That Time shall not gainsay.
The tribute is one which, we think, would have appealed to the dead statesman, a man of few words, but who in the words of another Duke, the Duke of Argyll, was "firm as the rock, and clear as the crystal that adorns the rock."
A few weeks later Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, broken in health, resigned the Premiership, dying so soon afterwards that he virtually died in harness. Punch did not overstate things in describing his death as "a common grief" to Liberals and Unionists, for he had outlived the obloquy of party bitterness and revealed as Premier qualities which his successor, Mr. Asquith, fittingly described when he spoke of him as "our revered and trusted chief." By a strange and happy irony of fate, the statesman who had opposed the Boer war was responsible for the policy of reconciliation which might have been much harder if that war had not been waged.
Germany loomed large on the political horizon in 1908. This was the year of Mr. Lloyd George's visit to inquire into the working of the scheme of national insurance, a visit which Punch treated with undisguised irony as a belated afterthought. It was also the year of the Kaiser's famous interview, published in the Daily Telegraph, in which he claimed credit for magnanimity to England during the Boer war, with the result of annoying his Chancellor and having to consent to a revision of his conception of the Imperial prerogative. Punch's open letter to "The Great Misunderstood" exhibits considerable scepticism of his friendliness, and a set of verses, in the same spirit, are inspired by the activities of the German Women's Navy League. An English M.P. had been exhibiting a toy model of a German gunboat used by this organization as a collecting box, and it was alleged that these toys were handed about in German schools with the request: "Give us your pence, so that we can thrash the English."
The Kaiser's Soliloquy
The Kaiser's fiftieth birthday is commemorated in a "Soliloquy in Berlin," in which the Emperor boasts of having swept aside Bismarck and repressed the "too clamorous people" by police, prison or exile, and defends his impulsive loquacity against his critics. The King must know best, and "while all the discontented loose their tongues and rave against him, shall the King be still?" Moreover, he claims to have kept the world from war:—
And I have kept the peace. Was that well done?
I know not, but I know I kept the peace,
I, whose blood boiled to hear the clash of swords,
At whose command a million men would spring