Chapter 2

I will conclude these few reflections by drawing attention to the manners of the modern girl, who is so busily engaged in kicking over the traces that formerly kept her in her proper place. Nowadays flappers who should still be in the schoolroom consider themselves called upon to teach their grandmothers how to conduct their lives; and, to complete the chaos, the grandmothers are eagerly lapping it up, and in the matter of dress and deportment are even bettering the instruction. _Si vieillesse savait!_

Oh for a prophet's tongue to lash our visionless leaders into a realisation of the rocks on to which we are drifting! We need the scourge of a Savonarola, but all we get is the boom of a Bottomley.

"Gone are our country's glories. _O tempora, O mores!_"

* * * * *

ALL SORTS.

It takes all sorts to make the world, an' the same to make a crew; It takes the good an' middlin' an' the rotten bad uns too; The same's there are on land (says Bill) you'll find 'em all at sea-- The freaks an' fads an' crooks an' cads an' ornery chaps like me.

It takes a man for all the jobs--the skippers and the mates, A chap to give the orders an' a chap to chip the plates; It takes the brass-bound 'prentices--an' ruddy plagues they be-- An' chaps as shirk an' chaps as work--just ornery chaps like me.

It takes the stiffs an' deadbeats an' the decent shell-backs too, The chaps as always pull their weight an' them as never do; The sort the Lord 'as made 'em knows what bloomin' use they be, An' crazy folks an' musical blokes an' ornery chaps like me.

It takes a deal o' fancy breeds--the Dagoes an' the Dutch, The Lascars an' calashees an' the seedy boys an' such; It takes the greasers an' the Chinks, the Jap and Portugee, The blacks an' yellers an' half-bred fellers and ornery folk like me.

It takes all sorts to make the world an' the same to make a crew, It takes more kinds o' people than there's creeters in the Zoo; You meet 'em all ashore (says Bill) an' you find 'em all at sea-- But do me proud if most o' the crowd ain't ornery chaps like me! C.F.S.

* * * * *

"---- UNITED FREE CHURCH.

Evening--Monthly Sermon for Young Men and Women.

'Love, Courtship, and Marriage.'

Anthem--'And it shall come to pass.'"

_Scotch Paper._

The organist seems to be a sympathetic soul.

* * * * *

"The fees for Burial will in the future be doubled, in order to meet the increased cost of present-day living."--_Parish Magazine._

At this rate we shall soon be unable to afford either to live or to die, and must try a state of suspended animation.

* * * * *

"As Lady ---- was stepping aboard she dropped a waterproof satchel containing a pair of the Queen's shoes, and Their Majesties laughed heartily at her Ladyship's discomfiture. One of the sailors adroitly recovered the satchel with the aid of a boot-hook." _Scotch Paper_.

The handy-man! Prepared for all eventualities.

* * * * *

THE HOUSE THAT JACK WANTS BUILT.

* * * * *

CONVERTED CASTLES.

Rural England, I learn, is rapidly changing hands--not for the first time, by the way, but we cannot go into that just now. Excellent treatises on feudal tenure, wapentake, the dissolution of the monasteries and the enclosure of common lands may be picked up dirt cheap at any second-hand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road with the words "Presentation Copy" erased from the flyleaf by a special and ingenious process. What is happening now is that farmers are buying up the big estates in pieces, and Norman piles or Elizabethan manors are beginning to be too expensive to maintain, what with coal and the rise in the minimum wage of vassals and one thing and another.

"The stately homes of England How beautiful they stood Before their recent owners Relinquished them for good,"

as the poet justly observes. And even if there is enough money to keep up the castle without the broad acres (though as a matter of fact an acre is not any broader than it is long) there is no fun in having a castle at all when the deer park has been divided into allotments and the Dutch garden is under swedes.

The question is then what is going to happen to Montmorency (pronounced "Mumsie") Castle, and The Towers at Barley Melling?

In London the difficulty of dealing with huge houses has been solved in a very subtle manner by turning them into a couple of maisonettes apiece, so that under the portico of what used to be 105 Myrtle Crescent you discover two perfectly good doors, marked 105a and 105b. Into the letter-box of the door marked 105a the postman invariably puts the letters intended for 105b, and _vice versá_, but, as these are always letters addressed to the last tenant but two, it does not really very much matter. Both are desirable maisonettes, though the tenants of 105a have the sole enjoyment of the lincrusta dadoes in the original dining-room. In some cases there are as many as three maisonettes, and the notice on the area gate says, "105c. _Mrs. Orlando Smith_," where it used to say simply "No bottles." I never really understood that notice myself, for whenever I am walking along with an empty bottle that I want to get rid of I do not throw it down into an area, where it would make a most horrible crash, but softly into the thick shrubs of the Crescent Gardens.

This brings me back to the country again.

There will not be enough of the new rich to purchase a castellated mansion apiece, partly because of the Excess Profits Duty, which is crippling this kind of enterprise, and partly because so many baronial seats, romantic and picturesque in their way, are terribly under-garaged. On the other hand you cannot expect a farmer who happens to be buying the fields round Badgery Mortimer to have any use for a dungeon keep or the haunted picture-gallery in the west wing. No, there is only one thing to do and that is to break these places up into a number of self-contained homes.

* * * * *

* * * * *

HISTORIC FLATS TO LET

is the house-agents' advertisement which I seem to see, and what you will actually find will be a sort of concentrated hamlet where modern improvements are mixed with ancient grandeur and the white-haired seneschal is kept on to operate the electric lift.

Let us take, for instance, the case of Soping Hall. There will be none of that untidy straggling arrangement about it which detracts so largely from the beauty of Soping Barnet, Little Soping and Soping Monachorum. In Soping Hall the billiard-room will be the village club, the armoury the blacksmith's shop, the housekeeper's room the place where you buy buttons and balls of string and barley-sugar, the cellars the village tavern, and very nice too. In the state-saloon, with a few trifling alterations, such as the introduction of a geyser and a sink, will live Mrs. Ponsonby-Smith, who will sniff a little at the Jeffries in their attic suite and the Mutts who live in the moat. But Mrs. Jeffries will have compensations, because the air is really so much more bracing, my dear, on the higher ground, and on fine days one can walk about the roof and peep through the boiling-oil holes, while as for the Mutts they are protected, at any rate, from those bitterly piercing east winds and have an excellent view of the draw-bridge.

A further advantage of residing at Soping Hall will be that you can do all your shopping and pay your calls without going out-of-doors on a wet day, and, if you like, have a communal dining-room or restaurant, where only those who have been recognised by the county should sit above the salt. And if your friends come to visit you in expensive motor-cars they will have the privilege of passing through the great iron gates on the main road and up the large gravel drive planted on each side with the cedars of Lebanon which Roger de Soping brought back in his haversack from the Second Crusade.

I am quite aware that when federal devolution becomes really infectious and every county insists on a legislative assembly of its own it may be necessary to turn some of these great houses into Parliament chambers, and the rural civil service will also no doubt insist on having offices comparable with the vast hotels which their parent bodies occupy in London. But this will not account for nearly all the ancestral seats, and, in calling the attention of the Minister of Health and Housing to this little memorandum of mine, I would specially urge him to note how it will solve some of the most difficult problems which confront him to-day.

There will be a rush upon these potted villages, and that will ease the situation in towns and free a number of cottages for agricultural labourers too. There will be a rush, not only because of the advantages which I have already enumerated, but because all the people who live in Soping Hall will be able to put "Soping Hall" on their notepaper, and, if they like to pay for it, two _wyverns rampant_ as well, and everyone outside the circle of their immediate friends will imagine that they have not only bought the whole place but even become the possessors of the flock of wyverns that used to be pastured on the Home Farm.

Three acres and a cow was all very well in its way, but what about two wyverns and a flat? Evoe.

* * * * *

* * * * *

TIPS FOR UNCLES.

Dear Mr. Punch,--I am writing to you about uncles because you are in a way a kind of general uncle. Uncles are much more useful than aunts, because uncles always give money and aunts mostly give advice. Only, as the Head always says when he jaws our form, "I regret to see in this form a serious deterioration"--I mean in uncles. They come down here and trot us round and say what a luxurious place it is compared with the stern old Spartan days. They know something, though. They ask us to have meals with them at an hotel. They take care not to face a luxurious house-dinner. And while we dine they tell yarns about the hardness of the old days and how it toughened a fellow. And then, because about 1870 it was the custom to tip a boy five bob, they fork out five bob and tell you not to waste it.

If the Head had any sense--only you can't expect sense from Heads--he'd put up a notice at the school gates: "Parents, Uncles and Friends are respectfully reminded that the cost of tuck has increased three hundred per cent. since 1914." Why, old Badham, my bedroom prefect, who was a fag in 1914, turned up the other day and declared that then he could buy four pounds of strawberries for a bob, and that a fag could get enough chocolate for two bob to give him a week in the sick-room.

Yet we have uncles coming down in trains (fare fifty per cent. extra), smoking cigars (costing two hundred per cent. extra), cabbing it up to school (a hundred-and-fifty per cent. extra) and then tipping as if the old Kaiser was still swanking in Potsdam.

Now Sutton minor, who has a positive beast of a house-master and is practically a Bolshevist, says that we ought to go on strike against the tipping system and demand a regular living wage from relations. He says that if a scavenger gets four quid a week a fellow who has to tackle Greek aorists ought to get eight quid a week.

But I'm afraid a strike might aggravate uncles. It's no use upsetting the goose that lays the silver eggs, so I thought it better to write to you, pointing out that there was one luxury still at pre-war prices and that uncles should never miss a chance of indulging in it, and whenever high prices bothered them they should write us a bright cheerful letter enclosing a postal order--they're still quite cheap.

Chalmers major, who has read this and leads a sad life, having only aunts, says that the only hope for him is in fixing a standard tip of 9_s._ 11¾_d._ or, better still, 19_s._ 11¾_d._, that women couldn't help giving.

So hoping that all uncles will put their hands to the plough--I mean in their pockets--and then the bitter cry of the New Poor will cease in our public schools,

Yours respectfully, Bruce Tertius.

* * * * *

"Notice.

My wife, Roxie M. ----, having left my bed and board, I will not be responsible for any bills contracted after this date, June 21, 1920. Fred ----." _American Paper_.

"Notice.

The undersigned wishes to state I had just cause to leave, but I left neither bed nor board as I furnished my own board, and the bed being mine I took it. Roxie ----."

_Same Paper, following day._

A good example of what _Touchstone_ calls "The lie with circumstance."

* * * * *

"To-Night at 9.30. NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH. For the first time in Calcutta." _Indian Paper._

Where was the Censor?

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE STATE AND THE SCREEN.

(_By a Student of Film Politics._)

Great satisfaction has been evinced in film circles over the conferment of a signal honour on Signor Pavanelli, the outstanding Italian screen luminary. The rank of Chevalier of the Crown of Italy is equivalent to a knighthood in this country, and Pavanelli's elevation is a gratifying proof of the paramount position which the cinema is assuming in Italian national affairs. But gratification is sadly tempered by the deplorable lack of State recognition from which film-artists suffer in this country. The joint co-starring Sovereigns of the Screen, though acclaimed by the populace with an enthusiasm unparalleled in the annals of adoration, were allowed to depart from our shores without a single official acknowledgment of their services to humanity. No vote of congratulation was passed by the Houses of Parliament; no honorary degree was conferred on them by any University; no ode of welcome was forthcoming from the pen of the Poet Laureate.

The discontent caused by the indifference of the Government to the wishes of the people is fraught with formidable possibilities. Already there are serious rumours of the summoning of a Special Trade Union Congress to discuss the desirability of direct action as a means of compelling the Government to abandon their attitude of hostility to the only form of monarchy which the working-classes can conscientiously support. It is further reported that Lieutenant-Commander Kenworthy, M.P., will seize the first opportunity to move the impeachment of Dr. Bridges. The indignation in Printing House Square has reached boiling-point, and it is reported that the authorities are only awaiting the delivery of a huge consignment of small pica type to launch a fresh and final onslaught on the Coalition.

The provocation has undoubtedly been intense. It was proved in an article of studied moderation and exquisite taste that the time had come to revise our estimates of bygone grandeur and substitute for the devotion to a Queen of tarnished fame and disastrous tendencies the spontaneous and chivalrous worship of her beneficent and prosperous namesake. Yet in spite of this dignified and convincing appeal no invitation was sent to the one person whose presence at the recent proceedings at Holyrood would have lent them a crowning lustre. The action or inaction of the Lord Chamberlain is inexplicable, except on the assumption that Queen Pickford's engagement to attend the Spa Conference would have rendered it impossible for her to accept the invitation to Edinburgh. None the less the invitation should have been sent. Besides, the resources of aviation might have surmounted the difficulty. In any case this deplorable oversight has knocked one more nail in the coffin of the Prime Minister.

* * * * *

"At the fifth each played a magnificent tea shot. Hodgson again used his favourite spoon."--_Provincial Paper_.

Obviously the right club for the purpose.

* * * * *

"'The Tongue Can no Man Tame.' _St. Peter._" _Heading in Daily Paper_.

A clear case of robbing James to pay Peter.

* * * * *

ESSENCE OF PARLIAMENT.

_Monday, July 12th._--Viscount Curzon's complaint about "crawling" taxi-cabs was ostensibly based upon the obstruction thus caused to more rapidly moving traffic. But I fancy that it was really due to an inherent belief that the motor-car is a noble creature, only happy when exceeding the speed-limit and dashing through police-controls, and that to compel the poor thing to crawl is "agin natur'" and ought to be dealt with by the R.S.P.C.A.

As usual much of Question-time was devoted to Russian affairs. Colonel Wedgwood wanted to know whether the Cabinet had approved a message from Mr. Churchill to the late Admiral Kolchak, advising him how to commend his Administration to the Prime Minister, who was described in the telegram as "all-powerful, a convinced democrat and particularly devoted to advanced views on the land question." Mr. Law, while provisionally promising a Blue-book on Siberia, declined to pick out a single message from a whole bunch.

The news that the Soviet Government had accepted the British conditions with regard to the resumption of trade and had thereupon been requested to conclude an armistice with Poland did not seem particularly welcome to any section of the House. Those whom Mr. Stanton in stentorian whispers daily describes as the "Bolshies" evidently feared that the request had been accompanied by a threat, while others were horrified at the idea of recognising the present _régime_ in Russia, and drew from Mr. Law a hasty disclaimer. The House as a whole would, I think, have liked to learn how you can do business with a person whom you do not recognise?

The Chancellor of the Exchequer refused to accept Mr. George Terrell's proposal to reduce the Excess Profits Tax from sixty per cent. to forty, but, in reply to Sir G. Younger--who "has such a way wid him"--promised that next year he would make the reduction. He admitted that it was in many ways an unsatisfactory tax, but the Government could not afford to part with it unless a substitute was provided. Somebody suggested "Economy," and Sir F. Banbury proved to his own satisfaction that the present estimates could be reduced by a hundred-and-fifty millions. But unexpected support for the Government came from Mr. Asquith, who as the original sponsor of the tax felt it his duty to support it.

There was a perfect E.P.D.mic of criticism, but it was brilliantly countered by Mr. Baldwin, who declared that the Chancellor, far from leading the country down the rapids, "was the one man who had seized a rock in mid-stream and was hanging on to it with hands and feet." The Amendment was rejected by 289 to 117, and the clause as a whole was passed by 202 to 16.

_Tuesday, July 13th._--Lord O'Hagan was one of the Peers who helped to outvote the Government a few days ago on a motion excusing them of extravagance. Yet that did not prevent him to-day from saying that the War Office should be more generous in their financial treatment of the Territorial Force, and particularly of the Cadet Corps. Naturally Lord Peel did not refrain from calling attention to this inconsistency--common to most of the financial critics of the Administration--but nevertheless he made a reply indicating that the grants for the Territorial Force were being revised, presumably in an upward direction, since Lord O'Hagan expressed himself grateful.

The Commons, like the Lords, are all for economy collectively, if not individually. General cheers greeted Mr. Bonar Law's announcement that all war-subsidies--save that on wheat--were to be brought to an end as soon as possible, but then there were similar cheers for those Members who urged the substitution of ex-service men for the less highly-paid women in various Public Departments.