And when a year later the hundred-thousandth English mother woke up to read that her boy had been shot, I am afraid she shed foolish tears and thought that the world had come to an end. Poor shortsighted creature! She didn't realize that Porkins, who had marched round the links in ninety-six the day before, was now thoroughly braced up.
These two utterances may show that Punch had failed in reading the signs of the times, and did not render justice to the youth of the country. I prefer to regard them as proofs that Punch, like the vast majority of his fellow-countrymen, neither expected nor desired war.
[1] Josiah Tatnall, flag-officer of the East India Squadron in 1856.
[2] Mr. James Falconer, the Liberal Member for Forfarshire, 1909-1918.
[3] The present writer was at Bayreuth in the week before the War. After the declaration of war on Serbia by Austria and in view of its inevitable consequences, the Germans, in conversation and in their Press, were unanimous in "banking on" the neutrality of England on the ground of her domestic embarrassments in Ulster and the friendliness of the Liberal Government.
[CAPITAL AND LABOUR]
The fervid Radicalism of Punch's earlier years had always been tempered by a distrust of "agitators" and socialistic experiments. It is impossible to deny that, in the period under review in this volume, this distrust gained in force if not in vehemence. There is nothing so bitter as the sketch of the delegate which appeared in the days of Douglas Jerrold (see Vol. I, p. 50), but the general attitude of the paper to the working man is decidedly less sympathetic. This change can be illustrated negatively as well as positively; less space is devoted to "the people," and more to "Society"—though in many cases it is suburban society—and to the middle classes. The references to Labour exhibit an increasing tendency to criticize and denounce trade union tyranny, socialistic legislation, the improvidence and extravagance of highly paid workmen, and "ergophobia" (as Punch academically calls work-shyness)—a habit which he describes as early as 1892 as "the new employment of being 'unemployed.'" Yet if Punch was increasingly critical of Labour—organized Labour—he was very far from being a thick-and-thin champion of Capital. Greedy employers and directors are never spared. The agricultural depression in 1892 furnishes him with the occasion for a vigorous onslaught on railway rates. Agriculture is shown as a female figure, bound hand and foot by Foreign Competition, lying prostrate on the track and about to be run down by an engine labelled Railway Rates. In 1895 the verses and cartoon inspired by lock-outs on the Clyde are equally severe on the employers. Punch condemns the action of "crass and unpatriotic capital," and shows Britannia rebuking the shipbuilders who are playing into Germany's hands by assisting the growth of her navy. In 1896, under the heading of "The Millions to the Millionaires," Punch takes for his text an actual appeal made by the working men of Walworth on the death of Baron Hirsch, à propos of his munificent bequests to his countrymen, and holds up the example for imitation. The continuance of the habit of "slumming," out of curiosity rather than good will, prompts in 1897 a satirical inversion of the organized visits to the East End. Punch's "West End Exploration Agency, Ltd.," provided "Night Tours through Belgravia and Lightest London" with the purpose of proving "the depressing monotony and triviality of the existence to which Fashion's merciless decree condemns her countless thousands of white slaves."
The debate in the Commons in the same year over Lord Penrhyn's dispute with his quarrymen found Punch decidedly hostile to the young Tory lions who supported that inflexible peer. When in 1900 the Coal Mining Companies in Fife declared a dividend of 50 per cent., and the price of coal was still rising, Punch castigated the greed of the owners. In 1907 the miners are exempted from any share of the responsibility for the high cost of coal. The triple Cerberus who dominates the situation is made up of the colliery owner, the coal merchant and the railway company. But as the price this joint monster exacted was only 30s. a ton—exorbitant for the time, no doubt—it is hard for this generation to share Punch's sympathy for the consumer. As late as 1912, when the coal crisis again became acute, Punch, though resenting the increased resort to the strike weapon, represents the merchant profiteer as in clover while Britannia is the victim of his avarice.