The strike against the butchers was one in which the working classes might safely combine to turn out. "They will not injure themselves, nor hurt their wives and families: on the contrary, all the while the strike lasts they will be putting by money. The public will support instead of discouraging them." But it is impossible to take the commendation seriously in view of the last sentence; "whilst others, I trust, are endeavouring, by total abstinence from butchers' meat, to reduce the butchers to reason, I remain medicinally, of course, always 'A Beefeater.'" Much more effective, because untainted by irony, are the plain-spoken verses on the British workman as painted by his flatterers, his detractors and his candid friends:—
While Democrat orators praise him and puff him
As the land's bone and sinew, and Nature's own nob:
Aristocrat talkers calumniously cuff him,
As shiftless, and soulless, sot, spendthrift, and snob.
'Twixt the daub of his bully, the daub of his backer,
The true British Workman's been able to stand,
And at once to disclaim both the brighter and blacker,
As alike wide of truth, from the right and left hand.
The success of "Tom Brown" (Tom Hughes), who was elected for Lambeth in 1865, encouraged the enthusiastic friends of the British workman in the hope that he would now be painted without fear or favour, but Tom Brown's honest unvarnished portraiture was more than his sitter could stand:—