"OLIVER ASKS FOR" LESS
John Bull (fed up): "Please, sir, need I have quite so many good things?"
Mr. Lloyd George: "Yes, you must; and there's more to come."
The last cartoon of the year, "The Third Stage," exhibits the main legislative preoccupations of the year in the form of a coach with the three Bills—Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment and Plural Voting—seated abreast under the hood of the Parliament Act with 1914 as postilion. Punch's view was that the electorate as a whole were somewhat weary of the legislative activities of the Government. In 1912 he had represented John Bull as Oliver asking not for more but less; in the summer of 1913 he showed John Bull disappointed with Mr. Lloyd George's "rare and refreshing fruit" on the ground that it contained "too many pips," à propos of Mr. Asquith's promise to amend the Insurance Act. The conscientious M.P., in the cartoon of a few weeks later, who presents himself at the Pay Office expressing his fear that he won't "really be earning his salary this year with no autumn session," is bluntly told by Paymaster Bull, "sick with legislation," not to worry about that. "You go and take a nice long holiday; the country needs it." There were other causes of weariness besides excessive legislation. The Marconi scandal was an incubus which lay heavily on the Government throughout the year. In the early stages of the inquiry, Punch showed Rumour presenting her season-ticket, and disgusted at being denied admittance, as the Committee were about to "get to business." The amount of space devoted to the question in the Press is satirized by the announcement of the forthcoming publication of "The Marconi Affair in a Nut-shell," by Messrs. Garvin and Maxse, in 968 pages. When the Report appeared, Punch thought the whitewash had been laid on too thick:
"More Whitewash!" said the Falconer,[2]
"Throw it about in bucketfuls;
Some of it's bound to stick."
"Very poor art!" the public cried;
"You've laid it on too thick!"
Even more hostile is the cartoon "Blameless Telegraphy," in which John Bull addresses Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Rufus Isaacs, dressed as telegraph boys with "Marconi, U.S.A.," on their caps: "My boys, you leave the court without a stain—except, perhaps, for the whitewash." There was no whitewash in Lord Robert Cecil's minority Report; and the reverberations of the Marconi affair did not die down for many months, nor did Punch wish that they should—witness his ironic cartoon of the Master of Elibank, luxuriating in a hammock in tropical Bogota, and expressing his keen disappointment that the inquiry had been closed.