Brother: "What did you say to that old chap just now?"
Sister: "I only thanked him for picking up my bag."
Brother: "My dear girl, you must learn not to be so beastly grateful. It's not done nowadays."
Punch's "Universal Hymn"
This is an instance of the danger of trying to kill two birds with one stone, for the parody of Henry James's later manner distracts our attention from the main aim of the satire. Punch was more sorry for than annoyed at the children of Chelsea, of ages from five to sixteen, who were said in 1908 never to ask for Dickens or the Jungle Book at the Free Library, but to devour works on "science, sociology, fine arts and religion." In the same year the Sociological Society held an exhibition of charts and plans, to show parents how to select their children's toys "as a profound educational agency," but Punch saw in it nothing but an exhibition of the profoundest Prigmatism—to use a word which he coined in later years. His bitterest comment on the new spirit of the young belongs to the year 1913, when a boy of seventeen rebukes his sister of twelve for thanking an old man for picking up her bag. The best antidote to this spirit was furnished by the Boy Scout movement, which grafted on to the public-school code of "playing the game" the larger ideals of altruism and mutual-as opposed to self-help. I have already spoken of the origin and development of what was the greatest non-official and informal contribution to national education of our times. Logically perhaps it ought to have been discussed in this chapter, but in its wider implications it belongs to the social and political history of the last twenty years.
To turn from general tendencies to the controversies which arose out of the working of the Education Act of 1871, we find that Punch was, as usual, impartially critical of all extremists, whether clerical or secularist. Against the latter he inveighed in 1894 in his "Universal Hymn for School Board Hymnals, adapted to modern Educational requirements":—
Arise my soul—if soul I've got—
And, vaguely vocal, thank
For all the blessings of my lot
The—Unknown Eternal Blank!