that it lacked weight and authority; and gave undue powers to indiscreet Bishops. He accordingly formulated six resolutions embodying the principles which ought to guide legislation on the subject. Sir William Harcourt followed, vigorously traversing his late leader's argument, and defending the Bill. His "Erastian Manifesto" was so favourably received by the House that Disraeli, in a remarkable speech, made it clear that the Government had adopted the Bill. It was in this speech that he declared that it "would be wise for us to rally on the broad platform of the Reformation." As long as the doctrines relating to the worship of the Virgin, or the Confessional were held by Roman Catholics, he was prepared to treat them with reverence. "What I do object to is Mass in masquerade."

The second reading was carried without a division; on the following day Mr. Gladstone withdrew his resolutions; and large majorities confirmed the principal clauses in Committee. When the Bill came back from the Lords, Disraeli gave way on an important amendment dealing with the question of appeal, which the Commons had introduced and the Lords had thrown out; he repeated that the Bill was intended "to put down Ritualism"; incidentally he described Lord Salisbury, who had repudiated "the bugbear of a majority of the House of Commons," as "a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers," but appealed to the House not to fall into the trap and lose the Bill by gratifying their _amour-propre_. The appeal was not in vain; the Commons without a division decided not to insist on their amendment, and the Bill which was appointed to come into operation in July, 1875, was read a third time on August 3. It is hard to say whether Sir William Harcourt's panegyrics of Disraeli, or Disraeli's sarcasms at the expense of Lord Salisbury caused more remark.

[Sidenote: _Gladstone on Vatican Decrees_]

But a more sensational sequel of the debates in Parliament was provided by Mr. Gladstone's article on Ritualism in the October _Contemporary_ and his pamphlet issued in November on _The Vatican Decrees_. By the former, in which he insisted on the hopelessness of the attempt to Romanize the Church and people of England, he provoked the Irish Romanist journals to fury and indignation. The reverberations of the _Vatican Decrees_ pamphlet were even wider. For Mr. Gladstone was not content with assailing the Papal claim to Infallibility: he went so far as to say that "it was a political misfortune that during the last thirty years the Roman Catholic Church should have acquired such an extension of its hold upon the highest classes of this country." The conquests had been chiefly among women, "but the number of male converts, or captives (as I might prefer to call them), has not been inconsiderable."

Gladstone's challenge was taken up both by Ultramontane and Liberal Catholic champions, lay and clerical, with the result that the latter disowned the former, and their conflicting answers revealed an extraordinary divergence of opinion among the professing members of the Roman Church. The views of Cardinal Manning and Lord Acton were irreconcilable; and Manning's circular issued at the end of November amounted to an excommunication of the followers of Döllinger, the famous German "modernist" whom Gladstone had visited earlier in the year, and who had been excommunicated himself in 1871 for refusing to subscribe to the Vatican decrees. But Döllinger had refused to allow himself to be consecrated a bishop of the old Catholic Church, and though by conviction he belonged to the old Catholic Community he never formally joined them.

The Ultramontane organs in Rome ascribed Gladstone's pamphlet to the alarm occasioned by the progress Romanism was making in England, and even hinted that his attacks were designed to clear himself of the suspicion of hidden Catholicism, which he had incurred by his conversations with Döllinger. This brief sketch of current theological controversy in 1874 may assist us in recognizing the incentives which animated _Punch's_ continued attacks on High Anglicans and Ritualists. At the close of 1875 he quotes the following from the _Church Times_:--

"We regret to observe that that 'chartered libertine,' the Dean of Westminster, has once more degraded the venerable church which is so unfortunate as to be committed to his charge, by making its nave a lecture room in which Nonconformist Ministers may disport themselves."

The same organ described the service in the Abbey on St. Andrew's Day as "Dr. Moffatt's entertainment," and _Punch_ asks, "if this is High Church pleasantry, what is Low?" In 1876, when communion was refused on account of the would-be communicant's disbelief in the Devil, _Punch_ observes:--

The cleric mind in quarrels seems to revel. Devil or none, some clerks will play the Devil.

The intransigent attitude of the High Church party towards Nonconformists is condemned with equal frankness when a Cornish vicar repudiated the title of Reverend as it was "desecrated" by the "carrion of dissent." In the same year the Rev. Arthur Tooth, of Hatcham, was inhibited by the Dean of Arches, and _Punch_ warns Mother Church that she will have no peace till she has got rid of this tooth. The familiar line of argument is adopted that he was neither a sound Anglican nor a true Romanist, and his church is called "St. James's (Colney) Hatcham." Frequent and unflattering allusions to a manual entitled, _The Priest in Absolution_, occur in 1877; and ironical comment is passed on the suggestion made in the Lower House of Convocation, that vestments might be allowed as from a distance they were not distinguishable from a surplice.

Mr. Mackonochie's continued recalcitrancy also occupied _Punch's_ attention a good deal in 1877. In December he explains the views on canonical obedience of the Vicar of St. Alban's, Holborn, as follows:--

When a Ritualist has gone on too long playing at Popery, he may, through impaired biliary function affecting the sensorium, finally contract a subjective delusion, induced upon his dominant fixed idea that he is his own Pope, etc.

A week later, when Mr. Mackonochie was reported to have withdrawn into a Retreat, _Punch_ kindly suggests that in earlier ages it would have been Anticyra--the town celebrated for hellebore, the chief remedy in antiquity for madness. Later on he gives specimens, under the heading of "Obedientia Docet," of correspondence from Mackonochie's Letter Writer to meet the situation of a subaltern reprimanded by his colonel, a stockbroker replying to a client who has objected to an investment effected on his credit, etc.--in all of which insubordination and disregard of orders and instructions are casuistically defended. On matters of doctrine and discipline _Punch_ differed acutely from Archdeacon Denison, but he greeted the publication of his _Notes of My Life_ affectionately, holding the author to be "most optimist of pessimists, John Bullest of John Bulls." In 1879 under the heading, "Coronatus, non Pileatus," _Punch_ applauds Newman's refusal of a cardinal's hat, accompanying his approval with a back-handed sarcastic reference to Manning, who had accepted the honour in 1875. Manning's instructions for the observance of Lent are roughly handled in the lines which end,

Will the great Lord Cardinal kindly make known On what day, if any, our souls are our own?

But this was practically the Swan-song of _Punch's_ no-Popery campaign. Lord Salisbury, in his speech on the Public Worship Regulation Bill, had spoken of three schools of religious thought--the Sacramental, the Emotional and the Philosophical. Henceforth and for a good many years to come _Punch_ was mainly concerned with the two latter schools, and most of all with the second. He reverted with undiminished vigour to his old campaign against the Sabbatarians, but his chief _bête noire_ was the Salvation Army. Here he was at one with Huxley in his criticisms on "Corybantic Christianity," but for the rest he impartially combated the pretensions of scientific dogmatism, of Agnosticism (which he called the Nothingarian creed) and Positivism. He warns France against the danger of a purely secularist education:--

An Atheist's "The Fool"--the Psalmist saith: Will France risk such a brood of Fools? Irreverent youth, with neither Hope nor Faith, Will be the product of your Godless Schools.

[Sidenote: _Sunday Observance_]

He satirizes the advocates of undenominationalism in the picture of the toy-shop man who declines to supply a Noah's Ark to a lady customer. He had given up keeping them since School Boards came in: "They was considered too denominational, M'um."

As for the keeping of Sunday, _Punch_ eulogizes Canon Basil Wilberforce for encouraging Sunday bands, and contrasts his tolerance with the attitude of a Dr. Watts, of Belfast, who objected to Sunday bathing: "It was not necessary for a man to bath himself every morning. He did not see, therefore, why it was necessary to open public baths on the Sabbath morning." The Sunday opening of the picture galleries at the Royal Manchester Institution proved a conspicuous success in 1880. Those who opposed the experiment had been, if not silenced, confuted, and _Punch_ entreated London to follow this excellent lead and not stand _last_ in the Sunday Race between Public House and Public Gallery.

So when the Tay Bridge disaster was regarded by the Sabbatarian zealots as a direct judgment on Sunday travelling, _Punch_ dealt with them as they deserved:--

One of these self-sufficient judges of judgments, and complacent dealers out of denunciations, converting the awful catastrophe triumphantly to the account of his own black and bitter creed--in which the Almighty figures as a sort of Ashantee Fetish, to be propitiated by death and destruction--has no hesitation in putting his finger on its immediate cause. Referring to the imprisoned passengers--men, women, and little children--many of them known to have been on their way to or from errands of friendship, mercy and family affection--he asks whether it was not "awful to think" that--

"They had been carried away when many of them must have known that they were transgressing the law of God."

It might do this gentleman some good to reflect that it is possible to be "carried away" in another fashion, and to transgress a great law of God--"Judge not that ye be not judged," in a more questionable manner. To see the professing minister of a religion, of whose virtues one of its leading Apostles has declared charity the greatest, swept off his narrow line of literal sectarianism in a hurricane of bitter bigotry, is suggestive of reflections which, if not exactly "awful," are neither agreeable nor edifying.

[Sidenote: _Sunday Pastime and Sunday Closing_]

In the lines on "Our Sunday--down East"--permission to include which in the programme of any Sabbatarian Penny Reading was freely granted by _Punch_--he writes:--

Which is the day that _should_ be blest, And to the weary, work-opprest, Bring wholesome pleasure, peace, and rest? Our Sunday.

Yet which the day of all the seven To our sour lives adds sourer leaven, And leaves poor folk most far from heaven? Our Sunday.

The persistence of the Sabbatarian instinct, even where it was disregarded, is illustrated in the picture of the young lady on a railway platform asking her grandfather to hide their rackets: "We needn't show everybody that we are going to play lawn tennis on a Sunday afternoon."

When in 1888 Sunday boating was allowed in the parks after church time, _Punch_ applauds "George Ranger" and Mr. David Plunket for the _act_ but not the language of the order, which he condemns as "Pharisaical trash." In the same year a largely signed petition was laid before the Upper House of Convocation of Canterbury protesting against the increasing pursuit of Sunday pastime by the "upper and fashionable classes of Society." _Punch_ ridicules the vagueness of the protest against "amusing programmes of fun and frolic," and sums up in these words:--

Our English Sunday is none too lovely or lively an institution, but as yet neither the upper nor the lower classes of English Society have shown any tendency, publicly, to desecrate it. When they do, it will be time enough, if not for the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, at least for the Public Opinion of the country to express itself upon the matter. Meantime, grandmotherly interference had better let it alone.

_Punch_ had evidently modified his earlier views as to the saving grace of Sunday dullness in England as compared with the Continental Sunday. The Bill for the Sunday closing of public-houses introduced in 1889 is dealt with in detail and at great length. The cartoon of "Sunday à la Pharisee" aims at showing that the habitual toper will not suffer, but that the decent working-man will be incommoded. It is rather unfortunate, however, that the latter is shown sending his little girl to the public-house for his beer. The accompanying verses are founded on a wonderful fulmination in _The Times_:--

"To hedge people round with petty restrictions instead of teaching them nobility of conduct and a worthy use of liberty, is the perennial resource of shallow and incompetent reformers.... A depraved and servile human nature, cribbed, cabined and confined by an infinity of minute regulations enforced by the policemen, is their reading of the social problem.... A small minority occasionally injure themselves with bad liquor on Sunday, and these reformers can think of nothing better than to forbid the entire Community to drink on Sundays at all."

_Punch_ descants rhetorically for nearly one hundred lines on Smugby's Sabbath, fanaticism, Pharisaism, etc., but as a Londoner he had probably never witnessed the orgies of the Glasgow Fair. He never failed to insist on the intemperateness of Temperance reformers, but as a supporter of moderate drinking he was himself often guilty of immoderate language.

In regard to anti-Semitism, another of his pet aversions in this period, his record is far less open to criticism. He made a perfectly fair point in representing men of Jewish extraction as the chief offenders, for these were the days of the _Libre Parole_, edited by Drumont, himself a renegade Jew, and of the anti-Semitic campaign in France which reached its climax in the Dreyfus "affair" in the middle 'nineties. As early as 1881, in one of Du Maurier's pictures, Sir Gorgius Midas is backed up in a tirade against the Jews by "Baron von Meyer," who, with the stigmata of his race written all over him, flatters himself that nobody can suspect his origin. In the cartoon on the Jewish "pogroms" in Russia in 1882, Humanity, compared to a Portia who pleads _for_ and not _against_ the Jews, is shown appealing to the Tsar, who stands with his back turned and arms crossed. How would it read in English, _Punch_ asks, if our papers contained accounts of the murdering of Jews and the burning of their houses in Houndsditch, with the police looking on in amused indifference, and the Home Secretary sending messages of thanks to the murderers?

In the verses published in January, 1882, "A Cry from Christendom," against the old anti-Semitic cry of "Hep! Hep!" _Punch_ indignantly denounces the hounding down of the Hebrew in the name of the Cross:--

Oh out on the Tartuffes of Creed! Let the spirit of Christendom speak Plain words of unfaltering truth for the cause of the helpless and weak.

[Sidenote: _Punch's Toleration_]

No warnings of possible retaliation come from _Punch_; such a possibility did not enter into the calculations of sympathizers with the oppressed Jews, who were regarded as incapable of effective resistance. A different aspect of the question is satirized in references to Society "mariages de convenance" with rich Jewesses, probably not unconnected with a recent notable alliance between a distinguished peer and the daughter of a great Jewish house. _Punch's_ general view, however, was that expressed in the saying that "every country has the Jews which it deserves," and he was ready to admit that the good English Jews were very good indeed. In 1883 he published Sambourne's portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, "who on the 8th day of Chesvan (November 8) entered on the hundredth year of his blameless, brave and beneficent life"; and when the old man died in the summer of 1885 _Punch_ paid him farewell homage in these lines:--

Long in the land his days, whose heart and hand All high and human causes could command; Long in the land his memory will abide His country's treasure, and his people's pride.

In 1886 _Punch_ vociferously applauded Dean Bradley, Stanley's successor, for "his admirable answer to the three fanatical Protestant-defence Secretaries, who would have forcibly ejected from Westminster Abbey some Roman Catholics who were saying their private prayers around the 'strong quadrilateral barrier of bronze,' which, as stated by Canon Duckworth, protects the tomb of Edward the Confessor from profane hands." He improves the occasion by some general remarks aimed at Protestant visitors to Roman Catholic churches on the Continent:--

_Mr. Punch_ heartily wishes that the conduct of English Protestants visiting the Catholic Churches abroad were anything like as inoffensive, and as appropriate to the sacred precincts, as was that of the poor benighted Romanists in Westminster Abbey, who, thinking that the best use to which a church could be put was to say prayers in it, knelt and prayed accordingly.

After rebuking the insolent caddishness of ill-bred British tourists which not only offended the congregation proper, but scandalized their decent compatriots, _Punch_ continues:--

If Dean _Punch_ saw a hundred 'Arrys, Romans or Rum 'uns of any sort, praying in Westminster Abbey would he interfere? No, bless 'em, certainly not. But if he saw one of them sneaking out a pencil to scribble his name on a monument, or attempting to nick a bit out of a shrine, or off a tomb, he'd be down upon him then and there, and have him up before the nearest police-magistrate charged with "maliciously damaging," and fined heavily for the offence, no matter what his excellent motive might have been for such wanton destruction. And this is what the Dean and Chapter would do, too; for whether it be a fanatic on one side or the other, law and order must not be set aside in favour of such a rule as "_Omne ignotum pro Fanatico_."

The doctrine is excellent if the language is jocular. But _Punch's_ plea for tolerance is seriously impaired by the virulent hostility with which he had for years assailed the Salvation Army and its founder. It is true that he had always discouraged and discountenanced emotional religion. The visit of Moody and Sankey in 1875 had drawn from him a set of acid verses on "Missionaries in Motley." After describing their methods, he continues:--

Their intent is sincere--let us trust, in all charity-- But Religion they cloak in the garb of Vulgarity, And, under a visor of seeming profanity, As comic evangelists, preach Christianity.

Those discourses of theirs are an exaggeration Of the jocular species of pulpit oration, Which was brought into vogue by that eminent surgeon And physician of souls to the multitude, Spurgeon. An impressible people are they that sit under These 'cute Boanerges, these smart sons of thunder, Who cause them, at will, to sing psalm or doxology By an influence much like electro-biology. Ira Sankey performs, as a musical Stentor, To the _mobile vulgus_ the part of Precentor. His remarkable name may suggest the inquiry If he ever exhorts them to sing "_Dies Iræ_?" _Quorsum hæc_? Can tomfoolery kindle true piety? Maybe so. Human nature is fond of variety. Mr. Merriman's unctuous sallies might irk us, But although a Revival American Circus, Ira Clown in the Ring, decent people would anger, Couldn't Moody and Sankey join Hengler and Sanger? If it didn't conduce much to edification, It would probably pay, as a good speculation.

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Salvation Army_]

The verses gave such offence that _Punch_ was moved to publish an explanation a week later, disclaiming any intention to throw any doubts on the motives or the sincerity of the American Evangelists, but maintaining his right to criticize what he honestly believed to be bad taste in the style and manner of their appeals.

Let it be granted that there was much in the early methods of the Salvation Army that provoked opposition and caused the judicious to grieve. The outrageous familiarity with which the most sacred names and subjects were treated in the _War Cry_; the conversion of the most popular songs into hymn tunes; the military organization, uniforms and titles; the "allonging and marshonging" with big drums and trombones--all these features affronted and disgusted good people who associated worship with privacy and reticence; while the hooligans looked on the Salvationists as sour-faced Puritans, and organized a "Skeleton Army" to break up their meetings. Collisions were frequent, and throughout the 'eighties members of the Salvation Army were fined and even imprisoned as disturbers of the public peace. Those of us who are old enough to remember these scenes can well recall the impression which the Salvationists made upon the detached observer of forty years ago. Men and women and girls, they wore the set look of people who had espoused an unpopular and even perilous cause and were resolved to carry it through. They seldom looked happy, and they had little cause for it. In ten years the physiognomy of the Salvationists had changed, and they went about their work unmolested with serene and cheerful faces. _Punch_ could at least plead this extenuation of his hostility, that it was shared by learned and excellent men. But there is really no excuse for his childish exultation over the Queen's refusal to subscribe to the Salvation Army's funds in 1882, and his jeers at the Archbishop of Canterbury for investing "his modest fiver in the Booth Bank."

The prophecy in which he indulged in that year in an article headed, "Bootheration to 'Em," is worth quoting. _Punch_ regretted the conversion of the Grecian Theatre--"a place of generally harmless recreation for the East End"--into a temple of Salvationism:--

Yet we feel certain that the Army, once possessed of a great permanent meeting-place, will speedily convert it into some sort of Conventicle, the excitement of "drums and excursions" will gradually cease, conservatism will increase, Respectability and recognition by Respectability will be the object of the majority, reformers will arise and "camp out," regiments will desert, and some twenty new Sects will be added to the list of the country which possesses "any number of religions and only one sauce."

Part of the prophecy has been fulfilled; the concluding part, in which the wish was father to the thought, has been falsified. For _Punch_ in these days only saw hysteria and vulgarity in what he considered an unhealthy mania. He seized on the repellent features of the crusade, e.g. the song, "On Board of the 'Allelujah," issued by "Admiral Tug" of the Salvation Navy--and overlooked the sincere and devoted efforts at social reclamation which underlay these exuberances. Mr. Justice Field's decision in June, 1882, allowing Salvationists to hold processions and parades was deplored as likely to encourage all the strange sects enumerated in _Whitaker's Almanack_--Jumpers, Shakers, Mormons and Recreative Religionists--to go and do likewise. The verses printed in November, 1883, are a bitter and violent tirade against the movement in general and the Booth family in particular, with offensive references to "dear Catherine ... blushing so feminine" who had been arrested by a Swiss magistrate:--

All the world knows we're so blessedly 'umble-- (How like the Master we follow so well!)-- That for a Booth there's no chance of a tumble, Though e'en the Temple of Solomon fell.

[Sidenote: _Hostility to General Booth_]

"Atlas" of the _World_ denounced the "Salvation Army nuisance" in the autumn of 1884. It had spoilt a season at Worthing and might do so at Brighton. _Punch_, welcoming the pious Mr. Edmund Yates as an ally, proposed as a remedy the prohibition of _all_ processions, excepting only those of State requirements, as a relic of barbarism and an anachronism:--

Let the Salvation Army, with their ensigns and captains and uniforms, and drums and trumpets, assemble in their Barracks just as Christians, Jews, Turks and Heathens do in their Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples; and let their recruiting sergeants go about where they list, or where they are likely to 'list; but let this out-of-door _irreligious_ movement, this outrageous travesty of _Ecclesiastical symbolism_, with its fanatic war-cries, its fanfares, its martial hymns, and brass-band accompaniment, leading to riot and bloodshed on the Lord's Day, let this be forthwith suppressed, as it can be, we believe, by existing law; and if not, let the law be made. Of course that harmless body of publicans and sinners, the Freemasons, would be sufferers by such a regulation; but with His Royal Highness of Wales, their Grand Master, at their head, they would be willing to bear the privation of being occasionally deprived of an open-air display of sashes, aprons and emblems for the sake of law and order.

_Punch's_ animosity towards the Salvationists showed little abatement right on into the 'nineties. General Booth was twice caricatured: in 1885 as "His own Trumpeter" blowing an instrument like a French horn in mid air, and in 1892 as "General Boombastes"--a composite title of derision founded on Bombastes Furioso and General Boum of the _Grande Duchesse_--in connexion with a great demonstration held by the Salvation Army in Hyde Park in February of that year. Sarcastic references occur from time to time to the finance of the Army, which in those years lent itself to criticism. But science and intellect, cynicism and fastidiousness were routed or converted in the sequel. The Salvation Army came nearer success in reclaiming "the submerged tenth" than any other sect or church: it outlived derision, criticism and scepticism, and earned the tribute of imitation in the organization of the Church Army. No finer example of this conversion is to be found than in the life of Frank Crossley, the senior partner in the great Manchester engineering firm, that noble and benevolent philanthropist, who began in antipathy to the methods of the Salvation Army and devoted the end of his life to intimate, self-sacrificing and cordial co-operation with them in the slums of Ancoats.

Burnand, who succeeded to the editorship of _Punch_ in 1880, was a Roman Catholic; but it cannot be asserted that he abused his opportunities any more than Charles Cooper, who was a Romanist when he joined the editorial staff of the _Scotsman_, a much more delicate position for a member of that communion. _Punch_ became perhaps less aggressively Protestant, but there was no substantial change in the theological policy of the paper, or in its mainly Erastian attitude in regard to the relations of Church and State. No serious exception can be taken to the verdict on the Revised Version--completed in 1880--as "a very qualified success if not an absolute failure," coupled with a wish to know what were the suggestions for improvements made by our American cousins. The verses in the same year on "A Life's Work and a Life's Wage," recounting the sad experience of a Devonshire curate who after thirty years' work, applied for an order to enter the workhouse as a pauper--are only a renewal of _Punch's_ familiar complaints on the scandal of underpaid clergy. Eleven years later, in 1891, he takes up the same parable _à propos_ of a statement by Mr. Gladstone to the effect that "if the priest is to live, he must beg, earn or steal," comparing the needy vicar, with eighty pounds a year, and the bishop with five thousand. Yet in the same number, under the heading of "Mitred Misery," _Punch_ has an article on the heavy and extortionate fees incurred by bishops on their installation or translation. The victim is represented as just managing to meet the expenses of his elevation to one episcopal see and his translation to another, but declining an archbishopric on the ground that it would land him in the Bankruptcy Court. In an earlier year the contrast between the well-to-do cleric and the poor is ironically emphasized in the "Consolation" administered by Mr. Dean: "Ah, my poor fellow, your case is very sad, no doubt! But remember that the rich have their troubles too. I dare say, now, _you_ can scarcely realize what it is not to know where to find an investment which will combine adequate security with a decent interest on one's money."

[Sidenote: _Disestablishment_]

Doctrinal opportunism is satirized in Du Maurier's picture of the vicar of a seaside town who was "High Church during the season, and Low all the rest of the year." Much in the same spirit is the list of qualifications necessary for a curate in a country parish: the chief desideratum being that he must be able to play tennis with the vicar's daughters. These jests were almost common form at the close of the Victorian age. A more serious situation arose in 1885 owing to the demand for Disestablishment put forward by the Radicals, but _Punch_ refused to treat it seriously. His cartoon, "A False Alarm," shows a chorus of Conservative owls--including Lord Salisbury and Mr. Cross--crying, "Too-whit, too-whoo, Church in Danger."

_Punch_ appends an extract from a speech by Mr. Chamberlain expressing his incredulity of any settlement of this question being arrived at in the Parliament about to assemble. This view is further developed in a burlesque forecast, "The Disestablisher's Diary," with sensational and circumstantial details of the passing of Disestablishment, the conversion of Westminster Abbey into a Coffee Hall, bishops begging in the streets, riots of country clergy, etc. In 1887 the scheme of the late Dean, then Archdeacon or "Harsh Deacon" Farrar (as _Punch_ called him), for a Church House as a Jubilee memorial roused _Punch's_ violent animosity. It was giving a stone to those who needed bread--the poor clergy. In the cartoon on "Mammon the mendicant," who was sending round the hat, John Bull declines to give anything to the seedy cleric for the Church House: "I'd rather put it into your own [hat]."

A long article is devoted in 1890 to the trial of Bishop King of Lincoln, but beyond facetious descriptions of the eminent counsel engaged the only point made is that the bishop never came near the place. In the same year another bishop, Dr. Jayne of Chester, earned _Punch's_ unstinted approval for encouraging dancing among the working classes. At a conference of the Girls' Friendly Society the bishop had remarked that, "until they were prepared to introduce basket-making into London Society as a substitute for quadrilles and waltzes he was not disposed to accept it as an equivalent for balls and dances among girls of other classes." This liberality of view prompted _Punch_ to cut a series of ecstatic capers over the pluck and common sense of "my pithy Jayne."

In agreeable contrast to these punning comments on Church matters are the tributes to two remarkable men, widely sundered in temperament, physique and doctrine, who both passed away in January, 1892. The memorial lines on Cardinal Manning insist that he was much more than

A great priest, shrewd marshaller of men, Subtle in verbal fence with tongue or pen, Ascetic of the cell--

He is extolled as the friend of the poor, the struggling weak, the toiler for temperance, the hastener on of light:--

In many a fray when Right's at odds with Might, Might's foes will miss their friend.

[Sidenote: _Homage to Spurgeon_]

It should be remembered that _Punch_ did not easily applaud Temperance advocates in this period, when he avowed himself as "capable of special sympathy with the publicans." _Punch_ owed an _amende_ to Spurgeon as well as to Manning, and made it handsomely. He recognizes Spurgeon's sturdiness and geniality:--

You spoke a potent word In the World's ear and listening thousands heard.

Spurgeon stirred the throng, not fastidious or sensitive souls. He was honest, robust, Puritan but not ascetic:--

Crudeness may chill, and confidence offend, But manhood, mother-wit and selfless zeal, Speech clear as light and courage true as steel, Must win the many. Honest soul and brave, The greatest drop their garlands on your grave.

At all points Spurgeon was poles apart from the "Adulated Clergyman," one of _Punch's_ "Modern Types" held up to contempt in the previous year, and noted in another section--who develops out of a mincing effeminate boy into an unconventional emotional preacher, ferocious in pulpit denunciations, but full of honeyed sweetness in fashionable drawing-rooms; adored by weak women, distrusted and despised by normal men.

A new rival to the pulpit, it may be noted in conclusion, had sprung up in the "theological romance." Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose _Robert Elsmere_ appeared in 1888, was its most widely read representative. But perhaps her greatest title to our gratitude in this context is the fact that it was her recommendation which induced Messrs. Macmillan to publish Mr. Shorthouse's remarkable novel _John Inglesant_.

LONDON AND ITS GOVERNMENT

Growth and expansion rather than reconstruction was the leading feature of London in the period with which we are now concerned. The spreading of the "great wen," as Cobbett called it, went on in almost all directions, and the linking up of the once detached village of Kensington with Central London was followed by a remarkable extension of that typically Victorian suburb. In 1884 _Punch_ described travellers journeying for hours and hours in a northerly or westerly direction, only to find that they had reached North Kensington or West Kensington, as the case might be. Already in 1876 he had noted the swallowing up of Brompton in South Kensington. Concurrently with this suburban expansion the disappearance or removal of many old landmarks went on apace. In 1876 _Punch_ had suggested that Temple Bar should be removed by one of the elephants in the Lord Mayor's procession. The long contemplated removal took place in 1878, and the historic site was duly occupied by the pedestal bearing the much-criticized "Griffin," which led to abundant satirical comment in prose and verse and pictures. The block in the traffic had been removed, but the cartoon of "Alice in Blunderland" showed that from an architectural point of view _Punch_ thought the remedy worse than the disease. Cremorne Gardens, the scenes of alternate revelries in high and low life, were closed in 1877, and the withdrawal of "Evans's" licence in 1879 was plaintively celebrated in the lament of a middle-aged Man about Town:--

Farewell the quiet chop! the kidneys poached! Farewell the grizzled bones and the mixed drinks, That made abstention virtue--O, farewell! Farewell the ready waiter, the vague bill, The nose-enlivening pinch, eye-winking smoke, The kindly hand-shake, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of Paddy Green! And O you ancient Basses, whose rude throats The immortal Jove's dread clamour counterfeit, Farewell!--A fellow's occupation's gone!

--_Othello_ improved.

In January, 1883, the old colossal equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington at Hyde Park Corner was taken down, and on the night of August 12, 1884, was "removed by Messrs. Pickford in a specially constructed waggon drawn by ten horses to Aldershot." The old statue, universally condemned and ridiculed, which would have been removed immediately but for Wellington's own objection, had been allowed to de-decorate a splendid site for nearly forty years. Boehm's statue, which replaced it, dates from 1888. To turn from the grandiose to the homely, we may note that _Punch_ vigorously espoused the cause of the cow-keepers in St. James's Park in 1885, and under the heading, "Wild Sports Near the Horse Guards," protested against the "chivvying from their milk-stalls of a lot of poor old women." One does not look for humour in the _Annual Register_, but the mention of this episode in that useful book of reference blends information with entertainment:--

_September 1st, 1885._ In pursuance of the orders of H.R.H. The Ranger, the stall-holders in St. James's Park, who represented the ancient "Milk Fair," held for nearly two centuries in the Mall, were ordered to close their booths and remove their cows. Two only of the stall-keepers refused to comply and after a strong protest in the newspapers, stating that some of the existing tenants had held stalls for more than a century [_sic_], the order for their immediate removal was relaxed and a compromise at length effected.

The respite granted to these interesting centenarians expired a few years later, and now the St. James's Park menagerie contains nothing larger than the pelicans.

[Sidenote: _Demolition and Innovation_]

The proposed demolition of Staple Inn in 1886 was peculiarly distasteful to _Punch_, who held all these old buildings in pious reverence, and inspired him to indite a ballad of remonstrance to the builder. As a matter of fact, the protest was premature, for the Prudential Assurance Company, into whose hands it passed by purchase, maintained the building as a relic of vanishing London. No such regrets as those awakened by the passing of Staple Inn were aroused by the announcement in 1887 that the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison were to be demolished. When the old Fleet prison was dismantled, _Punch_ could indulge in legitimate rejoicing, because it marked the close of a harsh and cruel penal system--imprisonment for debt. Here it was only a case of structural and sanitary improvements. In ancient days there were prisons impressive by their dignity of design. Their purpose inspired the strange and sinister side of Piranesi's genius in his famous imaginative series of "Carcere." But a modern gaol can at best be an unobtrusive reminder of a still necessary evil.

Though no achievement comparable in size and importance to the scheme of the Thames Embankment is associated with this period, new architectural features were not wanting; foremost among them were Street's new Law Courts, the swan-song in stone of the Gothic revival; a group of buildings dignified in conception and treatment, but terribly handicapped by their internal discomforts and darkness. I have already spoken of the "Griffin." Cleopatra's Needle was at last set up on the Embankment in 1878, and remains to this day a standing proof of the doubtful wisdom of detaching ancient historic monuments from their surroundings. There is something forlorn in this relic of Ptolemaic Egypt, as it faces the winking sky signs of the Surrey side. To the late 'seventies belongs another architectural innovation destitute of beauty, and only remarkable for its size and height--Queen Anne's Mansions. The invincible conservatism of the English could not be more strikingly displayed than by the fact that after more than forty years Queen Anne's Mansions remains our solitary skyscraper. The El Dorado which this method of economizing space offers to landlords and builders has never been exploited. Some put it down to our sense of the æsthetic fitness of things; others to the paralysing effect of building laws, vested interests, and the dead hand of "ancient lights." Sir Martin Conway, as becomes one who has scaled high peaks in both hemispheres, has recently come forward as an apostle of altitude in architecture, but so far without much response. _Punch_ had no quarrel with anything about Queen Anne's Mansions except their ugliness, and unreservedly withdrew the charge of irregular financial procedure which he had brought--on the strength of _The Times_--against the projector and original proprietor, Mr. Hankey.

But Queen Anne's Mansions were interesting in another way, for they marked the beginning of the system of residential flats, which has since revolutionized London life. Though Queen Anne's Mansions remain unique at the moment when I write, the flat system "came to stay," to be extensively used, exploited, and criticized. "Flats" however, as we understand the term, were devised for the convenience of the well-to-do or middle-class people. Among the contributions to the solving of the housing problem of the poor on the block system, the most notable in this period was the benefaction of Lord Iveagh, who in 1889 set aside £250,000 for the purpose, following the fine example set by the American millionaire, Peabody. Charing Cross Road, opened in February, 1887, was one of the first of the new thoroughfares which have changed the face of Central London. _Punch_ was much concerned in 1883 by a report that tramways were about to invade Kensington; some years were to elapse before they were admitted to the Embankment, but _Punch_ already complained in this year that it was being spoiled by railways and roughs. Trafalgar Square continued to excite his unflattering comments, but there is no public place in the world which lends itself to more criticism. As an American writer once remarked, the buildings seem to emphasize rather than to correct the slope, so that everything seems to be slithering down towards Whitehall. A notable addition was made to the Square in 1887 by the erection of the Gordon Memorial, and _Punch_ records the curious fact that Thornycroft's statue was unveiled, without any formality, by Mr. David Plunket, Chief Commissioner of Works, in the presence of a few friends of the general.

[Sidenote: _National Opera Houses_]

The connexion of art with architecture was not very happy or impressive in these years. When the Royal College of Music was founded in 1882 with Sir George Grove, _Punch's_ old friend, as Director, it was temporarily and inadequately housed in the buildings of the National Training School of Music, in which it had been merged. The move to the new buildings in Prince Consort Road did not take place till 1894. The annals of opera, so far as architecture is concerned, are positively disastrous. Mapleson, the once famous operatic impresario, projected a grand National Opera House on the Embankment; the first brick was laid by Mlle. Titiens in September, 1875, and the first stone of the building by the Duke of Edinburgh in December. But the patronage of "stars" and Royal Dukes could not conjure money out of the pockets of the investing public. The scheme languished, and in 1881 _Punch_ records that the unfinished Opera House was being converted, not musically, into "flats." By the summer of 1884 the project collapsed entirely, and _Punch's_ comments on "A Beggar's Opera House" are not without their point to-day:--

The sale by auction last week of what the retiring newspaper paragraph chronicling the melancholy fact described as the "materials of the unfinished Grand National Opera House on the Thames Embankment," cannot but afford food even to the least artistic mind for some rather disagreeable reflections. That after a six years' struggle, involving the sinking of something like £100,000 in hard cash, the speculative element, that ought to have been equal to the emergency in the first capital in the world, should have been contented to look on and smile, while, to quote once more the paragraph in question, "157 lots, the principal portion of which consisted of the iron girders and columns used in the formation of the pit and box circles, originally costing, it is said, £40,000," were knocked down for "the small sum of £218" is something not very far removed from a national disgrace.

The building was finally demolished in 1888.

Another scheme which also ended disastrously, though the building survives, was D'Oyly Carte's venture into the domain of serious opera. The new English Opera House in Shaftesbury Avenue opened in 1891 with Sullivan's _Ivanhoe_, but the analogy of the Gilbert and Sullivan light operas was deceptive: the expectation of a long run was doomed to failure, and the English Opera House was shortly afterwards converted into the Palace Music Hall. _Punch's_ patriotic _amour propre_ was wounded by the fact that where _Ivanhoe_ had failed, the _Basoche_, its successor, and an essentially French opera, had caught on. Why, he asks, call it the English Opera House? Why not the "Cosmopolitan" or the "Royal Babel Opera House"? But these are questions which do not fall within the scope of our immediate inquiry. It is enough to record the fact that an abortive attempt to establish English opera on a permanent basis succeeded in enriching the variety stage with a new temple, while the site of Mapleson's projected Grand National Opera House is now occupied by New Scotland Yard, generally admitted to be the most successful outcome of the genius of Norman Shaw.

In earlier days _Punch_ had constituted himself an unofficial Inspector of Nuisances for the Metropolis, and he never fulfilled these self-imposed duties with greater zeal and even fury than in the long campaign which he waged throughout the 'eighties against the then Duke of Bedford. London was a "City of Dreadful Dirt" and Covent Garden Market and the small streets around it, in _Punch's_ view, held the palm for filthiness. He had given the Dukes a rest for a good many years, but the scandal of "Mud-Salad Market" revived in him a truculence worthy of Douglas Jerrold:--

[Sidenote: _Mud-Salad Market_]

Mud-Salad Market belongs to his Grace the Duke of Mudford. It was once a tranquil Convent Garden, belonging first to the Abbot of Westminster, and finally to the Dukes of Mudford. The property having been let on building leases, it became a small square in the centre of London, bounded on one side by Inigo Jones's church--"The handsomest barn in England"--on another side by a theatre, and warmly supported on other sides by numerous minor taverns. The hot-houses of the old Garden have become the pot-houses of the modern Market. Mud-Salad Market, like its own vegetables, has now sprouted out in all directions. You may start from Cabbage-leaf corner, near the site of Temple Bar, on a market-morning, and may go as far as Turnip-top Square in Bloomsbury, or Cauliflower-place at Charing Cross, and it is all Mud-Salad Market. Houses are barricaded with mountainous carts of green-stuff, cabs lose themselves in vain attempts to drive through the maze of vegetables, the costermonger makes temporary gardens on the pathway, while the roads are blocked with waggons, carts, donkey-trucks, and porters staggering under the weight of huge baskets. Carrots, turnips, vegetable-marrows, potatoes, lettuces, and onions are masters of the situation. Vegetable refuse, ankle deep, carpets the pathway in every direction, mixed with mud and rain-water, and trampled into a pulpy slimy muck by thousands of hob-nailed boots. Leases drop in, old houses are pulled down, great spaces are cleared, new houses of an approved stucco type are built, and no attempt is made to increase the legitimate limits of Mud-Salad Market.

* * * * *

It is not too much to say that Mud-Salad Market is a disgrace to London, a special disgrace to his Grace of Mudford, and about the greatest nuisance ever permitted in a great City of Nuisances.

Rather different this account of Mud-Salad Market from Leigh Hunt's description of a certain Covent Garden Market in his day, when "it was the most agreeable in the metropolis," and when it had been "raised" into "a convenient and elegant state by the noble proprietor." Let his Grace of Mudford take a leaf from that Duke's tree, and, if he can't "raise" Mud-Salad Market, let him "raze" it, and give us a new one.

Grant, your Grace, a new broom to some one, let a clean sweep be made of Mud-Salad Market, and your petitioners will never again pray anything any more.

That was written in August, 1880. A fortnight later _Punch_ renews and enlarges his attack:--

THE DUKE OF MUDFORD IN GLOOMSBURY

The Duke of Mudford's grip upon London extends far beyond Mud-Salad Market. As Lord Cul-de-Sac and the Earl of No Thoroughfare, he claims and exercises a right of blockade in Gloomsbury. London is a very peculiar city. It is said to be sixteen miles long and eight miles broad, and is supposed to contain a population of four millions. Its parochial rulers for the last ten years have devoted all their energy to the improvement of the great avenues of communication from East to West, but the cross avenues are in much the same condition as they were in the days of Dr. Johnson. The Strand and Fleet Street have been improved, Oxford Street, Holborn, Newgate Street, etc., have been widened, a noble Embankment has been made, and a great serpentine roadway, extending from Waterloo Bridge to Whitechapel, is in course of formation. While this is done, or being done, there is not a thoroughfare worthy of the name from South to North, from Park Lane to Chancery Lane. Berkeley Street, Bond Street, St. Martin's Lane, and other cross streets have to get rid of their northern traffic by dodging round corners. The most central and most important thoroughfare from South to North, is composed of Waterloo Bridge (a bridge from which the halfpenny tax on suicide has just been removed), Wellington Street (which stands on a hill, and is adorned by the Thalia and Melpomene Theatres), Bow Street (which might be called Bow-legged Street, where criminals are tried), Endell Street (where they grow the criminals who are tried at Bow Street), and Gower Street, which belongs to the Duke of Mudford.

[Sidenote: _A Ducal Defaulter_]

At the north end of Gower Street the traffic is stopped by a ducal barrier, and turned round several narrow streets, to find its way to the Euston Road as best it can. Three of the largest railway termini--the North Western, the Midland and the Great Northern lie in this direction; but the Duke of Mudford, Lord Cul-de-Sac, and Earl of No Thoroughfare claims his right to stand between these railways and their floods of traffic. The line must be drawn somewhere, and it is drawn at Gower Street. It was Mrs. Partington's mission to try to mop back the Atlantic: it is the Duke of Mudford's mission to push back four millions of people.

By the way, Mud-Salad Market was at its dirtiest and filthiest last Thursday. Such a standing nuisance in London ought to be as impossible as it is impassable.

When the Duke of Westminster helped to start a cheap eating-house with beds and baths in Bow Street, _Punch_ invidiously contrasted his philanthropy with the recalcitrance of the Duke of "Mudford." Nor was he content with agitating for the improvement of Covent Garden, but followed up his attack by a similar exposure of the filthy condition of Billingsgate, maintained by force of vested interests, where the overcrowding led to the destruction of large quantities of fish and the consequent enhancement of prices.[5] In 1883 the Duke of Bedford had apparently been goaded into offering Covent Garden Market to the Municipal Authorities, but they declined to relieve him of his responsibilities, and the campaign continued. _Punch_ was not the only paper which attacked the Duke for neglecting his London property, but it was the most outspoken and persistent. The Duke had the reputation of being an improving landlord on his country estates, but over a million sterling had been added to the ducal revenues in his time by fines exacted on leases falling due on his Bloomsbury estate, and, in view of this fact, the scandal of Covent Garden inevitably exposed him to hostile comment, from which his successors have been wholly immune.

[Footnote 5: An attempt was made in 1884 to open a new fish market in Smithfield to break the monopoly of Billingsgate, but the scheme failed through mismanagement, and _Punch_ renewed his attacks in 1889.]

Much of _Punch's_ criticism of the drawbacks of London was destructive. But he did not refrain from specific suggestions. For example, he persistently agitated for the painting of street names on lamps as a guide at night, and to good purpose, as the extract overleaf shows. The lighting of London still left much to be desired, and foreshadowed the obligatory darkness of war time:--

Punch has long been pegging away at the Vestries and District Boards, to turn the street lamps to account for display of the street names after dark. His pegging has profited. He is glad to hear that the practice is spreading, and will soon, he hopes and trusts, be general. Wherever it is neglected, let ratepayers take up the cry, and bombard not their street lamps, but their District Boards. The manufacturer who has supplied labels with street names for the lamps in Camberwell, writes to _Punch_ to say that he has furnished similar labels throughout the parishes of Kennington, St. George the Martyr Southwark, St. Mary's Newington, and Limehouse, as also to the boroughs of Leeds, Leicester, Birmingham, Bootle-cum-Linacre near Liverpool, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. He has also been supplying the Board of Works with lamp-tablets notifying the position of Fire-plugs and Hydrants, in the parishes of St. George the Martyr Rotherhithe, Deptford, Charlton, and Woolwich, and is now preparing to fix similar tablets in the parish of St. George the Martyr Hanover Square.

"Light--more Light"--is _Punch's_ cry, as it was fighting Ajax's, and dying Goethe's. All honour to Sugg for his railway-Argand-burner, and his new naphthalene with its forty-candle power--and when next he fits it to a train, may _Punch_ be there to see, instead of to struggle with a tantalising twilight, as he does under the present mockery of railway-carriage illumination.

Another movement in which _Punch_ took an active part was that for the provision of respectable restaurants for girl workers. The "Coffee-Houses," which were then almost the only sort of cheap eating-houses available, were both dirty and dismal, and the need offered _Punch_ in 1881 an opportunity for combining a practical suggestion with a dig at the Duke of Bedford:--

[Sidenote: _Punch's Suggested Improvements_]

A GOOD THING TO DO.

If the Church and Stage Guild, and the Association for Administering Weak Tea to Reluctant Ballet Girls, are inclined for practical work, we can tell them how to make themselves exceedingly useful to the humbler members of the dramatic profession. Pantomime rehearsals are beginning, and hundreds of girls, many of them living far off in the suburbs, and most of them receiving only a few shillings a week, are brought into the neighbourhood of Covent Garden early, kept at work all day, with no time to return home before they are required for their night duty at the theatres. There are hundreds of taverns, public-houses, coffee-shops, restaurants, and pastry-cooks, in and about the Strand, but, as far as we are aware, and we are pretty well up in the supply resources of this neighbourhood, there is _not one place where these girls can go to get a cheap and decent meal_. They can go to hundreds of places, if they like to spend half their week's earnings in less than an hour, but they cannot even do this without being stared at like wild beasts, or annoyed by the insolent patronage of the cad and the prowler. Commercial philanthropy has given the market-men and women of Covent Garden a "kiosk" in Bow Street, and what is done for the Mudford gang might surely be done for Theatrical London. The old Bow Street Police Station is empty and wanting a tenant, as "To Let" bills are stuck upon its broken windows. It has space and position, and the least the Duke of Mudford--the proprietor of Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres--can do, is to offer it at a very moderate rental for this useful purpose. A chance for Mudford and popularity.

A series of articles on "How to Improve London" began in the same year, and though some of the suggestions were fantastic or counsels of perfection, many have since been translated into reality. The list of metropolitan improvements suggested in 1886 betrays perhaps an excessive solicitude for equestrians in the Parks and a corresponding desire to control 'buses and carts in their interests. The scheme for doing away with all private residences within Regent's Park is magnificently comprehensive. _Punch_ wished to construct

a public Summer and Winter Garden on a French and German model, with Restaurants open for luncheons, dinners, and suppers, a theatre, a circus, lawn tennis grounds, tennis court, boating by day, and by night fireworks on the ornamental water. Such an establishment is a real want, and Regent's Park, being at once well within reach, and yet so far removed as to offer no obstruction to traffic, is the very place for the purpose.

There is a patriarchalism which is almost Teutonic in his suggestion for preserving the amenities of the Parks and public places:--

_Parks and Streets._ All Processions, not being State Pageants, should be prohibited. All bodies of persons marching about with and playing, or attempting to play, musical instruments, should be prohibited. Fine and imprisonment should be the punishment for breaking these laws.

_Quiet Streets._ All organ-grinders and so-called street-musicians should not be permitted to come within a radius of ten miles of Charing Cross on pain of imprisonment, fine, and, for a third offence, penal servitude for not less than seven years.

_Meetings._ Public spaces, at least four miles out of London, to be set apart for open-air meetings, if required, and only such spaces to be used for such purposes.

_Parks._ The London Parks shall be only used by the Public for the purposes of recreation and enjoyment, and not for political meetings, haranguing, preachings, and suchlike nuisances, which render Sunday a day of turbulence and unrest, and prevent quiet, peaceable people, who are at work all the week, from enjoying the fresh air on their only holiday.

The reference to musical instruments in processions is clearly aimed at the Salvation Army, of which in its earlier phase _Punch_, as we have learned, was the resolute enemy.

[Sidenote: _Public Vehicles_]

In 1889 _Punch_ drew up a new Bill for London Improvements, including his old schemes for extending Rotten Row, making new rides, and otherwise protecting the equestrian interest, but adding new suggestions for the wholesale planting of trees along the principal streets and thoroughfares, the training of creepers over all the structures of the District Railway, the provision of popular restaurants in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and in general the opening of as many open-air refreshment places as possible--on the French model.

There is much less abuse of the imperfections of public vehicles in this period, though they are by no means exempt from censure. In 1875 _Punch_ quotes at length the account of an exceptionally honest cabman with the additional information that his name was Isaacs. The frequency of cab accidents in 1880 elicits the fact, if it was a fact, that cabs were not obliged to carry lights! The congestion of horse-drawn traffic at the Marble Arch and the Piccadilly end of Hamilton Place clamoured for a remedy, but _Punch_ was more concerned by the discreditable congestion of pedestrian traffic in the neighbourhood of Piccadilly Circus, and the nocturnal orgies enacted there. These belonged to the scenes and institutions calculated to bring London into disrepute, of which _Punch_ made a list in 1882 under the heading, "Things to Show Cetewayo." To return to the vehicles, the hansom still retained its popularity--witness Du Maurier's picture--and taximeter cabs introduced in Paris by 1890 aroused hopes not destined to be fulfilled until much later. The "growler" still held its own. _Punch_ had no love for it or its driver, but supported the plea for more cab-shelters. As for the omnibuses, the abolition of the "knife-board" and the introduction of garden-seats and proper staircases were handsomely acknowledged by _Punch_, though he still resented the importunities of rival conductors. Only those who can remember the atmosphere on the old and unelectrified Underground can properly appreciate _Punch's_ tirades against the dirt and discomfort of subterranean travel in the 'eighties. They were aggravated, moreover, by an outbreak of hooliganism, which became a serious nuisance in 1881. Nor was it any comfort to the semi-asphyxiated passenger to be assured that the underground officials were singularly free from bronchial affections.

[Sidenote: _The Tyranny of King Fog_]

In this atmospheric context the question of London fog and the smoke nuisance naturally emerges. The table of the total number of days of fog in London from 1871 onwards published in the Meteorological Society's Journal shows a decline in the 'seventies and a recrudescence in the 'eighties and early 'nineties. In 1878 _Punch_ notes ironically that the London fogs made it impossible to see colours at a dressmaker's, but did not interfere with "doing" the Old Masters. There are frequent allusions in his pages to the Conference on Smoke and Fog held in 1880, but at the end of the decade, when the nuisance was unusually acute, _Punch_ launched out in a long, sardonic, and spirited doggerel tribute to the unimpaired sovereignty of the demon King Fog. The occasion was the visitation of January 9th-13th, 1888, when a heavy fog settled over England and a great part of Ireland, traffic by sea and land being greatly impeded and many accidents reported from all parts of the country. But London, as usual, suffered most. _Punch_ describes how King Fog, having summoned all his attendant demons, determined to surpass all his previous efforts in torturing "miserable mortals," and succeeded.

The fog of January, 1888, was equalled, if not eclipsed, by that of Christmas, 1904, but the table of statistics already referred to records a marked decline from 1900 onwards. Statistics, however, are a poor consolation. The late Director of the Meteorological Society, writing in 1910, frankly owns that no statistics of the "frequency occurrence" of fog warrant the inference that the atmosphere of London is approaching that of the surrounding districts as regards transparency. It is true that an absolute approximation was made in the spring and early summer of 1921, but it was purchased at a cost which even in these days must be regarded as exorbitant.

Sir William Harcourt's Bill for the reform of the Government of London, introduced in April, 1884, and withdrawn in July, fell between two stools; it exasperated the Obstructives and failed to satisfy the Reformers. _Punch_, however, seized the opportunity to indulge in a burlesque prophetic account of the first meeting of the reformed Corporation, illustrating the embarrassment created by the _damnosa hæreditas_ of the Metropolitan Board of Works, and, in general, indicating the immense amount of work to be done, and the rooted disinclination of the old gang to undertake it. Yet when the new authority was established five years later, and the first elections to the London County Council were held in January, 1889, it cannot be said that _Punch_ exhibited any great enthusiasm. It is true that in his verses on the "London County Council Dream," widespread improvements and reforms are foreshadowed, but they end up on a note of tempered optimism.

[Sidenote: _A Mixed Epitaph_]

In the very next month the mood of disillusionment is apparent in the cartoon revealing friction and the delight of the ex-Bumble and ex-member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. Not that _Punch_ regretted the Board, though he rendered justice to its greatest achievements in the decidedly mixed epitaph composed for its tombstone, to be surmounted by an armed figure labelled "Black Mail" and headed "Peace to Its Hashes":--

To the Melancholy Memory of The Metropolitan Board of Works. It was an Unfortunate Institution. Flushed in the earlier years of its Existence, With a laudable Ambition To command the Respect and Admiration of the Ratepayers, It gave an Embankment to the Thames, Drained London, And suddenly showed the world How jobbery could be elevated to the level of the Fine Arts; Thus Fighting to the End, it was more anxious To leave an Inheritance of Spite to its Successor, Than to retire from the Scene of its Late Labours with Dignity to itself. Unwept, Unrepentant, yet Unhung, It has Passed for Good and Aye to that Oblivion From which it is Possible the More Thoughtful and Philosophical Ratepayer May think it would have been as Well For the Interests of Municipal Honesty That it had Never Emerged.

The series of articles on "County Councildom" are by no means sympathetic; and the indignation of the ratepayer, who had expected a reduction in his burdens and was proportionately disappointed, is vividly and vocally expressed in Du Maurier's picture of "Reaction." The resignation of Sir John Lubbock and later on of Lord Rosebery,[6] the Chairman of the L.C.C., lent point to _Punch's_ allusions to the jubilation of "Bumble" and his confident hope that he will have to come back. "Bumble's" idea is that the "toffs" and "big pots" were "hooking it" in disgust at the bad manners and arrogance of the "Progressives." But if the truth be told, it was not the methods of the L.C.C. in dealing with ordinary affairs of administration that disappointed and exasperated _Punch_: it was the spirit in which the Progressives addressed themselves to the task of regulating theatres and places of entertainment. In his verses "Ye Moderates of England" he inveighs against the grand-maternal rule of the Puritan L.C.C., and more especially Messrs. McDougall and Lidgett:--

When Lidgett and McDougall Are censors of the play, We can patronize the drama In a strictly proper way. When Parkinson's Inspector Of Ballets, we shall know He will stop Any hop If he sees a dancer's toe.

[Footnote 6: Lord Rosebery, during his tenure of office, is generally alluded to as "Mr. Rosebery," because he preferred to be called "Mr. Chairman" rather than "My Lord."]

That was in March, 1892, and in the cartoon of "The Bogie Man" in the previous number, Gog and Magog are seen shaking in their shoes before the Progressives, who had been returned with a largely increased majority. Lord Rosebery had declared his intention of not offering himself for re-election to the L.C.C. in consequence of the announcement that the election would be fought on Party lines. _Punch_ made no secret of his disappointment, for he believed that Progressivism was merely extravagance writ large, and had advised everyone to vote for the Moderates:--

Oh, Rosebery turned traitor, And Lubbock seemed to cool, McDougall, now, and Parkinson May proudly play the fool. London's delivered to be ruled On the "Progressive" plan, And "Ben" can bear the honoured name-- Ye gods!--of _Alderman_!!!

"Ben" was Mr. Ben Tillett. As a matter of fact, Lord Rosebery was re-elected Chairman, and held the post for a few months longer.

[Sidenote: _The Cockney Dialect_]

To conclude this survey of London between 1874 and 1892, one may note that the changes included not only a new form of self-government, but a new lingo. The progressive development of the Cockney dialect is far too large a subject to be treated in a paragraph. Let it suffice to say that while in Dickens's time the distinguishing mark of the Cockney was the interchange of the "v" and "w," in the 'eighties and 'nineties he turned his attention to the other end of the alphabet, replaced "a" by "y," and began that "general post" of the vowels which is the despair of those who seek to erect a true phonetic standard.

RAILWAYS AND INVENTIONS: FORECASTS AND NOVELTIES

Railways continue to be a fertile seed plot of grievances. In 1876 Charles Keene devises a patent costume for collisions, closely resembling that of a diver. This was the year in which Captain Tyler's report on the Long Ashton accident to the "Flying Dutchman" on July 27 prompted _Punch_ to a scathing set of verses on the G.W.R. directors, of which the motto was, "Westward Ho! with grim Death." The introduction of the Pullman dining-car in 1879 is welcomed in a lyrical effusion, to the air of "The Low-backed Car," in which _Punch_ contrasts the discomforts of "Mugby Junction" days with the new amenities of travel:--

Five minutes, a frantic fixture, You strove with might and main To gulp some scalding mixture, While the bell rang--for the train! Your tea or soup you swallowed, As much as did not fly On your shirt-front or your waistcoat, From the dense crowd hustling by. While the minxes at Mugby Bar Smiled, serene, upon the war, For they'd learnt the art, And looked the part-- Of "We are your betters far."

But in Pullman's dining-car, Sir, Now run on the Northern Line, You've a soup, and a roast, and _entrées_, And your cheese and your pint of wine. At his table snug the passenger sits, Or to the smoke-room moves, While on either side the landscape flits, Like a world in well-greased grooves. Thanks to Pullman's dining-car, No more Mugby Junction Bar-- No more tough ham and chicken, Nor passenger-pickin' For the minxes behind the Bar!

[Sidenote: _Punch is a Railway Critic_]

_Punch's_ jubilation was short-lived; and in 1883 his discontent takes the form of a wholesale indictment of unnecessary noises, draughts, dismal chilly waiting-rooms, atrocious refreshment-rooms, undistinguishable station-names. The regulations and adjustments of Railwaydom, he sums up, "can only be praised in the same spirit as that in which Charles Kingsley lauded the British North-Easter." On the question of Railways in the Lake District, about which Ruskin had raised an exceeding bitter cry, _Punch_ seems rather to favour the Philistine view:--

Let sentimental Ruskinites the thing disparage, Most scenery afoot you miss--it cannot be denied: The Nature-lover's point of view's a third-class smoking carriage, 'Twould be a blot if there were not a line to Ambleside.

"Justice at Fault," a cartoon in 1887, based on a recent inquiry, reiterates _Punch's_ familiar complaint: overworked signalmen are punished, while the directors go scot free. No jarring note, however, is struck in the cartoon in the same year on the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway--"the New North-West Passage," or in the verses in which Britannia and Canada exchange mutual compliments and indulge in hopeful auguries. The opening of the first electric underground railway in England by the Prince of Wales on November 4, 1890, passed unnoticed by _Punch_, but he rendered full justice in 1891 to the historic conclusion of the famous "Battle of the Gauges," when Stephenson's triumph over Brunel was finally crowned by the abandonment of the broad gauge on the Great Western. It had been an heroic contest, and _Punch_ treated the defeated champion with dignity and respect, quoting the words, "Good-bye, poor old Broad Gauge, God bless you!" which were found written on the G.W. track.

The record of novelties, inventions and discoveries opens modestly in 1875 with the mention of hot-water bottles in bed as "a new idea." They have long since ousted the warming-pan, which until recently maintained a precarious existence in old-fashioned inns, and is now merely a picturesque antique. Lovers of _The Rose and the Ring_ will remember its use as a weapon, and romantics will deplore its abandonment, for there is no romance in a hot-water bottle. I have dealt with the bicycle under the head of Pastime, but may supplement what I have said elsewhere with a few further observations on this momentous innovation. What I believe to be the first mention of the word occurs towards the end of 1878. Before that we only hear of velocipedes or "rantoones," and in the year 1879 an epigram refers to the "Bycicle." _Punch's_ early references to the "steel horse" and the "public wheel" are decidedly friendly, and he contrasts the bicyclist favourably with the hangers-on of the noble animal:--

No slinking knaves environ him And dog his ins and outs; No jockeys, ostlers, stable-boys, No tipsters and no touts.

Another substitute for the horse, I may remark in parenthesis, comes in for notice at the time of our Egyptian campaigns.

The rules for the road in 1878 are farcical, their only interest being the reference to proprietors of 64-in. machines, for this was the day of the old "ordinary." The use of bells was first made obligatory in Liverpool in 1877. Twelve years later, when the "safety" bicycle was coming in, _Punch_ addressed a warning to enthusiasts in the form of a skeleton cyclist stooping over the handles, in the approved attitude, with an alarming curvation of the spine. In the same year allusion is made to the thrill caused by the Bishop of Chester's taking to the bicycle; but the rumour was exaggerated, for Dr. Jayne only patronized the tricycle. _A propos_ of skeletons, it may be noted that Mr. (afterwards Sir) Seymour Haden's advocacy of burial in wicker coffins and the exhibition held at Stafford House to popularize the scheme in 1875 merely served _Punch_ as an occasion for punning on the projector's name, and suggesting that the funeral march of the future seemed likely to be Haydn's "With Verdure Clad," as the wicker baskets were to be filled with moss and ferns.

[Sidenote: _Flying Machines_]

Of more topical interest to the readers of to-day is the account given by _Punch_ in the autumn of 1876 of a flying machine invented by a Mr. Ralph Stott of Dover. Under the heading, "A Dædalus at Dover," _Punch_ forecasts the use of the flying machine as an engine of war. Mr. Stott, who claimed that his machine was capable of speed up to one hundred miles an hour, and of hovering in mid-air, went to Berlin to see Bismarck, but backed out of the proposed trial ascent when the German Government declined to pay him £1,000 in advance. This recalled to _Punch_ the old story of "Twopence more and up goes the donkey"; for the rest, while suspending judgment on the invention, he observes that its use in war will constitute a "fearfully costly addition to already bloated armaments: but the cheap defence of nations is now no longer possible, and Governments, in their martial preparations, are obliged to be regardless of expense."

_Punch_ was not an inventor himself; he never even put a hat on the market; but almost every new invention or discovery prompted him to indulge in forecasts, often farcical or fantastical, but, when read in the light of subsequent views, sometimes proving that he prophesied better than he knew. This is specially true of the development of scientific warfare. The warship of the future, designed by Sambourne in 1875, is not nearly so wonderful as some of the "blisters" of the late war. In the following year the eighty-one-ton guns made at Woolwich prompt an account of an imaginary sea-fight in which battleships engage at fourteen miles distance. In 1879 Victor Hugo declared that the twentieth century would see war abolished, along with capital punishment, monarchy, dogmas and frontiers. _Punch_ replied with a satirical forecast, in Hugo's manner, of a twentieth-century invasion of Paris based on the pacificist assumption that, given non-resistance, it would result in a "fraternal walk-over." The Channel Tunnel scheme, revived in the early 'eighties, was the subject of much discussion and debate, until in 1883 the Joint Select Committee of the Lords and Commons decided by a majority that it was inexpedient to give Parliamentary sanction to a submarine communication between England and France. In 1881 _Punch_ notes the acute divergence of views between various experts, and the military opposition headed by the Duke of Cambridge and Lord Wolseley. He summed up the views of the majority in a picture of Britannia saying that she was glad to _lunch_ with Sir Edward Watkin--the indefatigable champion of the scheme--any day, but drew the line at the tunnel. Early in 1883, under the heading, "After it is Open," _Punch_, in a vein of laboured and fantastic irony, records the evidence given before a "Channel Tunnel _Closing_ Committee." Here by a complete change of front Lord Wolseley is represented as urging the maintenance of the tunnel, and John Bright as opposing it--both on account of the unforeseen consequences of its having been made. The alternative and subsequent scheme of a ferry or bridge is dealt with in 1890 by Du Maurier in a picture of a cross-Channel gigantic Pullman car labelled, "Electric Plate-glass Express." Du Maurier's fantasies were always fascinating, but the nightmare element robs them of any pretence to realism. This applies also to the "Tale for the Submarines in A.D. 2086" with Sambourne's illustration, published in February, 1886. The forecast of a naval battle given in 1891 under the title "Who'd be a Sailor? A Story of Blood and Battle," is a slightly more circumstantial attempt to realize the possibilities of marine warfare fifty years later. _Punch's_ description of the devastating effect of high explosives is not too extravagant, though it is meant to be farcical. Points of more real interest in this fantasy are the idea of a Federation of Anglo-Saxon nations--England, the Dominions and the United States--and the well-merited recognition by name of the late Mr. Stead as an advocate of the maintenance of Great Britain's naval supremacy.

[Sidenote: _Gas v. Electricity_]

In 1881 _Punch_ published a cartoon with the title "What will he grow to?" in which King Steam and King Coal are seen sulkily contemplating the new and portentous infant Electricity. The question has only been partially answered in the ensuing forty years, but _Punch_ found ample material for comment and speculation in the achievements of the 'seventies and 'eighties. In his "Ode to the Coming Light" in 1878 delight is expressed at the possibility of a clean substitute for gas. Yet he showed a wise caution as well as true foresight in the verses accompanying the cartoon inspired by the slump in gas shares in the same year. The notion that gas is likely to go utterly to the wall is discouraged, and the panic-stricken share-holders typified by the silly birds clustering round the Electric Lighthouse are advised not to knock their brains out against the "Edison Light." Things would work themselves out right in the end, and they did. Night has not yet been turned into day, though a football match was played by electric light at Sheffield more than forty years ago, and fresh comfort for holders of gas shares was furnished in 1882 when the eminent Dr. Siemens recommended the use of gas stoves for cookery. The Electric Exhibition in 1881 is celebrated in an explosion of jocular optimism; and in a burlesque fantasia on electricity in the house in 1883, _Punch_ anticipates the time when everything will be done by electricity--shaving, boot-cleaning, carpet-beating--down or up to an "Electric Family Prayer Reader," though not without frequent accidents, as when the last-named machine gives the same chapter of Genesis three mornings running. It was in the same year, by the way, that sixpenny telegrams were first introduced--one of the many vanished privileges which inspire envy in the harassed Georgian citizen.

References of the telephone abound through these years. The prevailing temper of _Punch_ is shown in one of his earliest allusions to what he calls "The Coming Agony," in 1877. An experiment in long-distance telephoning is described in which a newspaper reporter is quoted as saying, "On putting the instrument to my ear, I felt somewhat as if a regiment of the line had fired a volley, at a hundred yards, into that member." The _Almanack_ of 1878 has a page of telephone pictures, illustrating bottled composers and singers--Gounod, Patti, Nilsson, Santley, Henschel and De Soria--talks with the antipodes, etc. Mary starts a "tallyphone" in the kitchen to converse with her young man; and in another picture, suggested by the phonograph, Du Maurier foreshadows the coming of the gramophone. A more friendly note is struck in the article "Good-bye, Telephone," in 1881, lamenting that vested interests were, by legal decision, ousting the telephone in order to perpetuate the inefficiency of the telegraph:--

We may read about scientific progress, but we must go abroad to see it. The wire that misspells a message, and the street Arab who delivers it at his leisure, are all we shall get in this country till the day when we are conquered by the Irish.

On the whole I am inclined to think that this is the strangest of _Punch's_ many strange prophecies.

In the illustration of the "Photophone," the long-promised and culminating development of the film, Du Maurier in 1881 depicts the romance of long-distance courtship between Boulogne and Folkestone. The "Telephone Trials" of 1885 are hardly distinguishable from those of to-day. Telephonic communication with Paris was first established in March, 1891, and _Punch_ represents Lord Salisbury and President Carnot conversing over the wire about "outstanding questions." For the ordinary person it was an expensive luxury, even in those days of cheapness, and the lonely wife in Du Maurier's picture, on being reassured by her husband (just off to Paris) that she can talk to him over the telephone, but that it was rather costly, suggests he had better leave her some blank cheques. A cartoon in the following year, 1892, represents the telephone as the Cinderella of the Post Office; but _Punch_ boldly predicts her final triumph over her "ugly sisters"--the Telegraph and the Letter Post. The imperfections of the telephone were simultaneously "guyed" in a delightful burlesque on "Telephonic Theatre-goers," suggested by performances of the "Theatrophone" at the Electrical Exhibition held in that year. The experiences of auditors of different types are ludicrously reproduced, notably those of the Irritable Person who is just beginning to hear the dialogue of an exciting melodrama:--

GHOSTLY VOICES (_in the Irritable Person's ear as before_): "Your _wife_?" "Yes, my wife, and the only woman in the world I ever loved!"

THE IRR. P. (_pleased, to himself_): "Come, now I'm getting accustomed to it, I can hear capitally."

THE VOICES: "Then why have you----?... I will tell you all. Twenty-five years ago, when a shinder foodle in the Borjeezlers I----"

A STILL SMALL VOICE (_in everybody's ear_): "TIME, PLEASE."

[Sidenote: _Unconscious Crime_]

In the realm of discovery the return of the Arctic Expedition of the _Alert_ and the _Discovery_ under Nares was an outstanding event of 1876 and was commemorated in two cartoons. As a mountain had been named after _Punch_ he was naturally inclined to be proud of an expedition which had given him something to be proud of. In 1880 a plan for a new Arctic Expedition in which balloons should take part attracted a good deal of notice, but _Punch_ was reluctantly sceptical of the feasibility of this "wild scheme," expounded before the Lord Mayor by a deputation mainly of sailors, but including Coxwell the famous aeronaut. In 1885 we catch the first murmurs of modern psychological jargon in a ballade on "The Unconscious Self":--

'Tis a famous idea of Myers, The _Spectator_ attempts to explain, There's a hitch in the cerebral wires That the burden of thinking sustain; One "hemisphere" bustles amain, While the other is laid on the shelf, And what tenants these cells of the Brain? It is just the Unconscious Self!

Now suppose that this essence inspires All acts that give Moralists pain, That ferocious passions it fires, Why the sinner may guiltless remain! He may forge, and may hurry to Spain With a parcel of alien pelf, But the culprit's that Side of his Brain, It is just the Unconscious Self!

What a comfort to ladies and squires When their scutcheon is under a stain! They must answer whoever inquires, With apology none can disdain, "Automatic vagaries arraign, But acquit the poor innocent elf. Ananias is guiltless, and Cain, It is just the Unconscious Self!"

Prince, surely the notion is plain To the critical mind of a Guelph, When we sin 'tis a kink in the brain. It is just the Unconscious Self!

Write "Subconscious" for "Unconscious," and _Punch's_ lines remain an excellent exposition and criticism of the fashionable doctrine of Psycho-Analysis of to-day.

The arrival of the Colorado Beetle, a "newcomer" the reverse of "blithe," is turned to humorous account by Keene in 1877. It was not _Punch_, however, who was responsible for the unfeeling suggestion that a young man, who had little to recommend him but the size of his feet, and was in need of employment, should emigrate to Colorado to crush the Beetle. Inoculation was already sufficiently advanced by 1881 for _Punch_ to make it the subject of what no doubt seemed to him burlesque treatment. A lady, whose nephew is going out to Sierra Leone, comes to buy him some Yellow Fever from her chemist, who offers her the Traveller's half-guinea assortment of six of the Commonest Zymotics, to be supplemented with most of the Tropical diseases at 5s. each. In the light of the development of medical science the burlesque is not so fantastic after all. Of the alternative method of cure by suggestion or hypnotism _Punch_ was sceptically critical, though he exhibits in 1889 an ironical preference for the hypnotic treatment of dipsomaniacs as compared with the repressive laws advocated by temperance extremists.

[Sidenote: _Drugs, Diet, and Speed_]

In 1890 influenza attained the proportions of an epidemic, and under the heading, "Refreshments in Vogue," a butler is shown saying to a lady, "Quinine or Antipyrin, my lady?" _A propos_ of refreshments, it is to be noted that _Punch_, while no teetotaller, bestowed a somewhat lukewarm benediction on Vegetarianism in 1886, when a Vegetarian Restaurant was opened in the Strand opposite the Law Courts. The movement was supported by several eminent medical men, including Sir Henry Thompson and Sir James Crichton-Browne, on the ground that we ought to eat less meat. Of late years Sir James Crichton-Browne has shown more benevolence to carnivorous habits.

The general speeding-up of traffic on land and sea by improved methods of locomotion inspired _Punch_ with mixed feelings. He was far-sighted enough to recognize the need of raising the status of the engineer in the Royal Navy long years before the introduction of the system of the "common entry," but when he read in 1883 that a ship was being built to cross the Atlantic in five days, he remarked that we were reducing our periods of astonishment: "It's only a five days' wonder now." Wonder gives place to protest, in 1889, against the racing of great Atlantic liners; and the following passage has a curiously prophetic ring when one thinks of the tragedy of the _Titanic_:--

RACING THE "RECORD"

(Suggestion for a brief Mid-Atlantic Cantata).

"Tearing ahead with the green sea sweeping the decks from end to end, never slacking speed in the face of the heaviest weather, regardless alike of the risk of crashing into some coming vessel and of the chance of splitting in half on some suddenly appearing iceberg, as of the dense fog which conceals both; with fires blazing and stokers fainting over the stress of work that is wrung out of them--the passage is made, from start to finish, at high-pressure pace. What is gained is a few hours' triumph in time over the performance of some rival Company, and the cost, if the practice be not speedily checked, will, sooner or later, most assuredly be the loss in Mid-Atlantic of a whole shipload of loudly protesting but as yet helpless and totally unheeded passengers."--Notes of some recent Atlantic Passages taken at random from the Daily Papers.

The speeding-up of agriculture by machinery found little favour in _Punch's_ eyes. In the two pictures representing the "Delights of the Peaceful Country" in 1884, the point of view is that of the sportsman. Horses, maddened by the noise and smoke of steam ploughs and traction engines, are seen bolting in all directions. The leader of a tandem is shown standing on his hind-legs. Nowadays we expect to see sensitive motorcars behaving in a similar way in the presence of Highland cattle.

_Punch_ did not retain a City editor on his staff, but the great increase of limited liability companies in the 'eighties did not escape his notice. The movement had gone so far that in 1886 a cartoon shows a "Baked Tater Merchant" about to convert his business into a limited liability company and retire into private life. The gold boom in Johannesburg in 1889 inspired him with no misgivings, and an optimistic article in the _Daily News_ prompted him to picture the Transvaal, a Colonial Cinderella, transformed by Gold the fairy godmother. England was visited in the same year by a party of American engineers on their way to the Paris Exhibition, and their impressions are summarized in a set of verses entitled, "Yankee Notions," in which _Punch_ undertakes to interpret their admiration and gratitude. They would be admirable if they had been written by an American, but acknowledgments of this sort lose nine-tenths of their virtue when the host usurps the privilege of the guest. Yet as a record of British achievement the lines are worth quoting:--

We have seen the Mersey Tunnel, 'tis a tidy little funnel; The Manchester Ship Canal, and Bridge of Forth, John Bull, And we find the land of Smeaton not so easily is beaten. We have travelled East and West, and South and North, John Bull. In your skill we've grown believers, and those Forth Bridge cantilevers Lick the topping towers of Washington and Eiffel, John Bull. And now we would say thankee on behalf of every Yankee Who has had your hospitality, no trifle, John Bull.

At the Guildhall Banquet truly every toast was honoured duly, And the Yankee Engineers received a bumper, John Bull. The old "Star-spangled Banner," sung by Fryer in a manner All his own, made every Yankee heart a thumper, John Bull. It seemed to float right o'er us as we all joined in the chorus, And drank the loving cup in Civic style, John Bull. Well, and here's three hearty cheers for Old England's Engineers, Who make the best of your queer little isle, John Bull.

'Tisn't long, 'tis rayther narrow, but Laird, Bessemer, and Yarrow, With Armstrong, Whitworth, Maudslay, Ford, and Rennie,[7] John Bull. And others quite as clever use their very best endeavour To make their little land as good as any, John Bull. We must presently go back, and when on the homeward track The results of our excursion we shall tot, John Bull, And shall find ourselves agreeing we have seen _some_ things worth seeing In the land of Telford, Stephenson, and Watt, John Bull.

[Footnote 7: The Maudslays, Joseph and Thomas Henry, were both famous marine engineers; the Rennies, George and Sir John, carried on the business and enhanced the repute of their father, a famous civil engineer and pupil of James Watt. Ford is probably a misprint for Fox (Sir Douglas Fox), the engineer of the Mersey Tunnel. Mr. Fryer, the vocalist of the evening, was a professional singer.]

"Snapshot" photography is mentioned, but one cannot say honourably mentioned, in 1887, and in 1892 the "detective" camera is spoken of as a fashionable plaything. The introduction of the Parcel Post in 1883 inspires a burlesque correspondence on its abuse by the senders of unsuitable articles, such as red herrings. In 1890 the Jubilee of the Penny Post is celebrated in a ballad in praise of Rowland Hill, always one of _Punch's_ heroes, who had carried his point though denounced as a lunatic.