THE CALL TO ARMS!
John Bull (aroused from slumber and only half awake): "What's wrong?"
Lord Roberts (the warning Warder): "You are absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war!"
John Bull (drowsily): "Am I? You do surprise me!" (Goes to bed again.)
(Vide speech by Lord Roberts at meeting of London Chamber of Commerce, Mansion House.)
The "decline and fall" of the Unionist administration are symbolized and explained in two cartoons in the late summer of 1905. In one Mr. Balfour is seen, a lonely swimmer, wallowing in the sea of Public Opinion. A voice from the Tug (Tory Organization) hails him, urging him to keep afloat and he'll "drift in to the shore" (Session 1906). He replies that he "can't do much against a tide like this." The sources of weakness are even better diagnosed in the cartoon of August 30, "Shelved," showing the group of statesmen who had resigned—the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Ritchie, Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Lord George Hamilton and Mr. George Wyndham.
The rout of the Government at the General Election of 1906 was a veritable débâcle. Liberal candidates were returned who never got in before or after: there is a story of one so overwhelmed by his wholly unexpected success that he fainted on the declaration of the poll. Ministers went down like ninepins, and on the meeting of the new Parliament Punch descants on the disappearance of the "old familiar faces"—Mr. Arthur Balfour and his brother Gerald, Alfred Lyttelton and St. John Brodrick, Bonar Law, Sir John Gorst, Sir Albert Rollit, Sir W. Hart Dyke, Gibson Bowles, and, "saddest fate of all and most lamented," Mr. Henry Chaplin. The emergence of a new, formidable, but uncertain factor was at once recognized in the cartoon in which John Bull looks over the wall at a bull labelled Labour Vote. The Trade Disputes Bill, the first and most notable concession to the demands of Trade Unionism, is discussed in the next section.
