Patrons of Universal Peace.
Lord Roberts's warning speech at the London Chamber of Commerce in the late summer of 1902 had prompted the cartoon "The Call to Arms." John Bull, aroused from slumber and only half-awake, asks "What's wrong?" Lord Roberts, the warning warder, replies: "You are absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war!" whereon John Bull rejoins drowsily: "Am I? You do surprise me," and goes to bed again. Growing distrust of the Kaiser is shown in the cartoon in which he figures as "The Sower of Tares" after Millais's picture, while Punch simultaneously manifests his satisfaction at the strengthening of the Anglo-French Entente. The British working man, if Punch is to be believed, disliked all foreigners, but his pet aversion was "them blooming Germans." There was, at any rate, a legitimate grievance in the fact that fifty-nine foreign pilots were employed on our coasts, whereas abroad our ships were compelled to take native pilots; and the Nelson Centenary on October 21, 1905, impelled Punch, in an address to the hero of Trafalgar, to deplore the decay of national patriotism in a vein of pessimism happily falsified ten years later:—
Much you would have to marvel at
Could you return this autumn-tide;
You'd find the Fleet—thank God for that—
Staunch and alert as when you died;
But, elsewhere, few to play your part,
Ready at need and ripe for action;
The rest—in idle ease of heart