PART I

THE NATIONAL OUTLOOK

MR. PUNCH'S HISTORY OF MODERN ENGLAND

THE AGE OF NON-INTERVENTION

"Whether splendidly isolated or dangerously isolated, I will not

now debate; but for my part I think splendidly isolated, because

this isolation of England comes from her superiority."

These words were used by Sir Wilfrid Laurier in 1896, but they were

prompted by a retrospect of the Victorian age, and may serve as a motto

for the policy which governed England in her relations with foreign

countries in the period surveyed in this volume.

There was serious friction with France in the early days of the Empire

owing to the distrust of the Emperor's warlike preparations and his

manipulation of the opportunities presented by his assistance of Italy

in 1859. In the war of North and South in America, England as a whole

"backed the wrong horse," and English diplomacy mishandled the

obligations of our neutrality. We were on the verge of war over the

_Trent_ case, and the slackness of the Government in failing to detain

the _Alabama_ burdened the country with a costly legacy of moral and

intellectual damage--to say nothing of pecuniary loss.

Popular sentiment was strongly anti-Prussian in the war on Denmark in

1864; misgivings of Prussian aggression were heightened by the crushing

defeat of Austria in 1866 and the French _débâcle_ in 1870. Yet the old

diplomacy, whatever its shortcomings, kept us out of European wars. The

Court as well as the Government strove hard for peace in 1859; the

Queen's influence was successfully exerted to prevent interference on

behalf of Denmark in 1864, which had been foreshadowed in a menacing

message to Austria from Lord Palmerston. After the defeat of the

Austrians at Sadowa in 1866, Disraeli justified abstention from

unnecessary interference in European politics, on the ground that

England had outgrown the European Continent, and was really more of an

Asiatic than a European power. With Gladstone the restraining motive was

economic rather than anti-imperialist, though his distrust of a

"spirited foreign policy" became more pronounced in later years. But

under Liberals and Conservatives alike, non-intervention in European

wars remained the unbroken rule, and the only serious military

operations undertaken between 1857 and 1874 were those involved in the

suppression of a great revolt within our own dominions. The Chinese

quarrel was the only cloud on the horizon in the beginning of 1857.

Parliament was dissolved as the result of the vote of censure passed in

the Commons, but Palmerston was returned with a strong majority, and the

pacificists under Cobden lost their seats, _Punch_ expressing the hope

that Cobden might be "master of himself though China fall."

The war with China was not a glorious page in our annals: it remained in

abeyance during the Mutiny and was not concluded till 1860. Indirectly

it was one of the means of saving India by the diversion of the troops

intended for the Far East, and already at Singapore, to the relief of

Bengal at the urgent summons of Lord Canning, the Governor-General of

India. The first mention of the outbreak in _Punch_ followed close on

the tragedy of Meerut early in May. In his "Essence of Parliament" we

read:--

Lord Ellenborough delivered an alarmist speech about the mutinies

in our Indian Army. Among other terrors, he was hideously afraid

that Lord Canning, the Governor-General, had been taking some step

which showed that he thought Christianity a true religion, but this

damaging accusation was happily explained away. Lord Lansdowne was

almost sure that Lord Canning could not so far have misconducted

himself.

The charge was capable of complete disproof, but unluckily, as with the

greasing of the cartridges, the Sepoys were unconvinced. A fortnight

later _Punch_ realized that the time for levity was passed:--

An Indian debate followed, but it is no subject for light

treatment, for while members were droning about cotton, and Mangles

[the Chairman of the East India Company] was puffing the Company as

having done miracles for India, news was hurrying over the sea that

native regiments were in mutiny, had seized Delhi, and murdered all

the Europeans there, without distinction of age or sex. It is a

good time to be erecting a Shropshire memorial to Clive, if only to

remind England that she once had a man who knew not only how to

gain, but how to keep Oriental conquests.

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

[Sidenote: _Heroes of the Mutiny_]

The issue of July 25 is full of the bustle of preparation, the hurried

dispatch of Sir Colin Campbell to take command, and the embodying of the

militia. It should be noted that one of the very first of the Mutiny

cartoons revealed a disposition on the part of _Punch_ to recognize that

the mischief was deep-seated and had its origin largely in the arbitrary

methods of the East India Company. On August 15 there appeared the

picture of "The Execution of 'John Company,'" with _Punch_ blowing up

the offices in Leadenhall Street, and fragments labelled "avarice,"

"blundering," "nepotism," "supineness," "misgovernment," etc., flying

from the mouth of a gun. But there was no hesitation in _Punch's_

support of the most drastic measures for stamping out the mutiny. The

word of the moment was "Cry Havelock! and let slip the dogs of war." On

August 22 appeared the cartoon "The British Lion's Vengeance"--on the

Bengal Tiger seen crouching over the bodies of an English woman and

child. On September 12 Britannia is shown smiting down the mutineers; in

the same number, however, in the lines "A word to the Avenger,"

reprisals are deprecated: "Spare the Indian mother and her child." On

October 10, under the title "O God of Battles, steel my soldiers'

hearts," the Queen is shown kneeling with widows and orphans in mourning

garb, while a week later Sir Colin Campbell is drawn in fetters of red

tape--his greatest difficulty in India.

At home, while _Punch_ welcomed the recruiting from drapers' shops, and

the filling of their places by women, he noted the snobbery of certain

tradesmen who thought they would lose caste by enlisting. He also

recognized that the appeal for recruits was seriously prejudiced by the

callous treatment of ex-service men in the past.

Throughout the Mutiny _Punch_ was hostile to Canning, and his

"Clemency," representing him as unduly tender to the mutineers and

invariably interfering on their behalf. This criticism reaches its

height of injustice to the statesman who uttered and acted on the noble

maxim "I will not govern in anger," in the mock proclamation which

appears in the issue of October 24. There was probably better ground for

the imaginary conversation between the Duke of Cambridge, as

Commander-in-Chief, and Lords Lucan and Cardigan, in which the two

latter noblemen sneer at the services of Havelock. This disparagement,

be it noted, was not confined to the Crimean cavalry commanders; Mr.

Gladstone declined to vote for the grant of a pension, and was in

consequence associated by _Punch_ with the Manchester School, whose

pacificist organ, the _Star_, had been savagely burlesqued in the issue

of October 31. Meanwhile the tide had turned in the war by the capture

of Delhi and the first relief of Lucknow. The toll of heroic lives among

our leaders had been heavy--Henry Lawrence, Nicholson and Havelock at

the end of the year--but _Punch_ was true to his old democratic

instincts in recording the exploits of all ranks. He was eloquent in his

appeal for the assistance of Miss Salkeld, sister of Lieutenant Salkeld,

who lost his life in the blowing in of the Kashmir gate at Delhi. But he

does not forget Salkeld's humbler associates, who with him "rushed upon

death to make way for the bayonets of England when the great stronghold

of treason was stormed":--

Let it not be forgotten, when Salkeld's noble deed is told, and

thought is taken for those whom he loved, that other gallant men

met death in the same proud exploit. Sergeant Burgess sprang

forward, took the match from Salkeld when he was struck, and firing

the train, fell mortally wounded. Sergeant Carmichael had already

perished in an attempt to fire the fuse. Surely England has a

heart warm enough, and a purse deep enough, to do all that money

can do in memory of such men as those whose names are thus set

before her.

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

He is gone. Heaven's will is best:

Indian turf o'erlies his breast.

Ghoul in black, nor fool in gold

Laid him in yon hallowed mould.

Guarded to a soldier's grave

By the bravest of the brave.

* * * * *

Strew not on the hero's hearse

Garlands of a herald's verse:

Let us hear no words of Fame

Sounding loud a deathless name:

Tell us of no vauntful Glory

Shouting forth her haughty story.

All life long his homage rose

To far other shrine than those.

"_In Hoc Signo_," pale nor dim,

Lit the battle-field for him,

And the prize he sought and won,

Was the Crown for Duty done.

Lucknow was recaptured in March, 1858, but the pacification of Oudh by

Sir Colin Campbell, now Lord Clyde, and the clearance of Central India

by Sir Hugh Rose, afterwards Lord Strathnairn, occupied the whole of the

remainder of the year: indeed, order was not completely restored till

the close of 1859, or more than a year after the rule of "John Company"

had been abolished and its executive powers transferred to the Crown.

[Sidenote: _John Bull's Foreign Policy_]

The process begun under Palmerston was completed by the Derby-Disraeli

administration after long and acrimonious debates and recriminations,

cabals and intrigues, in the course of which _Punch_ vehemently assailed

the East India Company, disgraced but impenitent, for its misdeeds,

Bright for his impracticable independence and pro-Indian sympathies;

Ellenborough and Canning; Palmerston and Disraeli. Palmerston in

particular had fallen from favour because of the Conspiracy Bill

introduced after the Orsini attempt to assassinate the French Emperor.

The plot had been hatched in London, but _Punch_ bitterly resented the

notion of making this a ground for depriving England of her position as

the "sanctuary of Europe," and held that Palmerston had brought defeat

on himself by knuckling down to Louis Napoleon. The fury of the

_Moniteur_ against England's alleged harbouring of criminals only

excited _Punch's_ derision. Relieved from the Indian tragedy, he was now

free to revert to his old inveterate distrust of Louis Napoleon, and to

preach for years to come the need of a strong navy. The lines on "John

Bull's Foreign Policy" in the autumn of 1858, addressed to the Peoples

of Europe, frankly admit that self-interest mingles with his love of

Liberty:--

To hold you down, your despots arm,

And keep me always in alarm.

Confound them!--they mean me no good;

Abolish, well I know they would,

My Constitution, if they could.

I, too, must arm in self-defence;

And armaments involve expense:

Expense taxation means--my curse;

Despotic power alone is worse:

Your masters thus myself amerce.

Oh, how I wish I could retrench!

But I must keep pace with the French,

And for the Russians stand prepared,

The cost whereof I should be spared,

To shake your yokes off if you dared.

Rise, therefore, and your rights assert,

Ye Peoples, trodden in the dirt.

Strike for your freedom, nations brave,

Whom monarchs absolute enslave:

And so enable me to save.

So along with appeals to Lord Derby to make up his mind like a man to

Reform, we find repeated and even more urgent appeals to England to keep

up the Channel Fleet. The imposing display of force at Cherbourg by

Louis Napoleon in the autumn of 1858 only enhanced _Punch's_ misgivings

and prompted the suggestion of an alliance with the United States.

_Punch_ greeted Sir Francis Head's renewed scare-mongering about a

French invasion with ridicule, but he was more seriously impressed by

French pamphleteers and novelists who spoke of war with England as

inevitable.

The defeat of the Derby-Disraeli Government over their Reform Bill in

the spring of 1859 brought back Palmerston and Russell at a critical

time in the history of the struggle for Italian unity. Of that cause

both these statesmen were true friends, but the sympathy of England was

impaired by distrust of Louis Napoleon, and this nervousness and anxiety

as to his intentions is repeatedly illustrated in the pages of _Punch_.

Victor Emmanuel is shown as the Piedmontese farmer between the two

Eagles, Austria and France. Again the French Emperor's phrase "_L'Empire

c'est la paix_" is satirized in a cartoon showing him as a porcupine

bristling with bayonets. England's line should be one of extreme

watchfulness: "We'll keep our powder dry." On the eve of the outbreak of

the war between France and Austria _Punch_ gives his "Neutral Advice" in

the following lines:--

Let France delight to go and fight

If 'tis her folly to:

Let Austria cry for "territory!"

With that we've naught to do.

Our shout must be "Neutrality!"

To England peace is sweet;

But, friends, that she may neutral be,

LET'S MAN OUR FORTS AND FLEET.

[Illustration: THE FRENCH PORCUPINE

"L'empire c'est la paix"

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

[Sidenote: _Napoleon III and Cavour_]

After Magenta the share in the fighting between Italy and France is

symbolized in the fable of the Giant and the Dwarf: Victor Emmanuel was

to do all the fighting while France, forsooth, claimed half the honours

of war. No opportunity was lost of putting the worst construction on

Louis Napoleon's patronage of Savoy. His pacific statements are

constantly contrasted with his policy of aggrandisement. In the autumn

_Punch_ quoted the _New York Herald's_ tribute: "We are seriously of

opinion that if Louis Napoleon were not Emperor of the French, he would

have made a first-rate newspaper editor. His style is like that of the

American papers." The report that Cavour had retired in disgust inspired

a bitter attack on the two Emperors in July:--

Count O'Cavourneen, the bubble is breaking,

You've had the last scene, Solferino's red hill,

The cannons no longer the echoes are waking,

Count O'Cavourneen, what, Minister still?

O hast thou forgot the diplomacy clever

In which thou didst bear so distinguished a part,

Thy vow to clear out all the Hapsbugs for ever?

The vermin still linger, Cavour of my heart.

Cavourneen, Cavourneen, the dead lie in numbers

Beneath the torn turf where the living made fight;

In the bed of My Uncle the Emperor slumbers,

But Italy's Hapsbugs continue to bite.

Well done, my Cavour, they have cut short the struggle

They fired all the pulses of Italy's heart;

And in turning thy back on the humbug and juggle,

Cavour, thou hast played a proud gentleman's part.

[Illustration: MILITIA OFFICER: "Ah, this is Smithers! Why, you're

getting very fat, Smithers. Let's see--this is your fifth training,

isn't it?"

STOUT PRIVATE: "Yes, sir. After we was disembodied, sir, the Adj'tant he

took an' _reintestined_ me, sir!!!"

(_Note._--Militiamen, after serving four trainings, can be

"_Re-attested_" for another five years.)]

Italy and her friends were alike profoundly dissatisfied with the terms

of the Peace of Villafranca, by which Savoy and Nice were handed over to

the French Emperor, whose further "intentions" kept England in a simmer

of indignant anxiety for years to come. The scare of a French invasion

revived, the volunteer movement took on increased activity, and the

anxiety of financiers was revealed in the grotesque incident of the four

Liverpool brokers who wrote to Louis Napoleon asking him what his

"intentions" were. They were faithfully dealt with by _Punch_ in his

burlesque verses on "The Four Fishers"--who caught nothing, and in an

imaginary parallel letter to Queen Victoria.

[Sidenote: _The Invasion Scare_]

[Illustration: OUR RESERVES

CAPTAIN OF RURAL CORPS (calling over the Roll): "George Hodge!" (No

answer.) "George Hodge!--Where on earth's George Hodge?"

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

fighting's wicked."]

As for the invasion scare, _Punch_ treated it contemptuously in the

cartoons representing the French Emperor with a poodle at Calais facing

the British Lion at Dover, and the French Eagle drowning in mid-Channel.

These cartoons, by the way, and _Punch's_ support of the volunteer

movement in general, led the pacificist _Star_ to declare that "_Punch_

is a disgrace to the country in which it is tolerated." But _Punch_ was

not a panic-monger. While he vigorously upheld Lord Lyndhurst's plea for

a strong Navy, which John Bright vigorously opposed, he welcomed the

evidence of goodwill shown by a French publicist, M. Chevalier, who

vindicated England against the charge of Chauvinism, and maintained that

her attitude was merely defensive. As for the volunteers, _Punch_

commended their patriotism, resented the patronizing contempt of the

Regulars, and while ridiculing fancy costumes, was all in favour of a

rational uniform:--

Some talk of Alexander,

And some of Hercules,

But John Bull's rising dander

Needs no such aids as these.

He shoulders his long Enfield,

And at his drill appears,

Till "ping-wing-wing," the bullets sing,

Of the Rifle Volunteers.

And when he is commanded

To find himself in clothes,

Like a trump unto his tailor

For a uniform he goes.

With his easy knickerbockers,

And no stock his neck that queers,

For a run, jump, stand, they're the boys to command,

Are the Rifle Volunteers!

Let the Horse Guards trust to pipe-clay,

And General Routine,

Till the Linesman's shakoed, belted,

And pack'd to a machine;

With winds and waists unfettered,

And the use of eyes and ears,

In wide-awake tile come the rank and file

Of the Rifle Volunteers!

[Illustration: NO PLAYING AT SOLDIERS

COLONEL PUNCH (Inspector of Volunteers): "Look here, George, I want

those brave fellows to learn their duty."

H.R.H. COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF: "Of course you do, old boy, and so do I; and

I'll see that they _do_ learn it, too!"]

[Sidenote: _Punch and the Volunteers_]

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

AIDE-DE-CAMP: "Good gracious, sir! Why don't you order your men to lie

down under this hill? Can't you see that Battery playing right on them?"

COLONEL OF VOLUNTEERS: "So I did, sir. But they won't lie down. They say

they want to see the Review!"]

In later years, when the menace of Napoleonic "intentions" ceased to

preoccupy the public, the attitude of _Punch_ towards the volunteers

became more critical and less sympathetic, but throughout 1860--allowing

for a little amiable chaff of the contrast between their physique and

their bellicose spirit--he lent the movement cordial support, applauding

the institution of cadet corps in schools, and the provision of

facilities to enable footmen and tradesmen to attend drills and be

instructed in rifle-shooting. The review in Hyde Park was duly

chronicled in a cartoon representing the Queen resting a rifle on

_Punch's_ head, and the poem in honour of the London Volunteers may be

set against the genial satire of Keene's zealous little captain leading

his men "through fire and water," or the references to the street boys'

catch-word "Who shot the dog?"

The year 1860 found England with the Chinese war still on hand; it was

not ended till the autumn, with the capture, destruction and looting of

the Chinese Emperor's Summer Palace at Peking as an act of vengeance for

the barbarous treatment of the British envoys. But India was completely

pacified, and Lord Clyde returned home to receive the laurel. The Prince

of Wales's visit to Canada was already decided on; Lord Lyndhurst was

still clamouring for a strong fleet; the Queen's speech promised the

introduction of another measure of Reform, nominally redeemed by Lord

John Russell's "nice little Bill" satirized by _Punch_ in March and

overwhelmed with ridicule on its withdrawal in June:--

Amendments sore long time I bore;

Parental love was vain;

Till by degrees the House did please

To put me out of pain.

Abroad the outlook was still concentrated on Italy and the progress of

her unification. In October, 1859, _Punch_ had hailed the coming of

freedom; but it was

"no rosy dawn,

No true Aurora; but a lamp

Which in a moment may be gone,

Extinguished by a tyrant's stamp."

He deplored the exigencies which confined England's aid to the mere

expression of goodwill to the brave men who were fighting for liberty.

But by the summer of 1860 events were moving apace. It was the time of

the famous Sicilian Expedition of Garibaldi, whom _Punch_ acclaimed as

the great champion of United Italy:--

Honour to Garibaldi! Win or lose,

A Hero to all time that Chief goes down,

Whatever issue his emprise ensues,

He, certain of unquenchable renown,

Fights for a victor's or a martyr's crown.

[Sidenote: _Garibaldi and Lincoln_]

The flight of "Bombalino"--Francis IV, son of "Bomba," King of

Naples--is celebrated in a pæan on Garibaldi, the Irish Papal Volunteers

are ironically praised for their valour in "The Wake of the Irish

Brigade," and a cartoon "The Right Leg in the Boot at Last" shows

Garibaldi helping Victor Emmanuel to put his leg into the boot of Italy,

with the comment, "If it won't go on, Sire, try a little more powder."

_Punch_, we may add, condoled with Garibaldi on the report that Dumas

was to write his life, and recorded the description of him given by a

young English lady as "a dear old weather-beaten angel."

Savoy and Nice had been annexed to France, and Louis Napoleon's letter

to the Comte de Persigny, the French Ambassador in London, disclaiming

any aggressive intentions, revived _Punch's_ distrust. The cartoon of

August 11, 1860, represents the Emperor as a wolf in sheep's

clothing--with the heads of two little dead lambs, labelled Savoy and

Nice, peeping out--in the act of posting a letter to Mme. Britannia,

"care of M. le Comte de Persigny." But already the eyes of Europe were

beginning to be drawn across the Atlantic. The protest of South Carolina

is dealt with mainly in a light-hearted spirit, but with an ominous

anticipation of the sequel. The verses on "The Beginning of Slavery's

End" are wholly serious and entirely on the side of the North:--

This is America's decision.

Awakening, she begins to see

How justly she incurs derision

Of tyrants, while she shames us free;

Republican, yet more slaves owning

Than any under Empire groaning,

Or ground beneath the Papacy.

Lincoln had been elected President, and apart from references to his

achievements as a rail-splitter, and the facetious suggestion that the

White House should be renamed "Lincoln's Inn," he is welcomed as an

honest man and with a respect which, all too soon, was replaced by the

spiteful calumny which did not cease until the tragedy of his untimely

end. The outbreak of civil war in the United States was immediately

followed by the proclamation of Britain's neutrality. _Punch's_

misinterpretation of the issues involved and his misreading of the

attitude of the cotton spinners of Lancashire is dealt with in another

section. The comments on Bull's Run and the burlesque correspondence

from Charleston are lamentably lacking in good feeling, and the report

that the Duc de Chartres and the Comte de Paris had joined the army of

the North only furnished _Punch_ with materials for disparaging the

French Princes and the cause they had espoused. The famous affair of the

_Trent_, involving the seizure of two Southern envoys on a British ship,

which brought England to the verge of war, is treated seriously, but

with a profound conviction of the justice of our claim. In the cartoon,

"Waiting for an Answer," Britannia is shown standing at the breech of a

great gun:--

She waits in arms; and in her cause is safe

Not fearing war, yet hoping peace the end,

Nor heeding those her mood who'd check or chafe,

The Right she seeks; the Right God will defend!

At home Reform had been indefinitely postponed; Lord John Russell had

gone to the Lords with an earldom, and _Punch_, lamenting the cooling of

his reforming zeal, recalls the analogies of Chatham, Pulteney, and

Holland, who, "to put on earl's ermine laid down their earlier fames."

Reorganization of the Navy and a large increase in the number of ships

were promised and taken in hand, and _Punch_ records his inspection of a

training ship at "Sherrysmouth" and the favourable impression created by

the discipline and spirit of all on board. Germany's desire for a fleet

is noted and treated with consistent ridicule. As an instance of her

activity "it is reported on the very best authority (not less than that

of Messrs. Searle, the great boat-builders of Lambeth) that a four-oared

cutter will be launched in a very few days." That was in September,

1861, and three weeks later _Punch_ appears in a cartoon as an old salt,

handing a toy yacht to a small but plethoric German with the remark:

"There's a ship for you, my little man; now cut away, and don't get in a

mess." This is followed up with a set of verses ending:--

The moral, my dears, we all understand,

All fat little Germans will stick upon land.

[Sidenote: _The Suez Canal_]

Nor was _Punch_ happier in his comments on the Suez Canal. In the

"Essence of Parliament" for May 6, 1861, he writes:--

The Lords had a discussion about the Canal of the Future, that is

to say, the impossible trench which M. Lesseps pretends to think he

can cut through the Isthmus of Suez. The Government opinion upon

the subject is, that if the Canal could be made, we ought not, for

political reasons, to allow it, but that inasmuch as the Canal

cannot be cut, the subject may, and the wise course is to let the

speculators ruin themselves and diddle the Pacha. This seems

straightforward and benevolent enough.

In Italy Victor Emmanuel had been declared King by the new Parliament,

but _Punch_ was not at all certain of the stability of his throne.

Cavour died on June 6, but the death of the greatest of Italian

statesmen is passed over with a brief though sympathetic reference. In

August we find _Punch_ uttering a serious warning to Victor Emmanuel, on

the ground that he had sold the cradle of his race, and expressing the

fear that Sardinia would be ceded to France as well as Savoy. This was

the year in which the crown of Greece was offered to Prince Alfred (the

late Duke of Edinburgh). _Punch_ declined it both for him and his next

brother, Prince Arthur (the Duke of Connaught). "Let the present King

(Otho) mind his own business better," _Punch_ advises. The Greek Crown,

it is derisively added, was not worth five bob. The offer, however, was

not definitely and officially refused until the following year.

The _Trent_ affair was settled, but throughout 1862 _Punch_ exchanged

his impartial unfriendliness to both antagonists for a distinct bias

against the North and Lincoln. For the moment his distrust of Louis

Napoleon was merged in disapproval of the Empress Eugénie for her

alleged interference in politics and support of the Papal pretensions.

The visit of the Japanese ambassadors in the summer inspired imaginary

dispatches, in which allusion is made to their interest in English

arsenals and factories. _Punch_, by this time, had at any rate learned

not to depict them as negroes, as he had done only a few years earlier.

The police-ridden condition of Poland excites his indignation; but he

is careful to disclaim sympathy with sentimental "National" movements,

maintaining much the same view as that expressed in his lines on "The

Nonsense of the Nationalities" three years before:--

No more talk of national races,

Panslavic, Hellenic, all stuff!

Of rant, gestures wild, and grimaces

On that point, we've had quite enough.

John Bull you will vainly appeal to,

That in his own person contains

Both Saxon and Norman; a deal, too,

Of Danish blood runs in his veins.

[Illustration: "UP A TREE"

(Colonel Bull and the Yankee 'Coon)

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

COLONEL BULL: "I am."

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

The cultivation of the Welsh vernacular provoked _Punch's_ outspoken

hostility, as we notice elsewhere. And it is impossible to avoid the

conclusion that _Punch's_ strong sympathy with Poland in 1863 was in

part due to the fact that Russia, her oppressor, was the only

Continental nation friendly to the North in the American war. The

exploits of the _Alabama_ only tended to enhance English sympathy with

the South, and Mrs. Beecher Stowe's letter, in which she complained that

England was throwing her weight into the scale on the slave-owners'

side, was not favourably received; while _Punch_ considered it "bad

form" for Americans in London to celebrate Independence Day. It is

almost needless to say that Louis Napoleon's suggestion for a Congress

at Paris was treated with scant courtesy: any suggestion from that

quarter was sure to be regarded as suspect.

But the eyes of England and of Europe were diverted from the great

struggle in America, already at its height, by events nearer home. The

Fenian trouble had already begun in Ireland in 1863; the

Schleswig-Holstein controversy was working steadily up to the

arbitrament of war. It was of this "question" that Palmerston said that

only three men in Europe ever understood it, of whom one (the Prince

Consort) was dead; another (a Danish statesman) was mad, and the third

(he himself) had forgotten it. Palmerston was inclined to be

"interventionist," but was restrained by his colleagues and the

influence of the Queen. _Punch_ somewhat reluctantly acquiesced in the

view that non-intervention in foreign disputes was the best policy, but

his comments with pen and pencil reflect the extreme unpopularity of

Prussia. In May appeared the cartoon in which _Punch_ is shown

presenting Prussia with the Order of "St. Gibbet." In the same month he

bitterly protested against the bestowal of the Order of the Black Eagle

on Prince Alfred by the King of Prussia:--

Black Eagle, murder's proper meed!

Well doth its colour match the stain

Of guilt, that dyes that coward's deed

Who female slew and infant Dane,

Black Eagles are for blackguards right,

White feather who with black combine.

No English Prince shall be a Knight

Of such black Chivalry as thine.

The proclamation of General Falkenstein, commander-in-chief of the

Prussian troops in Jutland, regulating the scale of contributions to be

levied on Danish landlords, is quoted in the issue of June 4 as a

villainous edict, worthy of cut-throats and felons. Earlier in the year

_Punch_ had fallen heavily on Professor Max-Müller for his letter, "A

German Plea for Germans," in _The Times_. The Prussians and Austrians

were depicted, accurately enough in view of the sequel, as bandits

quarrelling over their spoil, and this free criticism was bitterly

resented throughout Germany. When Müller was tried and executed for the

murder of Mr. Briggs in the autumn of this year, the judge was accused

of anti-Prussian bias. Meanwhile _Punch_ found little worthy of comment

in the American war beyond the allegations of malingering among Federal

troops, and the report that Irishmen were induced to emigrate, with

promises of help, in order to furnish recruits for the Northern army.

[Illustration: THE AMERICAN GLADIATORS--HABET!]

The end of the American war came in 1865. Of its magnitude and of the

deeper issues involved; of the achievements of the heroes on either

side--Sherman and Grant and Farragut, Stonewall Jackson and Lee--_Punch_

showed himself strangely deficient in appreciation. The _amende_ to

Lincoln was handsome and complete, but it was not made until after the

assassination of the greatest of Americans:--

Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,

To lame my pencil and confute my pen--

To make me own this hind of princes peer,

This rail-splitter a true-born King of men.

It is truly said that Lincoln lived through four long-suffering

years--years of ill-fate, ill-feeling, and ill-report--and lived to hear

"the hisses change to cheers, the taunts to tribute, the abuse to

praise," and took both with the same unwavering mood. Unhappily, as we

have seen, by the change in _Punch's_ view not being expressed until

Lincoln was dead, the tribute lost its grace.

The toll of great or eminent men taken by 1865 was heavy, and memorial

verses abound. Cobden, successively eulogized as a Free-Trader and

attacked and even execrated as a Pacificist, died in the spring, and

Lord Palmerston, the greatest of the Elder Statesmen, in the autumn. As

we have often had occasion to notice in this chronicle, _Punch_ had

alternated between admiration of Palmerston's nerve and dislike of his

Parliamentary opportunism. But no jarring note is struck in his eulogy;

there is nothing elegiac in the cheerful dactyls--after the model of Tom

Moore--in which he pays homage to Palmerston's wisdom, his courage, and

his humour, and skates over the thin ice of his masterly inactivity in

the cause of Reform:--

We trusted his wisdom, but love drew us nearer

Than homage we owed to his statesmanly art,

For never was statesman to Englishmen dearer

Than he who had faith in the great English heart.

The frank merry laugh, and the honest eye filling

With mirth, and the jests that so rapidly fell,

Told out the State-secret that made us right willing

To follow his leading--he loved us all well.

Our brave English Chief!--lay him down for the sleeping

That nought may disturb till the trumpet of doom:

Honour claims the proud vigil--but Love will come weeping,

And hang many garlands on PALMERSTON'S tomb!

[Sidenote: _General Eyre_]

Relations with France were improved in 1865, the year of the fiftieth

anniversary of peace with England, by the interchange of fraternal

visits between the Fleets, duly celebrated by _Punch_. The death of the

King of the Belgians, Leopold I, deprived Queen Victoria of one of her

greatest and most trusted friends. As for Germany, the acquisition of

Kiel laid the foundation of the naval policy formulated in the boast of

Wilhelm II: "Our future lies on the water."

At home the Fenian outbreak in Ireland was spreading, but _Punch_

refused to treat it as a serious menace, to judge from the burlesque

list of its supporters published in the autumn. Much more space is

devoted to the negro outbreak in Jamaica and the campaign against

General Eyre, which affords a curious parallel to the Amritsar riots and

the action of General Dyer. Eyre was much censured for his severity in

suppressing the rising; the agitation to bring him to trial was kept up

for three years by the Jamaica committee, of which J. S. Mill was a

prominent member; but _Punch_ defended Eyre throughout and heaped scorn

on the "fanatics" and "noisy quacks" who thought so much of the blacks

that they could not think of the whites. He admitted that the vengeance

had been terrible; that a great slaughter had been made; but held that

it had been justified by the needs of "a small white population, eight

times outnumbered by the negroes, and suddenly confronted by the foulest

horrors of savage warfare." The Grand Jury of Middlesex threw out the

Bill in 1867, confirming the view already expressed by the Shropshire

magistrates, but nevertheless Eyre was committed for trial a year later

under the Colonial Governors' Act. _Punch_ reprinted Eyre's speech in

Court, and never swerved from the firm conviction that he had saved

Jamaican society, white and black, by his promptness and resolution. He

compared his long martyrdom with that of Warren Hastings, and predicted

that Englishmen, who listen too much to noisy and gushing men, would in

time make amends. The result was inconclusive, for while Eyre's career

was ended by his recall, his legal expenses were paid by Government in

1872. He had undoubtedly saved the situation, but could not be acquitted

of excessive severity.

The second of the three wars which consummated the aggrandisement of

Prussia was brought to a speedy end in the summer of 1866 by the

"twelve days" campaign which culminated in the defeat of Austria at

Königgrätz (Sadowa). England, with Lord Russell as Premier, once more

stood aloof, but English hostility to Prussia, and, above all,

Bismarck--already recognized as the most formidable power in Continental

politics--made itself widely felt. _Punch_ expressed this general

resentment in his comments on the rumour that the Queen was to visit

Germany in the autumn. As a friend of Italy he could not disapprove of

the arrangement by which Venetia was annexed to her dominions; as the

unrelenting critic of Louis Napoleon he could not refrain from

disparaging his attitude of neutrality tempered by a hope of "picking up

the pieces." But England, though not embroiled in Continental disputes,

was not without her own troubles. The Russell Cabinet had fallen over

Reform, there had been riots in Hyde Park (of which we speak elsewhere),

and before the Derby-Disraeli administration came in, the Liberals had

been forced to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland in order to deal

effectually with what Mr. Gladstone did not hesitate to describe as the

wicked conspiracy of Fenianism. _Punch's_ summary of the proceedings in

Parliament on Saturday, February 18, and the historic session on Sunday,

19, when the Suspension Bill became law, is not without interest. J. S.

Mill supported the Government; Bright's speech in the character of the

candid friend was described by Gladstone as "containing what was in part

untrue, in part open to question, and generally out of place," a strange

inversion of their _rôles_ in 1886. It is noteworthy that the demand for

land legislation and the disestablishment of the Irish Church was heard

in the debate, and that the trouble in Ireland was largely ascribed by

the Government to the presence of Irish-Americans, released by the

cessation of the American war, who had come to Ireland to promote

Fenianism and were "regularly paid by somebody." They were "wanted," but

to make a general capture of these miscreants it was necessary to

dispense with the law which forbade arrest without warrant and

imprisonment without appeal to the judges. There is a distressingly

familiar ring about these arguments, and the reference to the fact that

the Fenians had already begun to murder.

[Sidenote: _Nascent Imperialism_]

To turn from the centre to the circumference, one may note a pleasant

hint of nascent Imperialism in the little geography lesson, doubtless

well needed, which _Punch_ gives his readers on December 1, 1866:--

_Mr. Punch_ is pleased to see that a decoration has been given by

the Queen to the Finance Minister of Victoria. Victoria is one of

the Australian colonies, it is at the southern extremity of the

continent, Melbourne is the capital, and the inhabitants are far in

advance of England in regard to civilization--for instance, they

have compulsory education. The Hon. George Vernon came over on a

mission to our Government. Victoria wants an armour-plated ship,

for which she will partly pay, and a training ship, and Sir John

Pakington has assented. The Minister, for his various services to

the colony, has received the Bath Cross. Should it not have been

the Victoria Cross? This little goak is the bit of sugar with which

_Mr. Punch_ rewards his readers for learning more than most English

people know about one of our noblest colonies. If his readers are

good, they shall have another colonial lesson some day. For we have

other colonies besides Victoria.

Another lesson in geography had been suggested earlier in the year by

the final success of the _Great Eastern_ in laying the cable, a success

due as much to the enterprise of Cyrus Field, the American capitalist,

as to the genius of Brunel.

In 1867 there was a further recrudescence of Fenianism, and the

"physical force" men extended their operations to England. For this was

the year of the sinister attempt to blow up Clerkenwell prison, and the

rescue of Fenians from the prison van in Manchester, in which a

police-sergeant was shot, with, as a consequence, the execution of the

"Manchester Martyrs," funeral processions and celebrations, the echoes

of which have reverberated down to these days.

The Reform League expressed sympathy with the Fenians, and an English

lady of rank associated herself with their cause; but _Punch_ regarded

such support with unqualified contempt and even abhorrence. Real

military operations on a modest scale were conducted by England in one

of her small wars--that against the recalcitrant King of Abyssinia--and

an autumn session was held to vote supplies. It was suggested that Sir

Robert Napier, who commanded the expedition, was not at first

adequately rewarded, but he was raised to the peerage in the following

year as Lord Napier of Magdala. There seems to have been less divergence

of opinion over the protest that the cost of the war was entirely borne

by income-tax payers. Disraeli having succeeded Lord Derby as Premier,

and Mr. Ward Hunt having gone to the Exchequer, _Punch_ contented

himself with observing, _à propos_ of the new Budget, that the money for

the deficit of upwards of a million and a half "is, of course, to be

taken from the Middle Class, which never defends itself," and returned

to the charge on May 9 in his lines on "The Great Untaxed in their

Glory":--

Napier came, saw, and conquered; the battle was o'er;

There's an end of the war and of King Theodore.

The prestige is recovered that England had lost,

And the popular voice cries "A fig for the cost!"

Lo, the tyrant's abolished, the captives are free!

And there isn't a fraction to pay on our tea,

Or our sugar: how sweet so cheap glory to win!

No additional tax on tobacco or gin!

Let us drink, then, success to Disraeli and Hunt,

Who exempted the many from finding the blunt;

And laid all the expense of the War on the few--

For the Income-Tax payer will pay all that's due.

Ah, tremble, ye tyrants, whom England can crush,

At a price which her millions won't care for one rush;

In the scale as a feather the money will weigh,

For a national war when a part has to pay.

[Sidenote: _French and German Ambitions_]

Meanwhile the upper classes had been spending their money freely at the

great French Exhibition of 1867, that crowning manifestation of the art

and opulence, the magnificence and cynicism of the Second Empire, with

Schneider as high priestess of the revels, and all the rank and fashion

of Europe paying homage at her shrine. _Punch_, however, took a friendly

personal interest in the exhibition, for Leech's drawings were exhibited

there. The Federation of Canada, an event of first-rank importance to

the British Empire, with a Constitution framed mainly on the lines of

Lord Durham's Report in 1840, was overshadowed by the more spectacular

and dramatic events of the year 1867. Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby on

his resignation in February, 1868, and _Punch_ handsomely acknowledged

"the genius and perseverance" which, after thirty years of strife, had

thus been rewarded; but the new Premier only held office till December,

when the Liberals were returned with a majority of 112. The peerage

which he declined for himself, but accepted for his wife, who was

created Viscountess Beaconsfield, inspired a graceful tribute from his

old critic _Punch_. Parliament, before the prorogation in July, had been

mainly occupied with the battle over Gladstone's Irish Church

resolutions, which brought about the Government's downfall. It is worthy

of note that in 1868 it was the Militarism of France, not of Germany,

that excited _Punch's_ misgivings and animosities, to the extent of his

describing the Emperor's proposed Army Loan of 440 million francs as a

measure to establish a reign of "terror and preponderance." A map, which

was said to have been published by order of the Emperor, illustrating

French ambitions, gravely exercised _Punch_ later in a year which

witnessed the Revolution in Spain and the flight of the notorious Queen

Isabella, events which awakened little sympathy or interest in England.

Yet the eviction of Isabella opened the door to the Hohenzollern

candidature for the throne of Spain, the proximate cause of the war of

1870. But the seeds of conflict lay deeper--in the relentless diplomacy

of Bismarck, bound sooner or later to manoeuvre Napoleon III into a

position from which he could not escape without resort to the

arbitrament of war. In 1869 the celebration of the centenary of Napoleon

I and the proposed inauguration of a Constitutional _régime_ furnished

_Punch_ with material for some plain-spoken advice to Napoleon's

successor and namesake. Distrust of Louis Napoleon still dominated

_Punch's_ outlook on foreign politics and clouded his vision. Strange to

say the growth of the Prussian fleet is not only praised, but

welcomed:--

BRAVO, BISMARCK!

John Bull used to laugh to scorn the idea of a Prussian Navy, and

chuckled hugely when _Punch_ christened it for him "The Fleet of

the Future." But lo, "the wheel of Time has brought about his

revenges," and the Fleet of the Future is the Fleet of the Present!

Prussia _has_ a fleet--and no chaff! A respectable force of steam

ironclads, backed by a serviceable knot of unarmoured

sailing-frigates and corvettes, with a first-class naval arsenal

and dockyard, on the Jahde, is a very different thing from the

solitary "gunboat on the Spree," which we used to poke our fun at

twenty years ago.

Britannia, through her _Punch_, rejoices to weave among her naval

azures a new shade--Prussian blue; and will be glad, in all fair

quarrels, to hail it alongside the true blue of the British

man-o'-war's-man.

But the mood of welcome was tempered with misgiving, and the possibility

of an eventual naval war with Germany filled _Punch_ with gloomy

forebodings, which, in view of subsequent developments, approach to

something like prophetic strain:--

LINE OF BATTLE IN SMOKE

We trust we shall ever preserve our friendship with the countrymen

of Hans Breitmann. We allowed Denmark to be robbed of

Schleswig-Holstein, and tolerated the total theft of Hanover; so

that there seems to be no conceivable offence that can hook us into

a war with Prussia and Germany. That view is a pleasant one to

contemplate for thinking people, who, but for it, would be rendered

very uneasy by the following statement in a _Times'_ leader on "The

Cruise of the Lords of the Admiralty":--

"It has been imagined that the introduction of steam-power would

render naval tactics of extreme importance in any future

engagements, but when on one occasion the ships were ordered to go

into action, it was found that a few minutes sufficed to envelope

the whole fleet in so dense a cloud of smoke that signals were no

longer visible, and all that any vessel could do was to fire as

rapidly as possible into the darkness around her."

Now, those Deutschers are confoundedly clever fellows; particularly

at chemistry. Gun-cotton, which was discovered by one of them, is a

substance they are at work on perfecting. No doubt they will soon

make it available, so as to supersede powder, for naval gunnery.

Gun-cotton goes off without smoke. In the happily almost impossible

event of a war with them, our ships, enveloped in smoke of our own

clumsy making, would blaze away at theirs in the dark, at random,

with useless guns of precision, whilst they would fire with

unerring aim at the flashes of our guns, and the end of our first

sea-fight with them would be, that the British would be sent to the

bottom by the German Fleet.

[Sidenote: _Death of Lord Derby_]

The same month witnessed the passing away of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of

Debate," a statesman somewhat out of his element in a period of

non-intervention; a great country-gentleman, sportsman, and scholar.

_Punch_, whose memorial verses in these years did not err as a rule on

the side of brevity, compressed his tribute within the compass of a

sonnet, in which there is a happy reference to Lord Derby's love of

Homer and of children, for he was the patron of Edward Lear, the

laureate of the best, because the most unalloyed, nonsense:--

LORD DERBY

BORN, 1799. DIED, 1869.

Withdrawing slow from those he loved so well,

Autumn's pale morning saw him pass away:

Leave them beside their sacred dead to pray,

Unmarked of strangers. Calmer memories tell

How nobly Stanley lived. No braver name

Glows in the golden roll of all his sires,

Or all their peers. His was the heart that fires

The eloquent tongue, and his the eye whose aim

Alone half quelled his foe. He struck for Power,

(And power in England is a hero's prize)

Yet he could throw it from him. Those whose eyes

See not for tears, remember in this hour

That he was oft from Homer's page beguiled

To frame some "wonder for a happy child."

The resignation by Lord Malmesbury, formerly Foreign Secretary, of the

Conservative leadership of the House of Lords about the same time met

with no such consideration. Lord Malmesbury had never been a favourite

of _Punch_, who insinuated that the Tory leader had gone because he was

obliged to, and quoted Artemus Ward's saying: "He told me to get out of

the office--I pitied him and went."

The fateful year of 1870 opened with the attempt to establish a

"Liberal" Empire in France with Ollivier as Prime Minister, a concession

which _Punch_ hailed as a "Magna Charta for France"; almost

simultaneously Lord Clarendon, our Foreign Minister, with Gladstone's

cordial approval, launched his suggestion of a partial simultaneous

disarmament, a proposal rendered futile by the attitude of Bismarck.

Lord Clarendon died on June 27, and his successor, Lord Granville, was

informed by the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office that he "had

never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign

affairs." Yet war had already been declared by France when _Punch_, on

July 23, issued his somewhat cynical manifesto of neutrality under the

heading: "Prussian Pot and French Kettle":--

In this unhappy event of a war between France and Prussia, we shall

of course do all we can to preserve the most perfect neutrality. We

certainly feel it. Our sympathies with the one side and the other

are, strong as they are, exactly equal.

As regards the Prussians we take a warmly admiring interest in the

course of aggrandisement which their King and his Bismarck have

been pursuing of late years, but most chiefly do we applaud its

first step--the attack on Denmark, and the forcible annexation

therefrom of the two Duchies. The immense number of Danes slain by

the Prussian needle-guns commands our approbation only less than

our wonder; but what crowns the sentiments with which we regard the

spoliation and destruction of the Danes is the piety wherewith the

author of those achievements solemnly expressed his thankfulness

for having been permitted to accomplish them. One brother once

knelt with Mrs. Fry in Newgate. The other might have knelt with

Mrs. Cole.

On the other hand, with respect to France, we cannot but feel how

much we owe to the French Imperial Government for the improvement

which, by the menacing armaments it has kept up now for so many

years, it has occasioned us to make in our national defences. But

we have higher reasons for sympathy with France than considerations

which are merely insular and selfish. The great principles of

Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality have been professed by France

more enthusiastically and more loudly than by any other European

nation; and we behold their standing reduction to practice in the

occupation of Rome, and the declaration that the chief of Italian

cities shall never belong to Italy.

The foregoing reasons should satisfy any Prussian and any Frenchman

of the perfect impartiality with which Englishmen must contemplate

hostilities between their respective nations.

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

As a matter of fact, public opinion in England at the outbreak of the

war was in the main inclined to favour Germany; the publication of the

Draft Secret Treaty submitted to Bismarck by Louis Napoleon in 1867,

providing in certain contingencies for the occupation of Belgium by

France, and now communicated by Bismarck to _The Times_ went a long way

to sterilize sympathy with France; and it was not until after Sedan that

compassion for France overwhelmed and obliterated the old distrust of

the Emperor's intriguing ambitions. When the cry, "nous sommes trahis"

was raised, _Punch_ blamed the French nation more than the Emperor, whom

he had portrayed in a famous cartoon with the ghost of Napoleon

appearing to him as he set out for the front. As the wheels of war drove

more heavily on French soil and Paris was threatened with famine, one

notices the growing desire that Germany should grant generous terms,

mingled with a sense of impotence. This mood is well shown in the

verses, "Between the Hosts," printed in the number of December 17:--

Like him of old, when the plague's arrows sped,

And life sank blighted by that scathing rain,

We stand between the living and the dead,

Lifting our hands and prayers to Heaven in vain.

While those that faint upbraid us from dim eyes,

And those that fight arraign us as they fall,

And French and German curses 'gainst us rise,

And, hating none, we rest unloved of all.

And so we stand with a divided soul,

Our sympathies for both at war within,

Now eager for the strong, to reach his goal,

More often wishing that the weak could win.

Only one feeling will not leave our minds,

Hate of this hate, and anguish of this woe;

And still war's scythe-set car rolls on and grinds

Guilty and guiltless, blent in overthrow.

And first we interpose a useless hand,

And then we lift an unavailing voice,

While still Death holds his way with sword and brand,

Still the Valkyrier make their fatal choice.

Still stormed on by ill-will from either side,

Be we content to do the best we can--

Give all that wealth, peace, goodwill can provide,

For war's poor victims who their helpers ban.

We have no right to wait for men's good word,

No right to pause before men's unearned hate:

No right to turn the ear, when threats are heard

Of what will, some day, be the neutral's fate.

"Do right and fear not" must be England's stay,

As it has been, let wrath say what it will.

So with love's unthanked labour let us pray,

And do our best to ease war's weight of ill!

[Illustration: "VAE VICTIS!"

Paris, March 1st, 1871.]

[Sidenote: _1871--and its Sequel_]

In the autumn the consideration shown by some German troops in Champagne

is welcomed; by the end of the year the reply of Göttingen University to

an appeal protesting against the threatened destruction of the

scientific and art treasures of Paris--a document breathing the familiar

spirit of unctuous rectitude--roused _Punch_ to indignant satire in "A

Deutscher Dove-Coo," the name of the principal signatory being Dove. So

a month later the pseudo-Walpolian letters issued as "Strawberry Leaves"

reflect the popular disgust with which German brutality was viewed, but

at the same time the popular dislike of England's participating in the

war. When the siege of Paris ended at the close of the month, _Punch_

congratulated Thiers on his statesmanship, but rebuked the Parisians for

their fickleness in heaping insult on their fallen Emperor. The Germans

entered Paris, but in the cartoon of March 11, and the accompanying

verses "Vae Victis" a warning was addressed to Germany which has turned

out to be a true prophecy. The triumph is admitted, but the sequel is

clearly foreshadowed:--

Yet listen, conqueror, while the shade,

That should sit near thee in thy car,

Whispers how quickly laurels fade,

How swiftly shift the sands of war;

How, sixty-five years since, there came

A mightier Emperor than thou,

Upon Berlin to put the shame

Which thy hand puts on Paris now.

Even as thy heel is on their head,

That on thy folks' head set their heel,

So, ere threescore more years have sped,

The woe thou work'st thy sons may feel.

"Who smite with sword by sword shall fall,"

Holds for kings as for subjects true;

God's mills grind slow, but they grind small,

And he that grinds gives all their due.

[Illustration: "AU REVOIR!"

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

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

The courtesy of Germany in coming to an amicable settlement over the

loss of some British colliers sunk in the Thames is acknowledged; but

anxiety as to her further aggressions was not allayed by her desire to

possess Heligoland, and was undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of

that brilliant realistic romance, _The Battle of Dorking_, while the

fratricidal tragedy of the Commune, and the ruthless measures of

suppression employed, augured ill for the recovery of France from the

abasement of defeat. These events and the lessons they conveyed to

England were not overlooked by _Punch_; they served to temper his

light-heartedness with moods of misgiving. Yet the wonderful

elasticity--due, as even official Republican historians admit, to the

industrial prosperity created under the Second Empire--which enabled

France to pay off what in those days seemed a crushing war indemnity

long before the time fixed, emboldened _Punch_ in the spring of 1873 to

indulge once more in a prophecy of the reversal of the verdict of 1870.

When the German occupation ended, France is shown undauntedly

confronting Germany with the words: "Ha! We shall meet again."

Germany was not the only foreign power that caused anxiety during the

Gladstone administration of 1868-1874. Russia availed herself of the

troubles of 1870 to revive the Near Eastern question by refusing to

recognize her treaty obligations in the Black Sea; but the friction thus

created was allayed by the compromise effected by the Black Sea

Conference. And Russia's expedition to, and occupation of, Khiva in 1873

gave rise to further uneasiness. But non-intervention remained the order

of the day throughout. The Ashanti expedition of 1873, whether in

respect of its aim or its scale could not be regarded as forming an

exception. But it furnished _Punch_ with occasion for much plain-spoken

criticism of War Office red tape and mismanagement. He saw in Sir Garnet

Wolseley "the right man in the wrong place":--

In our deep penny wisdom, and horror of waste,

We shipped off the General minus his men,

So that if in a fix he should find himself placed,

He might merely lose time writing home back again.

[Sidenote: _Gladstonian Legislation_]

Happily these misgivings were falsified in the sequel, and early in 1874

_Punch_ was able to record, amongst other evidences of the satisfactory

conclusion of the campaign, the arrival in England of King Coffee's

State umbrella. The Gladstone administration may not have been efficient

in the conduct of military operations, but in the sphere of Army Reform

it deserved well of the country for the abolition of purchase, in the

teeth of strong opposition from the Horse Guards' element, and the

reorganization of the service on lines which substantially endured for a

generation or more. For these improvements we have to thank a civilian,

Cardwell, whose name is indissolubly associated with the changes brought

about in 1870. The second instalment of Gladstone's scheme for the

pacification of Ireland--the Land Act of 1870--was supported by _Punch_,

but did not achieve its purpose, since it left the vexed question of

dual ownership unsettled; and it was another Irish measure--the

University Bill--that brought the Government down. The legislative

achievements of the Gladstone Administration had been immense and

salutary in many directions, but the universality of its activities

undoubtedly contributed to its growing unpopularity and lent force to

Disraeli's famous electioneering cry of "plundering and blundering."

_Punch_, who had in the main supported Gladstone, advised the Cabinet to

resign after their defeat, but the Prime Minister resumed office

temporarily and did not dissolve till January 1874.

[Illustration: THE HOLIDAY TASK

DR. PUNCH: "My dear young friends, you have done next to nothing this

half. Therefore, a little task during the vacation will be good for you.

You, Master Benjamin, must get up a 'definite policy.' You, Lowe, will

write a paper on the 'Application of the _Screw_.' Ayrton, you will have

to get by heart the whole 'Book of Etiquette.' Miall, you must attend

Church regularly. Whalley, you're going to America--stay there!

Plimsoll, you must learn to--ahem--moderate your _transports_. And as

for you, William Ewart, the _idler_ you are the better!"]

[Sidenote: _England 2,000 Years Hence_]

Much had been done in this, the central mid-Victorian age, to abate the

evils and abuses which kept the "Two Nations" apart in earlier days. Yet

at the opening of the new Disraelian _régime_, with its imperial

aspirations, it may not be amiss to reproduce the verses, somewhat in

the vein of Thackeray's musings on _Vanitas Vanitatum_, in which Punch

bade farewell to the Comet of 1858:--

ADIEU TO THE COMET

Dare a bold atom ask, with brain half dizzy,

What you will see two thousand years to come,

This planet still an ant's nest, black and busy,

Or an extinct volcano, white and dumb?

Will you behold, if keeping that appointment,

(Made for you, Sir, by Airy and by Hind)

Men still anointing Kings with holy ointment,

And Priests still leading, as the blind the blind.

Earth's choicest youth fierce rushing to the slaughter

That two crowned Fools may wreak their idiot pet;

Or wiser Christians' blood poured out like water,

That Jews may gamble with a nation's debt.

Will that day's Patriot be a mouthing truckler,

Setting proud Freedom's hymn to Freedom's dirge;

Will Law be still the rich man's shield and buckler,

The good man's terror, and the poor man's scourge?

Will you find Life a hot and blindfold scrimmage,

Men straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold;

And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image

Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old?

Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit,

Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed;

Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit,

When Lies shall fail--the first time, and the last?

Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder--

Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad;

Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder--

"An undevout Astronomer is mad."

THE ROAD TO REFORM

Turning from England's international outlook to home affairs, we are

confronted in the earlier stages of the period under review by the

powerful negative influence of Lord Palmerston. A great Foreign

Minister, a capable and humane administrator when he was at the Home

Office, he had little belief in legislative remedies, and his refusal to

grapple with Reform became progressively distasteful to his Liberal

supporters. The old party system had been confused and shattered by the

secession of the Peelites, as the result of the Repeal of the Corn Laws,

and Palmerston was maintained in power in fact, if not in name, by a

coalition. His death ended the _régime_ of masterly inactivity and

cleared the way for the reconstruction of parties and the prolonged duel

between the two great protagonists--Disraeli and Gladstone.

The Reform Bill of 1867, the chief constructive achievement of

Disraeli's first Premiership, was a great advance on that of 1832, but

the boon was robbed of much of its grace by the party strategy which was

summed up in Lord Derby's famous phrase about "dishing the Whigs."

Meanwhile Ireland had been forced into prominence by the outbreak of

Fenianism, the Liberals had been reunited under Gladstone by his Irish

Church policy and on his accession to power in 1868, we enter on the

golden age of Gladstonian finance, with a low income tax--it dropped to

3d. in the year 1873--high wages and industrial prosperity.

[Sidenote: _Labour and Intervention_]

It was also, as we have seen, the age of non-intervention in foreign

politics. Strange to say the strongest appeal to the Government to

interfere by force of arms in a foreign quarrel was made by a deputation

of working men, introduced by Professor Beesly, in May, 1863, with a

view to expounding to the Prime Minister the resolutions in favour of

Poland voted by a Trade Union Meeting in St. James's Hall:--

One of the deputation, Mr. Cremer, a joiner, after Pam had given

the deputation the requisite sympathetic and evasive answer,

jovially observed, in plain English:--

"We are men of action, my Lord, and have come to the conclusion

that the only way to aid the Poles is to call on Russia to desist

from her present conduct, and if she will not attend to that call,

thrash her into compliance."

We append _Punch's_ comments because they are typical of his gradual

adoption of a more critical attitude towards the working man. It should

be remembered that there was no Labour Party in the House of Commons

until 1884. Before that time working men like Mr. Burt and Mr.

MacDonald, the two miners returned in 1874, were returned by an

arrangement with the Liberals and sat on the Liberal benches:--

If the honest working men were so thoroughly well represented as to

command a majority in the House of Commons, they would not, of

course, want to thrash foreign powers into compliance with their

demands, and tax others to pay the expense of their own war. Would

they subject their wages, one and all, to Schedule D, then, in

order to thrash Russia into liberating Poland? If so, they are fine

fellows. If not, the parts performed by the handicraftsmen who

joined in the deputation to Lord Palmerston are about on a par with

those of Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Bottom, the

weaver; Flute, the bellows mender; Snout, the tinker; and

Starveling, the tailor, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_; our British

carpenters, joiners, and other working men partake in a very

delusive dream in the expectation that England is going to fight

for the Poles. The income-tax makes cowards of us all, except the

working men who do not pay it.

Many of the abuses and evils at which _Punch_ had tilted so vigorously

had been removed and remedied. The Corn Laws had been repealed; the

Factory Acts had improved the conditions of labour. Obsolete and

barbarous laws had been removed from the Statute Book. The Game Laws had

been modified, and the administration of justice was marked by a humaner

spirit. The principle that property had its duties as well as its rights

was being steadily enforced, and, at the close of the period under

review, class privilege was curtailed by the institution of open

competition in the Civil Service and the abolition of purchase in the

Army.

This brief and imperfect list may help to explain the conversion of

_Punch_, the strenuous and impassioned advocate of the masses during the

'forties and 'fifties into the champion of the middle classes, and the

very candid friend of the working man and Trade Unions as revealed in

the later 'sixties and early 'seventies.

[Illustration: THE SUNDAY QUESTION:

The Public House]

[Sidenote: _The Gang System_]

Life on the land showed little signs of progress in the opening years of

this period as illustrated by _Punch's_ legal pillory. But the vagaries

of clerical and aristocratic magistrates, culled with chapter and verse

from provincial newspapers, which excited his wrath in 1858, almost

disappear in the 'sixties, no doubt in consequence of a more humane

interpretation of the Sunday Observance Act. In 1869, the debate on "The

Recreation of the People" at the Church Congress revealed a growth of

clerical tolerance and common sense which extorted the high approval of

_Punch_. Still, the "Sunday Question" was far from being solved when it

impelled the convivial _Punch_ to print in the same year the companion

cartoons contrasting his vision of what might be with the squalid

reality of what was.

The incubus of Sabbatarianism, so far as it affected farmers and

labourers, was at any rate much lightened in these years. But a far more

serious evil was the gang system, under which a gang, chiefly of

children, some as young as five, but mostly boys and girls under

fourteen, were hired by a gang-master, who made as much as he could by

taking them about the country and letting out their labour to farmers.

It was not until 1867 that the good Lord Shaftesbury carried the

Agricultural Gangs Act by the provisions of which no child under eight

might be employed in an agricultural gang, and girls were placed under

the protection of a licensed female gang-master. It was a modest

instalment of reform, long since extended by our Elementary Education

Acts; it is to the credit of _Punch_ that he hailed it as placing a

check on "a system so abominable that nothing but the intensest

hypocrisy can call this a Christian nation while it exists." Against

those who deliberately perpetuated ignorance by enslaving the young he

carried on a truceless war. He was slower to condemn the ignorance of

rural superstition when it could be paralleled by the credulity of the

educated, and his observations on the sentence passed on a Devonshire

shoemaker may be taken to heart fifty years later:--

A paragraph in a contemporary, headed "Superstition in Devonshire,"

contains the following defence, addressed by an old shoemaker named

Burch to the Barnstaple magistrates, before whom he was charged

with assaulting an old woman by scratching her on the

arm:--"Gentlemen, I have suffered five years' affliction from her.

I have been under her power, and more than a hundred people advised

me to fetch blood of that woman to destroy the spell. I have lost

fourteen canaries, and from forty to fifty goldfinches; as fast as

I got them they died, and I have had five complaints brought upon

me at once."

* * * * *

On hearing this declaration:--

"The Mayor said that it was most extraordinary that such ignorance

and superstition should prevail in the present enlightened age."

In the present enlightened age persons of position in society and

of education believe that they shake hands with spirits at dark

_séances_. His Worship the Mayor of Barnstaple cannot have known

that, or he would not have called the belief in witchcraft

ignorance and superstition. If spiritualism is true, sorcery is

possible, and, as there is no legal remedy against it, old Burch

may be considered to have been justified in taking the law into his

own hands for self-protection. Accordingly, since he was fined 2s.

6d. and costs, and, as he couldn't pay the money, sent to prison,

perhaps a subscription to get him out of gaol, and make him amends

for the trouble he has got into, will be raised among affluent and

superior "spirit circles." For if one medium can float about a

room, why may not another ride upon a broomstick?

[Illustration: "SMALL BY DEGREES"

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

of the question!"

SUFFOLK PLOUGHMAN: "You're right there, Mas'r Wuzzles, sart'n sure! It

'on't dew. Our Sal sahy there'll be eight shillin' and threepence for

bread, three and sixpence for rent and coal, and half-a-crown for club,

clothes, boots and shoes for the owd 'oman, five kids, and me. No, that

'on't dew--that, that 'on't, b'um by. But it'll be enow to begin with!"]

[Sidenote: _The Old Man and the New Rich_]

Though no friend of feudalism, it is curious to note that in the

vehement protest against enclosures, the closing of rights of way, etc.,

which he published in 1869, _Punch_ is careful to distinguish between

the old and the new rich. The closing of Nightingale Wood, between

Southampton and Romsey, which "from time immemorial had been open by

gracious permission to rural ramblers," was the occasion for an outburst

culminating in the statement that "the brutes now fast closing the

sylvan scenery of England to Englishmen, are, with the exception of an

ignoble duke or two, rich rogues of speculators and financiers, who have

ousted the old territorial aristocrats and squires, having bought fields

and forests with the reward of their rascality."

In the selfishness of the "profiteer," as we now call him, _Punch_ sees

a sure provocative of Communism. He would clearly have applauded the

distinguished but eccentric judge who in a later day erected on his

country estate boards with the notice "Trespassers will _not_ be

prosecuted."

It remains to be added that the grievances of tenants and farm

labourers, though far less frequently mentioned than in earlier years,

did not altogether escape the vigilance of _Punch_. In 1861 he printed

an ironic petition from a tenant to his landlord asking to be as

comfortably housed as his horses. In 1868 he alludes to the scandalous

housing conditions on the estate of a noble landlord in Essex--an estate

which of recent years has been noted for its humane and liberal

management.

[Sidenote: _Prison v. Workhouse_]

Far more space, however, is devoted to the administration of the Poor

Law, the economics and evils of Industrialism in the manufacturing

centres, and the efforts of practical philanthropy. Throughout the

'sixties and right on into the early 'seventies _Punch_ never wearies of

insisting on the folly of making life in prison more comfortable than

that in the workhouse. His campaign begins with an onslaught on the

guardians of the Durham Union, who appeared to think that there "ought

to be a correspondence between the spiritual nutriment of paupers and

their material diet":--

Under this impression it evidently was that they advertised the

other day for a chaplain, offering the salary of £20 a year. Their

advertisement was answered by a tender from one John Smart, who

turned out to have been a clergyman's footman, and conceived that

he had learned to exercise the functions of a parson from his

master. He had, he said, "had a good deal of private practice, but

not public."

It is painful to find a respectable man-servant reduced to apply

for employment in the capacity of a Workhouse chaplain. Cannot an

inferior class of clergyman be ordained on purpose to administer to

paupers a coarser kind of spiritual food? Deep indeed must be the

humiliation experienced by a footman in exchanging plush and gold

lace for the canonicals of a chaplain whose salary is £20 a year.

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

comment:--

The frying pan as compared with the fire is much less comfortable

than the Model Prison in proportion to the Union-Workhouse.

The former of those two establishments relatively to the latter is

considerably milder than Purgatory may be imagined to be, in

contrast with the other place which the prisoners mentioned. Quod,

in comparison with the Abode of Want, is quite a tolerable sort of

Limbo. What is the moral of this arrangement, in the apprehension

of the classes who have to live by their own exertions? Whatever

you do, keep out of the Workhouse. Garrotte anybody rather than

apply to the Union.

_Punch_ still disapproved of the gallows; the strongest argument in its

favour was the manifest truth that the cheapest thing you could do with

a worthless rascal was to hang him. But he saw a better way in rendering

penal servitude exemplary:--

At any rate, for the prevention of garrotte robberies and all other

crimes, one step might be taken somewhat analogous to the treatment

proverbially recommended for that other complaint, the influenza,

which is just now likewise so prevalent. "Stuff a cold," says the

popular adage, "and starve a cough." At present the moral reverse

of this rule is observed in penal economy. You stuff a convict and

starve a pauper. Wouldn't it probably answer better to allow

paupers sufficient food and put criminals on low diet? Thus you may

be enabled to get on without the gallows.

It was stated, and accepted by _Punch_ in 1860, that since 1856 there

had been a decrease in crime of 25 per cent. owing to the establishment

of Reformatories. But the series of papers in the _Morning Post_ in 1863

on the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham--where the boys were

subjected to a devotional drill, made to lift and lower their hands in

prayer and sing grace "to the sharp order of a master," and mercilessly

caned and birched by a tall, muscular drill master for acts of

insubordination--gave _Punch_ furiously to think:--

The Middlesex Model School at Feltham is an institution for the

reformation of young thieves, but its arrangements for developing

the religious sentiment in the youthful mind appear to be such as

may be conceived to have been devised for mutual edification by the

inmates of an asylum for idiots.

* * * * *

Flogging is a fine thing; but how strange that its application is

limited to boys and soldiers and sailors: to children of tender

age and members of an honourable profession! Wouldn't it be at

least as suitable to garrotters, and even to cruel swindlers, whose

exemplary torture, in comparison with the misery caused by their

crimes, would be the lesser evil of the two?

The painful disclosures resulting from inquiries into workhouse

conditions are repeatedly referred to and make strange reading in a

comic journal. At a meeting held in Willis's Rooms by the Earl of

Carnarvon and the Archbishop of York early in 1866, the brutalities to

which the sick poor were subject in the infirmaries of most of the

London workhouses were illustrated in such hideous detail, that _Punch_

declared "it would be cheaper to put paupers out of their misery than it

was to let them die in misery, and it would at least be just as moral."

The parsimony, the self-indulgence and the barbarous procrastination of

the guardians of St. Pancras are castigated a few months later, when a

motion to postpone the consideration of the appointment of an extra paid

nurse for three months was carried by six votes to five. There were

forty guardians; but most of them were absent at the quarterly dinner of

the Burial Board. _Punch_, therefore, had good excuse for saying that

"these nine-and-twenty parochial humbugs, instead of minding their

business, were engaged in stuffing their most ungodly digestive organs

with funeral baked meats."

[Sidenote: _Ignorant Guardians_]

The Derby-Disraeli administration had come into power in the previous

month. So when Mr. Gathorne Hardy had succeeded Mr. C. P. Villiers as

President of the Poor Law Board, the alteration in the methods of

procedure in regard to investigating workhouse abuses provoked a

well-timed and damaging attack on the attempt to whitewash Bumbledom. It

is a dreary subject, but the principles which ought to govern a

Departmental inquiry could not be better expressed. And _Punch_ was

happily able to fortify his humanitarian zeal with ridicule when, in

quoting from the description of the horrors of Walsall Workhouse given

by the _Lancet_, he gives two stories showing that workhouse

mismanagement in those days, at any rate, was largely the result of

crass ignorance:--

It was suggested in one workhouse board-room that a bath ought

unquestionably to be supplied, when a guardian got up and stated

"he were agin it." He never had one in his house in his life, and

he didn't see why a pauper should enjoy what he didn't want. On

another occasion the absence of a proper light at the entrance door

was dwelt upon, and a gas-lamp was proposed. This was seconded by

another worthy, who, approving of the gas-lamp, said, "and I'd have

it lighted with ile."

Now the first of these gentlemen may be a regular saint. He never

bathed, and he regarded his neighbour as himself. To be sure, if he

was a saint he was also a pig; but swinishness has not seldom been

combined with sanctity. The other guardian, who didn't know better

than that a gas-lamp could be lighted with "ile," was himself so

destitute of all enlightenment that he may be excused as a simply

irresponsible clown.

The euphemisms of Poor Law inspectors, who used colourless words such as

"inadequate" and "insufficient" when "barbarous," "brutal" and

"horrible" would have been nearer the mark, had been exposed by the

_British Medical Journal_ in 1868. If destitution was not a crime, why,

asked _Punch_, was the pauper treated worse than the criminal? These

abuses, in the exposure of which he joined hands with serious medical

journals, explain and justify the intense and even passionate desire of

self-respecting poor people to avoid the Union.

Though no lover of Jews, _Punch_ in 1869 contrasts Jewish guardians

favourably with their so-called Christian brother officials. Dickens's

picture of old Betty in _Our Mutual Friend_ is hardly overdrawn, and a

year after Dickens's death _Punch_ was still contrasting the comforts of

prison life with the usual conditions of life amongst the submerged

poor.

The State had not yet awakened to a sense of its responsibilities to the

"legal poor." Much was being done by practical philanthropy, and it may

be fairly said that no appeal to _Punch_ for assistance or encouragement

was left unanswered. Wholehearted in his support of Ragged Schools, he

comes forward in 1858 to plead the cause of their logical

corollary--Ragged Playgrounds:--

Deprive a boy of healthy, fair and open games, and you drive him to

resort to unwholesome, foul and sneaking ones. Deny him any

playground but a hole-and-corner court, and you'll find that he'll

betake himself to hole-and-corner games in it. In default of

wholesome cricket, he'll become a dab at chuck-farthing; and will

get from pitch and toss to still worse kinds of time-slaughter.

* * * * *

If we mean then to teach the ragged young idea, we must give heed

somewhat to the ragged body likewise. And the first thing to be

done is to provide it with proper play space.

_Punch_, therefore, may be regarded as one of the pioneers of the

admirable "Play Centres" movement. In the same year we find him

applauding the conversion of an old thieves' public house in Westminster

into the headquarters of the Ragged Schools, and appealing for funds to

maintain it. Drinking fountains had been established in Manchester and

Liverpool, and Punch expresses a desire to see them introduced into

London. Here, at any rate, he was prepared to welcome the saying that

what Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.

In the domain of social reform _Punch's_ great bugbears were patronage,

condescension and misplaced missionary efforts. Towards Exeter Hall

philanthropy the old and rooted hostility remains throughout this

period, and in 1865 we find _Punch_ pleading vigorously for a greater

interest in social reform at home to supplement the fashionable

enthusiasm for foreign missions. For missionaries of the type of

Livingstone he had nothing but praise, but that "perfect Christian

gentleman," as Sir Bartle Frere described him, had severed his connexion

with the London Missionary Society in 1857, and thenceforth had been

subjected to "much hostile criticism from narrow-minded people."

[Illustration: TELESCOPIC PHILANTHROPY

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

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

The benefactions of George Peabody roused _Punch's_ interest from the

very first. In 1862 and 1863 his pages abound in questions as to what

was being done with the Peabody Fund. But in 1864 the first block of

"Peabody dwellings" was opened in Spitalfields, soon followed by others

in Chelsea, Bermondsey, Islington and Shadwell; and in 1866, on learning

that Mr. Peabody had increased his gift to the London poor from £150,000

to a quarter of a million, _Punch_ was ashamed at the lack of public

recognition of his generosity. The letter from a "London correspondent"

is more than an expression of gratitude--it is a valuable contribution

to the study of Victorian sociology.

MR. PEABODY'S GIFT.

"I will confess to you that I indulged myself with the thought that

it would be a graceful conclusion to the reference sure to be made

to American affairs in the Queen's speech, if a few words of

cordial recognition were devoted to the munificence of this great

American citizen. Of course, I was immediately ashamed of myself

for thinking such a thing possible; and I hope you will overlook

the ignorance of etiquette, routine and precedent--the shadowy

creatures that hold us back when we are yearning to obey some noble

impulse--betrayed by such a disordered fancy. When I read the

Speech, all feelings of disappointment about Mr. Peabody

evaporated, for I found that from the beginning to the end of the

Royal oration there was not a line to commemorate the name and the

fame of the Great Minister [Lord Palmerston] lying so near in the

sacred silence of the Abbey. The shadowy creatures were again

appalled by my audacious expectation, and held out menacingly a

noose of ruddy tape.

"I then waited to see whether Mr. Childers, in proposing a public

loan in aid of the erection of houses for the labouring poor, would

introduce Mr. Peabody's name. He did, and handsomely; and I am not

without hope that before the vessel of State gets into the chopping

seas that lie in its track, the captain, or perhaps the first

lieutenant, may say something on this American question which would

give unqualified satisfaction on both sides of the Atlantic. You

will not misunderstand me. You will not suppose that when I speak

of thanking Mr. Peabody, I am thinking of gold boxes, or addresses

beautifully engrossed on vellum and enclosed in polished caskets,

or public banquets, or services of plate. His gift towers above all

ordinary gifts, as St. Paul's rises over all meaner edifices; but

it does seem to me that it should be acknowledged and gratefully

recorded by the voice of the eloquent speaker and the pen of the

eloquent writer, be it in Parliament or in the pulpit, from the

public platform or in the columns of the omnipotent Press. To some

extent this has been done, but not commensurate with the magnitude,

the rarity, and the disinterestedness of the gift.

"When I read the unprofitable proceedings of Convocation, the

discussions about canons and catechisms, rubrics and conscience

clauses, I think to myself that Mr. Peabody may be doing more for

the souls of the poor, by providing for their bodies, than both

Houses of Convocation will do, though they should sit to the end of

the century, and enjoy a fresh gravamen at each sitting.

"If I were the Bishop of London, out of the fund with which his

name will be imperishably associated, in every district containing

a Peabody block of buildings, or dwellings for the poor, such as

Alderman Waterlow understands how to build, I would provide a

working clergyman, sure that he would find eager listeners in men

and women, translated from styes of filth and disease, and

degradation, to homes abounding in cleanliness, and health, and

comfort, through the direct bounty or beneficent example of the man

who has arisen to the rescue and deliverance of the poor of

London--George Peabody.

"Perhaps the best commemoration of their benefactor by the Peabody

settlements would be a day's holiday in the country every summer, on his

birthday, if it falls in one of the leafy months."

The neglect of which _Punch_ complains cannot be laid to the door of the

Queen. When Mr. Peabody was about to return to America in March, 1866,

she acknowledged his munificence in an autograph letter, saying how

gladly she would have conferred upon him either a baronetcy or the Grand

Cross of the Bath (both of which he declined), and asking his acceptance

of a miniature portrait of herself.

Peabody's gifts to London amounted in all to £500,000, and set an

example which native millionaires have done well to follow. But he was

an even more munificent benefactor to his own country, where he gave at

least a million to education. When he died in London in 1869 _Punch_, in

his memorial verses, contrasted the feelings aroused in the two nations

with those of the "mourners" of most rich men:--

No common mourners here such office fill--

A mother and a daughter, grand of frame,

Albeit one in blood, oft twain in will,

And jealous either of the other's fame.

But by this bier they pause from jar and boast,

Urged by no rivalry but that which strives

Him that lies here to love and honour most,

Ranking his life highest among the lives.

Of men that in their tongue and blood claim part:

And well may child and mother mourn for one

Who loved mother and child with equal heart,

Nor left, for either, Love's best works undone.

The beneficent use of great wealth on a great scale seldom evades

ultimate acknowledgment. _Punch_ said no more in his tribute to Peabody

than that great and humane American deserved. But minor endeavours were

not overlooked, even where they led to no immediate results. Such, for

example, was the proposal of F. D. Maurice and others to found a Working

Women's College in 1864. Classes for women had been held at the Working

Men's College from 1855 to 1860. The larger scheme was not realized, but

has been revived within the last year by the establishment of the

Working Women's College at Beckenham. Such again was the establishment

of the London Dressmaking Company in 1865, under the patronage of Lord

Shaftesbury and the Bishops of London and Oxford, to which _Punch_ gave

a vigorous puff-preliminary in his editorial columns.

In 1858 the fate of Emily Druce had shown that the plea of Hood's "Song

of the Shirt" was in danger of being forgotten. But sweated labour was

not confined to the cheap clothing trade. In 1863 West-End milliners

came under the microscope of Parliament and _Mr. Punch_:--

Public indignation has been excited by the accounts of the death of

Mary Anne Walkley, a girl employed by Madame Elise, of Regent

Street, wife of one Isaacson, and a notorious dressmaker. "Long

hours in an overcrowded room and sleeping in an ill-ventilated

bedroom," said Sir George Grey, "caused the young girl's death."

What is to be done? Lord Shaftesbury in the Lords, and Mr. Bagwell

in the Commons, called attention to the system under which such

girls are killed; and the man Isaacson, who seems to fill a similar

office to that of Mr. Mantalini, and who writes English of which

that gent would be proud, issued a letter full of impertinence and

bad grammar, in defence of Mrs. Isaacson's place. Thereupon the

parish requested other testimony, and Dr. Lankester examined the

premises, and found the dormitories rather better and the workroom

rather worse than had been expected.

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

MADAME LA MODISTE: "We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any

sacrifice, and the robe is finished _à merveille_."]

These tragedies and the efforts which they prompted serve as a

convenient transition to a more general survey of Labour problems,

Labour legislation, and Labour organization and representation as they

are revealed and discussed in the pages of _Punch_ from 1857 to 1874.

Under the recently established and rapidly extending joint reign of

steam and coal, it was only natural that rural life should recede into

the background. Railway construction had drawn off many labourers from

agriculture, and the influx of labour into the manufacturing districts

continued apace. In the prospectus of the Dressmaking Company given

above, the work-hours are given as ten. But in 1859 the movement among

working-men for a nine-hours' day had already been started. Strikes were

common, but _Punch_ discourages them on the ground that the men always

lost in the long run, and that the "agitators"--the name "Labour

Leaders" had not yet emerged--were the real criminals. The _Examiner_

took the same line in 1861 when it wrote "the submission of workmen to

the tyranny of their Unions is at once one of the most curious and

lamentable phenomena of our time." Yet the existence of genuine distress

is not denied, and in a little parable in verse entitled "Men and Bees,"

profit-sharing between masters and men is recommended as the true

solution.

On what was still, in spite of Factory Acts and other measures, the

greatest blot on our industrial system--the employment of child

labour--_Punch_ spoke with no uncertain voice. Early in 1860 he gives

Lord Brougham a good mark for taking up the question in the Lords:--

Lord Brougham, always true to his humane instincts, brought before

the Lords the case of the young children employed in Bleach Works.

It is a cruel one. Infants of seven and eight years old are at work

for eighteen hours, and are sometimes four nights without sleep.

The brutalities by which the poor little children are kept

sufficiently awake for the purposes of their task-masters are

shocking. Years ago, when the cruelties of the climbing-boy trade

were exposed in the Lords, a noble Lord told a good story, made

their Lordships laugh, and by getting the Bill thrown over for a

year, left a new batch of children to the mercies of the Sweep.

There was nothing of this kind to-night, and Lord Granville

promised information. He will be good enough to remember that Lord

Brougham _has_ tendered information, which proves that our friend

Mammon is, as usual, doing the work of Moloch.

[Sidenote: Climbing Boys and Girls]

Here, at any rate, there is no sympathy for the greedy capitalist, who

comes off as badly as the "agitator." The mention of the chimney-sweeps

is timely. In 1864 the employment of the climbing boys had been

prohibited by Act of Parliament for twenty years. Yet the Act had been

so systematically evaded that in that year more than 3,000 children were

still kept at labour in that filthy and unhealthy form of slavery. The

subject was brought up in the House of Commons in April by Mr. Digby

Seymour, and furnished _Punch_ with an excuse for assailing those

"sentimental and pious ladies" who "prefer subscribing to societies for

converting little Hottentots to using influence to suppress the

atrocities committed upon little white children at home." A month later

Lord Shaftesbury intervened in the Lords: the details which he brought

forward were too shocking for reproduction, but "fine ladies who mew

over the sorrows of the Circassians, and devout ladies who send

missionaries to the Chinese, had better know what is done in their own

houses, and within a few feet of their own beds, with the children of

white English folk."

The kidnapping of little boys had been revived, and at a meeting held in

York the following agreement was signed by the assembled sweeps:--

"We, the undersigned Master Sweeps of the City of York, mutually

agree, from and after this date, not to employ Climbing Boys and

Girls in our business; that the Act of Parliament on their behalf

made should be strictly complied with; and that we ought no longer

to risk the heavy penalties it prescribes, both against

householders and ourselves."

It thus appears that, in York at least, the employment of climbing girls

had become almost or quite as common as that of climbing boys.