Punch descants rhetorically for nearly one hundred lines on Smugby's Sabbath, fanaticism, Pharisaism, etc., but as a Londoner he had probably never witnessed the orgies of the Glasgow Fair. He never failed to insist on the intemperateness of Temperance reformers, but as a supporter of moderate drinking he was himself often guilty of immoderate language.
In regard to anti-Semitism, another of his pet aversions in this period, his record is far less open to criticism. He made a perfectly fair point in representing men of Jewish extraction as the chief offenders, for these were the days of the Libre Parole, edited by Drumont, himself a renegade Jew, and of the anti-Semitic campaign in France which reached its climax in the Dreyfus "affair" in the middle 'nineties. As early as 1881, in one of Du Maurier's pictures, Sir Gorgius Midas is backed up in a tirade against the Jews by "Baron von Meyer," who, with the stigmata of his race written all over him, flatters himself that nobody can suspect his origin. In the cartoon on the Jewish "pogroms" in Russia in 1882, Humanity, compared to a Portia who pleads for and not against the Jews, is shown appealing to the Tsar, who stands with his back turned and arms crossed. How would it read in English, Punch asks, if our papers contained accounts of the murdering of Jews and the burning of their houses in Houndsditch, with the police looking on in amused indifference, and the Home Secretary sending messages of thanks to the murderers?
In the verses published in January, 1882, "A Cry from Christendom," against the old anti-Semitic cry of "Hep! Hep!" Punch indignantly denounces the hounding down of the Hebrew in the name of the Cross:—
Oh out on the Tartuffes of Creed! Let the spirit of Christendom speak
Plain words of unfaltering truth for the cause of the helpless and weak.
Punch's Toleration
No warnings of possible retaliation come from Punch; such a possibility did not enter into the calculations of sympathizers with the oppressed Jews, who were regarded as incapable of effective resistance. A different aspect of the question is satirized in references to Society "mariages de convenance" with rich Jewesses, probably not unconnected with a recent notable alliance between a distinguished peer and the daughter of a great Jewish house. Punch's general view, however, was that expressed in the saying that "every country has the Jews which it deserves," and he was ready to admit that the good English Jews were very good indeed. In 1883 he published Sambourne's portrait of Sir Moses Montefiore, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, "who on the 8th day of Chesvan (November 8) entered on the hundredth year of his blameless, brave and beneficent life"; and when the old man died in the summer of 1885 Punch paid him farewell homage in these lines:—
Long in the land his days, whose heart and hand
All high and human causes could command;
Long in the land his memory will abide