In conclusion Punch makes this comment on the fact that in honor of the anniversary the flag of the United States had been hoisted on the summit of certain buildings, "Shouldn't it have been hoisted halfmast high?"
The answer came in the form of a thunderous negative with the next mail from America.
Thereafter Punch lost his supreme interest in the great Civil War. He made no allusions to Gettysburg or to Vicksburg. The "neutral hope" was painfully dampened by Northern triumphs. His commercial sympathy was all with the losing side. The wish was father to the not very neutral thought that the negro might prove the undoing of his Northern allies. On August 15 appeared a cartoon entitled "Brutus and Cæsar, from the American Edition of Shakespeare." To the tent of Brutus (Lincoln) enters at night the ghost of Cæsar, a black spectre. This colloquy occurs:—
Brutus—Wall, now, do tell! Who's you?
Cæsar—I am dy ebil genius, massa Linking. Dis child am awful Inimpressional.
In October appeared a cartoon headed with unconscious satire, "John Bull's Neutrality." John Bull standing with his arms akimbo in the doorway of his shop is glaring defiantly at two bad boys, clad respectively in federal and in confederate uniforms, who slink away before his glance and drop the stones they were preparing to hurl at his windows.
"Look here, boys," says John, "I don't care twopence for your noise, but if you throw stones at my windows I must thrash you both."
The same moral is enforced in the following poem:—
MR. BULL TO HIS AMERICAN BULLIES
Hoy, I say you two there, kicking
Up that row before my shop!
Do you want a good sound licking
Both? If not, you'd better stop.
Peg away at one another,
If you choose such fools to be:
But leave me alone; don't bother,
Bullyrag and worry me!