TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE.
Some pages of this work have been moved from the original sequence to enable the contents to continue without interruption. The page numbering remains unaltered.

Only references within this volume have been linked. A complete Index for all four volumes will be found at the end of this Volume.

The book cover has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

M^r. PUNCH'S HISTORY
OF MODERN ENGLAND

AFTER TEN YEARS
Reproduced from the original cartoon.

M^r.Punch's History
of Modern England
By
CHARLES L. GRAVES
In Four Volumes
VOL. IV.—1892-1914
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1922

Published by arrangement with the Proprietors of "Punch"

CONTENTS

PART I

THE PASSING OF THE OLD ORDER

PART II

SOCIAL LIFE IN TRANSITION

PART I

THE PASSING OF THE OLD ORDER

M^r. PUNCH'S
History of Modern England

[HIGH POLITICS]

Transition and growth, change and decay and reconstruction marked the half-century covered in the previous three volumes. In the twenty-two years that divide the return of the Liberals in 1892 from the "Grand Smash" (as Mr. Page has called it) of 1914, these features are intensified to an extent that renders the task of attempting even a superficial survey perilous and intractable to one who is neither a philosopher nor a trained historian. The wisest and sanest of those who have lived through these wonderful times are too near their heights and depths to view them in true perspective. Whatever merit attaches to this chronicle is due to its reliance on contemporary opinion as expressed in the pages of an organ of independent middle-class views. It is within these limits a history of Victorians and post-Victorians written by themselves.

"Full closes," unfashionable in modern music, are generally artificial in histories. But the period on which we now enter did more than merely coincide with the end of one century and the beginning of another. It marked the passing of the Old Order, the passing of the Victorian age: of the Queen, who, alike in her virtues and limitations, in the strength and narrowness of her personality, epitomized most of its qualities; and of the type of Elder Statesmen, of whom, with the sole exception of Mr. Balfour, none remains at the moment as an active force in the political arena. Of the Ministry of 1892-5 the only survivor who mixes in practical politics is Mr. Asquith, but his record as a legislator hardly entitles him to the name of an Elder Statesman in the Victorian sense. Sir George Trevelyan, Lord Morley, Lord Eversley and Lord Rosebery have all retired into seclusion. So, too, with the Unionist Ministers who held office from 1895 to 1905. Veterans such as Lord Chaplin, Lord George Hamilton and Lord Lansdowne enjoy respect, but they do not sway public opinion, and are debarred by age from active leadership and office. Lord Midleton stood aside to make way for younger men when the Coalition Government was formed, and Lord Selborne is perhaps the only Conservative statesman who held office before 1906 who has any chance of sitting in a future Cabinet.

It was not only an age of endings; it was also an age of beginnings, fresh and sometimes false starts, both as regards men and measures. It witnessed the coming of the Death Duties in 1894, when Sir William Harcourt's "Radical Budget," by equalizing the charges on real and personal property, paved the way for the more drastic legislation introduced by the Liberals in 1906 and the following years. This was Harcourt's greatest achievement, and perhaps the most notable effort in constructive policy of the short-lived Liberal administration; for the second Home Rule Bill was dropped on its rejection by the Peers. Under the Unionist administrations of 1895-1905 Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, as Colonial Secretary, and Mr. Wyndham, by his Irish Land Purchase Act, rendered conspicuous service in the domain of Imperial and Home policy. Yet at the culminating point of his popularity Mr. Chamberlain left the Government to prosecute that Fiscal Campaign which broke up the Government, broke down his strength, and ended a brilliant career in enforced retirement. Mr. Wyndham's withdrawal from the Government, owing to friction over Irish policy, closed in early middle age the career of the most gifted and attractive politician of his generation.

"IL GIOCONDO"

The enigmatic smile of this Old Master distinguishes it from that other National treasure, the "Bonar Lisa."

From 1906 onwards we are confronted by the meteoric and Protean personalities of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill, who between them have held almost all the great offices of State, and ranged over the whole spectrum of Party colours, and lastly of Lord Birkenhead. Mr. Churchill's father had once called Mr. Gladstone "an old man in a hurry." One wonders what Lord Randolph would have called his son Winston, of whom it was said "he likes things to happen, and when they don't happen he likes to make them happen." In comparison with the discreet progress of Reform in the last century the pace became fast and furious. The demands of organized Labour were conceded in the Trade Disputes Bill of 1906—the greatest landmark in industrial legislation of the last half-century—and in 1910 the People's Budget led to the revolt and surrender of the House of Lords.

Yet concurrently with the democratic drift of Liberal finance and social reform, the principle of a continuity of foreign policy, initiated by Lord Rosebery, and continued by Lord Salisbury and Lord Lansdowne, was faithfully maintained by Sir Edward Grey, whose sober and frugal expositions contrasted strangely with the vivacity and flamboyant rhetoric of his colleagues. The Anglo-French Entente and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance both came into being when Lord Lansdowne was at the Foreign Office, and the influence of the Liberal Imperialist group in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Cabinet secured a free hand for the Foreign Minister. It is the fashion in some quarters to regard the late King Edward as "the only begetter" of the Entente; it is at any rate within the mark to credit him with having missed no opportunity of fostering it by his tact and bonhomie. It was no easy task. When he visited Paris in 1902 the official greetings were perfectly correct, but the animosity aroused over the Boer war found vent in outrageous and unseemly caricatures. England was then the most unpopular country in the world; and in allaying this general distrust and dislike, the personal relations of King Edward with foreign statesmen and rulers wrought powerfully for goodwill and a better understanding.

STUDENTS ON THE MAKE

Mr. F. E. Smith: "Master of epigram—like me!"

Mr. Winston Churchill: "Wrote a novel in his youth—like me!"

Together: "Travelled in the East—like us. How does it end?"

(Mr. W. F. Monypenny's official "Life of Disraeli" has just been published.)

Foes and Friends

Looking back, in the light of fuller knowledge, on the South African war of 1899-1902, we cannot fail to recognize how narrowly we escaped the active hostility of more than one European Power; how much we owe to the wise magnanimity of the British Government in granting full autonomy to the Transvaal in 1906—an act not only justified by the sequel but approved by those who voted against it. It converted the most formidable of those who fought against us into loyal servants of the Empire in her hour of greatest need; it allayed the misgivings of those at home who had opposed the Boer war, and it silenced the criticisms of foreigners who had denounced our aim as the extermination of a people rightly struggling to be free. Whatever views may be held as to the origin of the Boer war—that it was forced on by mining magnates, or that it was the inevitable result of a reactionary system which threatened our hold on South Africa—it remains one of the very few examples of a war which, in the long run, left things better than they had been, and satisfied the aspirations of the majority of the conquered. And if we did not learn all the lessons that we might have learned from the military point of view, the experience was not thrown away. The services of Kitchener, Plumer and Byng, to mention only three out of scores of names, proved that what was comparatively a little war was a true school of leadership for the greatest of all.

Great Britain's warlike operations throughout this period were intra-Imperial, and the scale of the South African campaign, in which from first to last we put 250,000 men into the field, dwarfed the troubles in Ashanti and on the Indian frontier into insignificance. That we kept out of all the other wars which convulsed the world between 1892 and 1914 must be put down to good management as well as good luck. It is remarkable to notice the steady if gradual convergence of the war clouds on Europe, the drawing in of the war zone from the circumference to the centre, beginning with the conflict between China and Japan. The brief and inglorious Greco-Turkish war hardly counts, and Europe was not physically engaged in the Spanish-American war, where all the fighting was done in the New World. Politically its significance was far-reaching, as revising the Monroe Doctrine and enlarging the Imperial horizons of the United States. Politically, again, the "Boxer" rising in China affected the European Powers, whose competing interests in the "integrity of China" were not reconciled by their joint expedition for the relief of the Legations in 1900. Here again the fighting was in the Far East, as it was in the Russo-Japanese war, if we except the "regrettable incident" of the Dogger Bank; and Russia has always been as much an Oriental as a Western Power. But the Russo-Japanese war shook Tsardom to its foundations, promoted Japan to the status of a Great Power, and compensated her largely for the intervention of Russia, Germany and France in robbing her of the spoils of her victory over China. The European conflagration broke out in 1912 with the war of the Balkan League on Turkey. Victory crowned the efforts of a righteous cause—the relief of oppressed nationalities from the oppressions and exactions of a corrupt and tyrannous rule—but was wasted by the internecine quarrels and irreconcilable demands of the victors. Serbia, who had lived down much of the odium excited by the barbarous murders of Alexander and Draga, and had borne more than her share of the war against Turkey, was isolated, partly by her own intransigence, mainly by the greed, the diplomatic manoeuvres and the treachery of her allies, and in her isolation fell a victim to the dynastic ambitions of Austria. The assassination of the Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo was the excuse for Austria's ultimatum to Serbia, the proximate cause of the Great War of 1914. Whether engineered in Vienna or not, the murder secured the removal of an heir whose succession to the throne of Austria-Hungary was looked upon with grave suspicion by a powerful group in Austria who had no desire to upset the House of Hapsburg but profoundly distrusted the Crown Prince. In the homely phrase Sarajevo killed two birds with one stone. It eliminated an uncertain and unpopular prince, and furnished Austria with an opportunity for gratifying her long-standing hostility to Serbia. But there was a third and bigger bird; for the complicity of Germany in dispatching the Ultimatum is no matter for surmise. Without her support and pressure it would never have been sent.

THE ROAD TO RUIN

Punch on World Politics

Confronted on all sides by problems of such magnitude and far-reaching importance, it is not to be wondered at if Punch—primarily a comic journal—failed to gauge their full significance, or to preserve an attitude of inflexible consistency in his comments. There was always a certain divergence between his editorial policy as expressed in the cartoons and the comments of individual members of his staff. This elasticity made for impartiality in the main; but it became somewhat perplexing at the time of the Boer war, when a general support of the Government was combined with very sharp criticism of Lord Milner. Yet if Punch here and elsewhere spoke with more than one voice, his views on high policy, international relations and home affairs exhibit a certain general uniformity and continuity. He supported both the Entente and the alliance with Japan. The spasm of irritation over the Fashoda incident soon passed; he resented the intervention of Russia and Germany which robbed Japan of the fruits of her victory over China, and his sympathies were unmistakably with Japan in the war with Russia. Punch was consistently and increasingly critical of the Kaiser, while perhaps over-ready to dissociate his temper from that not only of the German people but of the educated classes; he was also consistently alive to the menace of German competition in naval armaments and trade, though by no means disposed to acquit British merchants and workmen from a provocative lethargy. Towards America, Punch's attitude shows a progressive benevolence. The Venezuela incident and President Cleveland's message at the beginning of this period brought us within measurable distance of a rupture, happily averted by negotiation, as the later and less serious difficulty over the Alaska boundary was averted by arbitration. One may fairly say that Punch's relief at the pacific adjustment of these outstanding questions was far greater than his sensitiveness on the point of national honour. He did not refrain from the use of the word "filibustering" in connexion with the Spanish-American war, in which the gallantry of Cervera went far to enlist sympathy on the beaten side; but with the accession to the Presidency of Mr. Roosevelt, a man in many ways after Punch's own heart, though not exempt from criticism for his controversial methods, a friendlier tone became apparent, and the historic "indiscretion" of Admiral Sims's speech at the Guildhall in 1910 helped to create the atmosphere of goodwill which rendered possible the fulfilment of his prophecy.

On National Defence and the maintenance of our naval supremacy Punch continued to speak with no uncertain voice. He applauded Lord Roberts's patriotic but neglected warnings and his advocacy of universal military service, and lent a friendly but not uncritical approval to the Territorial Army scheme.

THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE

John Bull: "Recruits coming in nicely, Sergeant?"

Recruiting Sergeant Punch: "No, Sir. The fact is, Mr. Bull, if you can't make it better worth their while to enlist, you'll have to shoulder a rifle yourself!"

Gladstonian Home Rule

In regard to Ireland and Home Rule, after the rejection of the Home Rule Bill of 1893 Punch's independent support of the Liberals gave place to a general support of the Unionist policy, tempered by a more or less critical attitude towards Ulster. He cannot be blamed for neglecting to note the obscure and academic beginnings of the Sinn Fein movement, or for failing to forecast that triple alliance of Sinn Fein with the old physical force party and the Labour extremists under Larkin which led to the rebellion of Easter, 1916. The Government expert, who devoted seven years to the neglect of his duties, was sunk in unholy ignorance of all that was going on until the explosion took place. For the rest, Punch became increasingly critical of the demands of Labour and the parochial outlook of its leaders; increasingly antagonistic to the measures passed in satisfaction of those demands. At the same time he devoted more space than ever to satirizing, ridiculing, and castigating the excesses, extravagances and eccentricities of "smart" society, the week-end pleasure hunt of the idle rich, and all the other features which may be summed up in the phrase, "England de Luxe." Pictorially his record reveals perhaps more amusement than disgust at the carnival of frivolity which reached its climax in the years before the war. The note of misgiving is not lacking, but it is sounded less vehemently than in the 'eighties of the last century. In the main Punch's temper may be expressed, to borrow from Bagehot, as an "animated moderation."

To turn from outlines to details, one is confronted in 1893 with Mr. Gladstone's second attempt to solve a problem which Giraldus Cambrensis pronounced insoluble seven centuries ago. Punch's earlier cartoons on the Home Rule Bill are negligible, but the difficulties of the Premier's position are aptly shown in the picture of Gladstone as a knight in armour on a perilous pathway between the Irish Nationalist bog and the "last ditch" of Ulster. The accompanying text, modelled on Bunyan, represents Mr. Gladstone as a Pilgrim relying as much on tactics as the sword. The most genial reference to Ulster is that in which she figures as the Widow Wadman asking Uncle Toby, "Now, Mr. Bull, do you see any 'green' in my eye?" and Uncle Toby protests he "can see nothing whatever of the sort." Otherwise Punch's attitude is unsympathetic, witness the use of the term "Ulsteria" and the epigram on the second reading of the Bill, put, it is true, into the mouth of "A rebellious Rad":—

Butchered—to make an Easter Holiday,

For Orangemen who yearn to have their say!

They've got political delirium tremens.

Orange? Nay, they're sour as unripe lemons!

In the "Essence of Parliament" little is said of the arguments, but we get a glimpse of Lord Randolph Churchill's return to the political arena and echoes of the unbridled loquacity of Mr. Sexton. The cartoons are more instructive, notably that on the introduction of the "Guillotine" by Gladstone, with the G.O.M. as chief operator, Harcourt and Morley as republican soldiers, and Amendments, as heads, falling into a waste-paper basket. The fate of the measure is neatly hit off in the "Little Billee" cartoon; Home Rule as "Little Billee" is about to be massacred by the House of Lords, represented by Salisbury and Hartington as chief villains. "Little Billee" in the legend not only survived but attained high distinction in after life; but it is hard to say whether Punch implied a similar resurrection for the Bill of 1893. But whatever were his views on the merits of Home Rule, Punch was decidedly critical of the Government's naval policy, and when Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Morley had simultaneously made seemingly irreconcilable speeches on the subject, he adroitly invoked the shade of Cobden, who had, in certain conditions, proclaimed himself a Big Navyite. Punch fortified the argument by a set of verses headed "Rule Britannia" and ending with this stanza:—

Devotion to the needs of home

And claims parochial is not all.

Beware lest shades more darkling come

With gloomier writings on the wall.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!

Britons to careless trust should ne'er be slaves.

Mr. Gladstone and his Successor

Yet when Mr. Gladstone resigned the premiership, early in 1894, Punch's tribute is an unqualified eulogy of the "Lancelot of our lists":—

"Unarm, Eros; the long day's task is done."

This is no Antony; here's a nobler one;

Yet like the Roman his great course is run.

From source to sea a fair full-flooded flow

Of stainless waters, swelling as they go,

Now widening broad in the sun's westering glow,

Broad widening to the ocean, whither all

The round world's fertilizing floods must fall,

The sweeping river with the streamlet small.

Hang up the sword! It struck its latest stroke,

A swashing one, there where the closed ranks broke

Into wild cheers that all the echoes woke.

That stroke, the last, was swift, and strong, and keen,

Now hang thou there, though sheathed, yet silver-clean,

For never felon stroke has dimmed thy sheen!

For thee, good knight and grey, whose gleaming crest

Leads us no longer, every generous breast

Breathes benediction on thy well-won rest.

The field looks bare without thee, and o'ercast

With dark and ominous shadows, and thy last

Reveille was a rousing battle-blast!

But though with us the strife may hardly cease,

We wish thee, in well-earned late-coming ease,

Long happy years of honourable peace!

The "last stroke" referred to was doubtless the speech in which Mr. Gladstone uttered his warning to the Lords, a warning translated into action by the Parliament Act of 1910. Lord Rosebery, his successor, came from the gilded chamber, and, in spite of his democratic record and brilliant gifts, was not enthusiastically welcomed by the Liberal Party. But Punch had no misgivings at the moment and acclaimed him in a cartoon in which he enters the lists, "from spur to plume a star of tournament," with Harcourt as his squire, a reading of their relations hardly borne out by the sequel. The Cabinet were not a "band of brothers," and, as we have said above, the most notable legislative feature of the Liberal administration was the "Radical Budget" of Sir William Harcourt. Punch's comment, in the cartoon "The Depressed Dukes" and the verses on "The Stately Homes of England," combined prescience with a touch of malice. The Duke of Devonshire is shown saying to the Duke of Westminster, "If this Budget passes, I don't know how I am going to keep up Chatsworth," and the Duke of Westminster replies, "If you come to that, we may consider ourselves lucky if we can keep a tomb over our heads." Mr. Chamberlain's famous phrase about "ransom" is recalled, in view of his rapprochement to the Tories, to illustrate his falling away from Radicalism, and Punch's references to him are, for a while, critical to the verge of hostility. Sambourne's picture of the interesting development of the "Josephus Cubicularius (orchidensis)" exhibits his evolution from the manufacturer of screws, the republican and the radical, to the patriot, society pet, and full-blown Conservative with a peerage looming in the future; while in the "Essence of Parliament" he is ironically complimented on investing the High Court of Westminster with "the tone and atmosphere of the auction-room."

On the other hand, Punch recognized that a disposition to add to our Imperial responsibilities was no longer a Tory monopoly. Uganda was annexed in 1894, and John Bull is seen finding a black baby on his doorstep: "What, another! Well, I suppose I must take it in," the explanatory verses being headed "Prestige oblige." The assassination of President Carnot prompts a tribute to France:—

Sister in sorrow now as once in arms,

Of old fair enemy in many a field—

an obvious adaptation of Sir Philip Sidney's "that sweet enemy France." But in the realm of foreign affairs the most striking event was the Chino-Japanese war. Here Punch's sympathies are clearly revealed in his cartoon, "Jap the Giant-killer," with an up-to-date fairy-tale text; in the picture of Japan as the Infant Phenomenon lecturing on the Art of War to John Bull, Jonathan, the Kaiser and other crowned heads; and in the condemnation of the jealous intervention of Russia and Germany to rob Japan, who had "played a square game," of the fruits of victory. The death of the Tsar Alexander III in November, 1894, is commemorated in a cartoon in which Peace is chief mourner. Punch, as we have seen, had not been enthusiastic over the gravitation of Russia towards a French alliance; but no official declaration of its existence was made until 1897, though it was mentioned publicly by M. Ribot in 1895.

"WHO SAID—'ATROCITIES'?"

(After the popular engraving)

"Old as I am my feelings have not been deadened in regard to matters of such a dreadful description." (Mr. Gladstone's Birthday speech at Hawarden on the Armenian atrocities.)

The Seven Lord Roseberys

The Rosebery Cabinet resigned in June, 1895. Punch's admiration for Lord Rosebery had steadily waned during his brief tenure of the Premiership, and distrust of his versatility is revealed in the versified comment on Mr. St. Loe Strachey's article in the Nineteenth Century. There the "Seven Ages of Rosebery" are traced, in the manner of Jaques, from the Home Ruler onward through the phase of London County Council chairman to Premier, and Sphinx à la Dizzy, ending:—

Last scene of all

That ends this strange eventful history,

Newmarket Rosebery, Ladas-owner, Lord—

Sans grit, sans nous, sans go, sans everything.

Lord Salisbury's third Cabinet was reinforced by the inclusion of the Liberal-Unionists—the Duke of Devonshire, Mr. Goschen and Mr. Chamberlain. It was a powerful combination, but suffered in the long run from the inherent drawbacks of all coalitions, though the course of events postponed the inevitable disruption. Before the Liberals left office, Mr. Gladstone had emerged from his retirement to denounce the "Armenian Atrocities" and urge British intervention. Here, as in earlier years, Punch sided with the advanced Liberals, rejoiced in his well-known cartoon, "Who said 'Atrocities'?" that there was life in the old dog (Mr. Gladstone) yet; welcomed the adhesion of the Duke of Argyll to Mr. Gladstone's campaign in another cartoon of the "Old Crusaders: Bulgaria, 1876, Armenia, 1895"; and denounced the unchangeable ferocity of the Turk. When the Bishop of Hereford invited his clergy to send up petitions respecting the Armenian atrocities, one vicar refused to protest against Turkish crimes, on the ground that the English Government was exercising all its ingenuity to persecute and plunder Christians here. This referred to the Liberal Government's Welsh Disestablishment Bill. Punch ironically declared that the vicar's logic was as convincing as his Christian sympathy was admirable. On the return of the Unionists to power, Punch continued to urge strong measures, and lamented the powerlessness of the "Great Powers" to bring about reforms in Turkish administration.

The Kiel Canal

The retirement of Mr. Peel from the Speakership afforded Punch a fitting opportunity for recognizing his great qualities in maintaining the dignity of his position, his "awesome mien and terrible voice" in administering rebukes, and for joining in the chorus of congratulation to the new Conductor of the Parliamentary Orchestra, Mr. Gully. As for the protest of Lord Curzon, Lord Wolmer and Mr. St. John Brodrick against the exclusion of peers from the House of Commons, Punch dealt faithfully with the movement in his comments on the "Pirate Peers." Better still is the cartoon in which a bathing woman addresses a little boy wearing a coronet, and battering with his toy spade at the door of a bathing-machine labelled House of Commons. "Come along, Master Selborne," she says, "and take your dip like a little nobleman." This incident of May, 1895, is hardly worth mentioning save as an example of self-protective insurance against future legislation aimed at the power of the Upper House. For years to come Punch's political preoccupations were almost exclusively with questions of Imperial policy and international relations. The opening of the Kiel Canal practically coincided with the return to power of Lord Salisbury, and is celebrated by Punch in the same number in which he ironically adapts Shakespeare's Coriolanus to illustrate the alliance of Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain. Punch's representative went out on the Tantallon Castle with Mr. Gladstone, and gives a lively account of the junketings on board and on shore, and the entertainment of sovereigns and local magnates. In more serious vein Punch editorially hails the canal as a "Path of Peace," banishing misgivings and remembrances of Denmark and France:—

Not war alone, but trade, will take the track

That shuns the wild and stormy Skager-Rak;

And may Brunsbüttel's now familiar name

Be little linked with Empire's big war-game;

May battle-echoes in the Baltic cease;

And the Canal be a new Path of Peace.

A couple of months later our friendly relations with Italy inspired a cartoon in which Britannia congratulates Italy, but advises her to be less visionary and more practical. Italy's finances were causing her trouble; otherwise the advice showed an inability to sound the springs of Italian policy. Punch's pacific dreams were dispelled in the autumn by the renewed troubles in Ashanti. Britannia, as he put it, expected more than an umbrella this time; King Coffee's umbrella had cost us £900,000 in 1874. Happily the expedition was well organized and its immediate purpose executed, though a further expedition became necessary in 1900. Far graver anxieties threatened us from Africa at the close of the year, and since Punch's criticisms of and comments on the successive phases of controversy and conflict betray a certain amount of variation and even inconsistency, it is as well to point out that the unfriendly tone he had shown towards "Joe" in previous years had largely abated upon Mr. Chamberlain's accession to office as Colonial Secretary. In the account of a dinner held in the late autumn of 1895 to celebrate the opening of railway communication between Natal and the Cape, Mr. Chamberlain's speech is extolled as "splendidly pitched, admirably phrased, and full of the Palmerstonian ring." Simultaneously in "The Imperial Federalists' Vade Mecum" Punch discourses on the difficulties, no longer insuperable, which attended on the translation into reality of that dream of Imperial Federation which had once been regarded as a nightmare.

Dr. Jameson's Popularity

The abortive Jameson Raid at the close of December, 1895, came as a bombshell; and Punch, in his "Tug of War" cartoon, shows the Uitlander trying to pull the British Lion into the Transvaal, while Mr. Chamberlain is pulling him back. Canning's well-known lines on "The Pilot that weathered the Storm" are rewritten in honour of Mr. Chamberlain's handling of the crisis. A few months earlier Punch had ridiculed the Kaiser for his arbitrary absolutism in sending to prison a private University teacher "for writing in praise of a certain kind of soap." The famous telegram to President Krüger was dealt with more audaciously in an apocryphal letter purporting to have been sent by the Queen to her grandson:—

Mein lieber Willy,—Dies ist aber über alle Berge. Solch eine confounded Impertinenz have ich nie gesehen. The fact of the matter is that Du ein furchtbarer Schwaggerer bist. Warum kannst Du nie ruhig bleiben, why can't you hold your blessed row? Musst Du deinen Finger in jeder Torte haben? Was it for this that I made you an Admiral meiner Flotte and allowed you to rig yourself out in einer wunderschönen Uniform mit einem gekokten Hut? If you meant mir any of your blooming cheek zu geben why did you make your grandmamma Colonel eines Deutschen Cavallerie Regiments? Du auch bist Colonel of a British Cavallerie Regiment, desto mehr die Schade, the more's the pity. Als Du ein ganz kleiner Bube warst have ich Dich oft tüchtig gespankt, and now that you've grown up you ought to be spanked too.... Du weist nicht wo Du bist, you dunno where you are, and somebody must teach you. Is Bismarck quite well? Das ist ein kolossaler Kerl, nicht wahr? So lange. Don't be foolish any more.

Deine Dich liebende,

Grandmamma.

This was followed up by the picture of the Kaiser as "Fidgety Phil." But Punch was already alive to the widespread hostility to England which prevailed on the Continent, and did not shrink from suggesting that we were ready at need to take up the challenge. He admitted the popularity of "Dr. Jim," but irony underlies his dialogue between the dubious Londoner, who asks:—

"How will they treat this Doctor Jim,

Who doesn't return a winner?"—

and the Hearty Citizen who replies:—

"There's only one way of treating him."—

"And that is?"—"Give him a dinner."

Punch is ironically sympathetic, again, in his comment on the statement that "About 130 letters awaited Dr. Jameson ... many of them containing offers of marriage." A few months later, however, Punch supported the demand for his release on account of ill-health. The cartoon based on Mr. Rhodes's resignation in May is headed, "The Pity of it." South Africa (as Othello) says to him: "Cassio, I love thee; but never more be officer of mine." Punch adds as his authority a statement in The Times: "Mr. Rhodes has no longer any power of assailing or menacing the Transvaal. The military authority in the Company's territory is in the hands of Sir Richard Martin. The administration is in the hands of Lord Grey." It was about the same time that Punch published a design for a statue of Krüger, in which the British Lion is shown in chains while Chamberlain kneels obsequiously to the President.

THE RHODES COLOSSUS

Striding from Cape Town to Cairo

South Africa was not our only source of anxiety in 1896. Indeed, it may be said to have temporarily receded into the background as a storm centre. For our strained relations with the United States over the Venezuelan arbitration had been brought to a critical stage by President Cleveland's message. The conciliatory speeches of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour in January led Punch to represent them in the act of placating the American Eagle with caresses and sugar. He was better inspired in his open letter to Mr. W. D. Howells, the distinguished American writer, recognizing his generous and courageous efforts to create a better mutual understanding between the two countries. In particular he saluted the "Golden words" in which Mr. Howells criticized his own countrymen:—

Letter to Mr. Howells

"What I chiefly object to in our patriotic emotion, however, was not that it was so selfish but that it was so insensate, so stupid. It took no account of things infinitely more precious than national honour, such as humanity, civilization, and

'the long result of time'

which must suffer in a conflict between peoples like the English and the Americans. For the sake of having our ships beat their ships, our poor fellows slaughter their poor fellows, we were all willing, for one detestable instant at least, to have the rising hopes of mankind dashed, and the sense of human brotherhood blunted in the hearts of the foremost people of the world."

But is there, as you say, "in the American heart a hatred of England, which glutted itself in her imagined disaster and disgrace when we all read the President's swaggering proclamation, in which he would not yield to the enemy so far as even to write good English"? Is there to be no forgiveness, are we never to cancel old scores and begin our international book-keeping, if I may so term it, on a clean page? I do not think our people hate yours. Your dash, your pluck, your humour, your keen common sense, your breezy and inexhaustible energy, your strength and broad capacity for government, all these qualities command and obtain from us a sincere tribute of admiration. If you hate us, we must submit to that melancholy condition, but never submit in such a fashion as to cease from honest effort to abate and in the end to remove all hatred. Blood, as one of your naval captains[1] said on a memorable occasion, is thicker than water. So saying, he dashed in to the help of our sorely pressed ships. Let us then call a truce to petty and malignant carping, and join hands in an alliance dependent not upon written treaties, but upon the noble sympathy of two great nations engaged in the same work of civilization and progress. You, Sir, speaking for others, I trust, as well as for yourself, have set us an example.

Believe me, yours in all cordial friendship,

Punch.

It was in the same spirit that Punch welcomed a remark in the New York Morning Press: "After all the English people are our people, and we are theirs," and deprecated as suicidal any efforts to forsake a common heritage and rend asunder a family tree. The tension passed, thanks to diplomacy and arbitration, and towards the close of the year we find Punch welcoming Mr. McKinley on his election as President, the Shade of Washington (with a somewhat bulbous nose) congratulating Columbia: "'Sound Money' is the best policy." Meanwhile the expedition to Khartum had been decided on; the House of Commons, reassured by a confident speech from Mr. Chamberlain, having approved of the forward policy by a two to one vote, in spite of the misgivings of Mr. Morley, Sir William Harcourt and Sir Charles Dilke. Punch, mindful of 1884, registered his approval in the cartoon in which the Shade of Gordon in the desert utters the one word, "Remember!" Wars and rumours of wars did not distract Punch's attention from the peaceful rivalry of commerce. He was still much concerned by Germany's competition, which he typified in his cartoon of British Trade as the old woman whose petticoats were "cut all round about," while she was asleep, by a German pedlar. And the commercial significance of Li Hung Chang's visit is not overlooked in the generally farcical handling of that extremely astute Oriental. In the cartoon "China in the Bull Shop," rival Continental shopkeepers, who had got no orders out of him, are consumed with envy and curiosity. If Punch is to be believed, their envy was ill-founded. Li Hung Chang displayed a boundless inquisitiveness, but there was "nothing doing" in the way of business between him and his hosts. Punch drew mainly on his imagination for the events of the visit, and ascribed to Li Hung Chang a number of topical Chinese proverbs. The best of them—"Half an official welcome is better than an ill-bred mobbing"—refers to his arrival in the "dead" season.

Two Modern Hamlets

Lord Rosebery resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party in June. While still in office he had estranged the Radical stalwarts by his Imperialist foreign policy and his heretical view of the necessity of converting the "predominant partner," England, before attempting to revive Home Rule. His Government, as one of his colleagues put it, were condemned to the task of "ploughing the sands." In the intervening year the gulf that severed him from the stalwarts and the Nonconformist conscience had been widened by his refusal to join in Mr. Gladstone's Armenian crusade, and henceforth he decided to "plough a lonely furrow." In later years he made occasional dramatic interventions, but his official career, like that of his contemporary at Eton, Lord Randolph Churchill, closed before he was fifty.

THE CHESTERFIELD HAMLET

Lord R-s-b-ry (in leading rôle):

"The 'Party's' out of joint;—O, cursèd spite,

That ever I was 'asked' to set it right!"

Act i, scene 5, Mr. Punch's edition.

Our relations with the United States were bettered at the opening of 1897 by the signing of the Arbitration Treaty adjusting the Venezuelan question. In Europe events did not conduce to diminish our unpopularity. It was the year of the brief Greco-Turkish war, which revived old divisions of opinion at home. Punch was no lover of the Turk; he realized the difficulties of King George, whom he depicted as Hamlet at Athens, recognizing (like Lord Rosebery) that the "time was out of joint" and deploring "the cursed spite that he was ever born to set it right"; but he supported Lord Salisbury in severely rebuking the hundred M.P.'s who had sent the King a message of encouragement. The verses, modelled on Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," disparaged the message as mere gaseous talk, which did not mean business, and was bound to end in smoke. Criticism of the Kaiser becomes more animated than moderate; the frequent prosecutions for lèse-majesté, and the famous pamphlet, in which Professor Quidde of Munich ingeniously satirized the Kaiser's megalomania in an historical essay on the aberrations of Caligula, inspire a caustic open letter to Wilhelm II, the gist of which is that, though old enough to know better, he was still the victim of the capricious extravagance of youth:—

Formerly I imagined that throughout Germany, and from time to time in Russia, Austria, or in Italy, an imperial but soaringly human boy was lifting his glass and crying, "Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!" amid the clatter of swords and the admiring shouts of a profusely-decorated soldiery. Now I know that a stout gentleman is doing these things, and reducing his hearers to an abyss of melancholy at his dismal failure in dignity. A boy who played fantastic tricks with the telegraph-wires incurred but a mild censure. What shall be said of a middle-aged and pompous party whose pleasure it is to play practical jokes that set two nations by the ears?

The "Raid" and its Aftermath

Yours is a great inheritance, greatly won by heroic deeds. Your people are by nature the mildest and most loyal, and by tradition and education the most thoughtful, in Europe. But mild and loyal as they are their minds must rise in revolt against a sovereign who reproduces in the crudest form the stale theories of divine right and arbitrary government, whose one notion of administration is to increase his stupendous military forces by taxation while diminishing the number of his reasonable critics by imprisonment. You have travelled, cocked hat in hand, to capital after capital, you have dismissed Bismarck, you have made yourself into the tin god of a great monarchy, you have shouted, reviewed, toasted, speechified, you have donned a thousand different uniforms, you have dabbled in the drama, you have been assisted in the design of allegorical cartoons, you have composed hymns to Ægir, and Heaven knows how many others—and to-day the result of all your restless and misdirected energies is that you have added not only to your army but also to the foreign ill-wishers of your country and to her internal distractions. And at this moment, in spite of the millions of men and money that go to form her army, Germany is weaker than she has been at any moment since the Empire was proclaimed at Versailles. This feat, Sir, you have accomplished, and such credit as attaches to it is yours alone. Where and how do you propose to end?

In lighter vein but with equal disrespect Punch satirizes the instructions to Prince Henry on starting with the naval expedition to Kiao-Chow. In particular Punch dwells, not unfairly, on the Kaiser's insistence on the sanctity of his mission. It was to be a Holy war:—

To preach abroad in each distinct locality

The gospel of my hallowed personality.

Another was added to the long list of Indian Frontier wars in the Tirah campaign. Punch did well to recognize the loyalty of native officers, N.C.O.s and men, while saluting the achievements of the Gordon Highlanders in his verses to their Commander, Colonel Mathias. The men were "doing splendidly," but as Colonel Punch says in one cartoon, "Yes, they always do; but is this 'forward policy' worth all this?" And a similar misgiving is revealed in an article implying that so-called "peaceful missions" to barbarian kings were too often closely followed up by punitive expeditions. The "repercussions" of the Jameson Raid were not overlooked. Punch made merry over President Krüger's famous claim for "moral and intellectual damages"; but his criticisms are not confined to the Boers. The proceedings of the South African Committee of Inquiry prompted a parallel between Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes, in which the Indian proconsul remarks to the new Empire-builder: "I succeeded and was impeached; you fail—and are called as a witness."

Of the second or Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the last great State pageant of her reign, one may say that it was more than a great act of veneration and loyalty; it was a celebration of Imperial expansion and solidarity which formed a reassuring interlude on the eve of events that were destined to test that solidarity to the utmost. For 1898 was the year of Fashoda, of the conflict over the "open door" in China, and of the Spanish-American war. I put Fashoda first, because the incident came perilously near embroiling us in war with France. It was not an isolated expression of French resentment, since the general attitude of British public opinion over the Dreyfus affair had greatly inflamed Anglophobia in France. Punch, like the majority of Englishmen, was strongly Dreyfusard. Early in the year he published his cartoon, based on Holman Hunt's picture, in which Zola figures as the "Dreyfus Scapegoat"—a reference to the famous "J'accuse" article—and a similar spirit is shown in the "Dreyfus Dictionary," in which strong hostility is shown to all the leading actors on the anti-Dreyfus side. On a large and sincerely patriotic section of the French public, exasperated by what they considered to be a gratuitous interference in a domestic affair, Punch's comments on the occupation of Fashoda in the Sudan by Colonel Marchand operated like vitriol on a raw wound. They certainly were not flattering to one, who if not a very discreet was a very gallant soldier. Beginning with a farcical burlesque of the stealthy invasion of the French, they go on from ridicule to contempt. "Marchez, Marchand," says John Bull to the Colonel, ironically congratulating him on having had a "nice little scientific trip." The last straw was the cartoon in which John Bull says: "Go away, go away," to a French organ-grinder with a little monkey in uniform perched on his instrument, which is labelled Fashoda. The organ-grinder says, "Eh? What you give me if I go?" and John Bull retorts: "I'll give you something if you don't." A "furious Gaul" broke Mr. Punch's windows, and now we can understand and forgive the retaliation. It may have been an added sting to say, as Punch did on the best authority, that Colonel Marchand had been really saved from the Dervishes by Kitchener's success at Omdurman. Anyhow, it was fortunate that Lord Kitchener, who had served with the French in 1870 in Chanzy's army, was in charge of the negotiations with Colonel Marchand on the spot. The French Government did not give way until six weeks had passed, during which Irish members had avowed their sympathy with France, and Punch addressed her with serious warnings and even bellicose threats. For the peaceful adjustment of what looked like a casus belli, we certainly owe more to Lord Kitchener than to Punch. The battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, was the culminating point of a carefully planned campaign which had lasted more than two years, and was duly celebrated in Punch's cartoon of the re-occupation of Khartum, with the statue of Gordon, avenged after thirteen years, in the background. Lord Kitchener lost no time in issuing his appeal for funds to erect the Gordon Memorial College in Khartum, to which Punch dedicated his cartoon of "Dreaming True." The agreement delimiting the respective spheres of England and France in North Africa was not signed till January 19, 1899, but Punch had foreshadowed the issue in his cartoon of John Bull as a "Fixture" in Egypt, his features replacing the battered countenance of the Sphinx.

"FOR QUEEN AND EMPIRE!!"

It cannot be said that Punch was any more conciliatory to the United States over the Spanish-American war than he had been to France over Fashoda. He is sympathetic to the young King of Spain, shown as a small boy on the throne threatened by Bellona and Revolution. Both in prose and verse he is distinctly hostile to the U.S.A., ironically crediting them with no desire to annex Cuba, but talking almost in the same breath of "filibustering" and "spread-eagling." And when Cuba was acquired Punch professes to regard it as anything but an unmixed blessing. Spain is shown saying to Uncle Sam: "Well, you wanted him! You've got him! And I wish you joy of him!"—Cuba being represented as an ill-conditioned little coloured boy. Punch's reading of the Treaty of Peace was that Uncle Sam would agree to anything if Spain would take Cuba back; while in another cartoon European resentment of American intrusion into European politics is typified by a very "sniffy" Europa asking Uncle Sam if he is "any relation of the late Colonel Monroe." All this did not make for good blood, or the promotion of that friendly understanding applauded in Punch's letter to Mr. Howells, but it may be pleaded in extenuation that some of the sanest and wisest and noblest Americans were not at all happy about the Spanish war, and that Charles Eliot Norton openly denounced the mixture of hypocrisy and thoughtlessness with which his countrymen had plunged into it.

"GOD SAVE THE KING!"

The "Open Door" in China

The conflicting commercial interests of various Powers in China are also the subject of a good deal of frank comment at the expense of Russia and Germany. In one cartoon the British Lion is shown with a barrow-load of goods denied entrance by the Bear at the "free port" of Talienwan. In another, the "Open Door" is reduced to a farce, being occupied by the Bear armed to the teeth and a German entrenched in tariffs. A third, entitled "The Sentinels," is based on the view that the occupation of Port Arthur left us no alternative but to occupy Wei-hai-wei in order to restore the equilibrium upset by Russia. The powerlessness of the young Emperor, who had proposed a scheme of reforms, is clearly indicated in the dialogue in which the "Son of Heaven" discusses his Aunt—the formidable Dowager-Empress. Punch had a friendly greeting for the young Queen of Holland on the attainment of her majority, referring to the House of Orange as a link with our Royal family; but for the most part wherever he saw a crowned head he hit it. The lèse-majesté campaign in Germany had led to the prosecution of Herr Trojan, the editor of the Kladderadatsch, to whom Punch offered his "Prosit," regretting that there was not also the companion offence of Humanitätsbeleidigung for which punishment could be awarded to "the Imperial buffoon." This was the year in which the young Tsar Nicholas put forward his proposal for general disarmament, but Punch's comments are very much on the lines of his satirical report of an imaginary meeting of the Nations summoned by the Arbitration League in 1894. Everybody was anxious to disarm so long as somebody else set the example. This scepticism now finds vent in the cartoon in which Peace suggests disarmament to Vulcan, understanding that the Tsar's proposal had already seriously interfered with his trade. Vulcan promptly undeceives her. He never was busier—and on orders for Russia.

The assassination of the Empress of Austria in September passed without mention in Punch, an omission probably accidental rather than deliberate, since she was popular in England as a great sportswoman. She was also a generous and enlightened patron of the arts, unconventional in her ways, blameless in her life, yet doomed by malign fate to the supreme infelicity of grandeur.

Gladstone and "C.-B."

Punch certainly missed a great opportunity for a chivalrous tribute to a lady whose unhappiness was greater than her rank, to say nothing of a text for a sermon on the notorious ineptitude of assassins in the choice of victims. Still, it was a harder theme than that which inspired Punch's most notable memorial verses in 1898—the death of Mr. Gladstone. The writer contrasts his end with that of those who have died in their early prime or the ripeness of their manhood, and continues:—

But you, O veteran of a thousand fights,

Whose toil had long attained its perfect end—

Death calls you not as one that claims his rights,

But gently as a friend.

For though that matchless energy of mind

Was firm to front the menace of decay,

Your bodily strength on such a loss declined

As only Death could stay.

So then with you 'tis well, who after pain,

After long pain, have reached your rest at last;

But we—ah, when shall England mould again

This type of splendour past?

Noble in triumph, noble in defeat,

Leader of hopes that others held forlorn,

Strong in the faith that looks afar to meet

The flush of Freedom's morn.

And now, with all your armour laid aside,

Swift eloquence your sword, and, for your shield,

The indomitable courage that defied

The fortune of the field—

As in the noontide of your high command,

So in the final hour when darkness fell,

Submissive still to that untiring Hand

That orders all things well—

We bear you to your resting-place apart

Between the ranks where ancient foe and friend,

Kin by a common sorrow at the heart

Silent together bend.

A new leader of the Liberal Party emerged in 1899 in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Sir William Harcourt is shown wishing his successor joy—rather ironically—and Mr. Balfour, in the cartoon of "The Wrestlers," acknowledges the strength of his opponent after their first round. "C.-B.'s" promotion to leadership coincided with the discussion of the Tsar's disarmament proposals, which the Liberal leader was destined to revive later on, and in May, representatives of Great Britain attended the Hague Conference convened on the Tsar's initiative. The enthusiasm which Punch had displayed a generation earlier over the Paris Conference had now evaporated, and his contributions to the subject are marked by farcical scepticism. The Tsar and the Kaiser are shown in one picture holding, at some uncertain date in the future, an imaginary review of what remains of the Russian Army, the soldiers resembling Stigginses armed with umbrellas. Punch's twelve suggestions are a reductio ad absurdum of the Tsar's idea, the first being a proposal to postpone the coming into operation of the new rules for 1,000 years. The list of "Some Probable Agenda" for the Hague Conference, published when it was already sitting, is pure burlesque. For example: "Declarations of war shall in future be abolished as being calculated to wound the feelings of opponents." In the same number there is a large picture of Imperial Bruin drinking to Peace, coupling the toast with the name of Victoria, Empress of India (the Queen had just celebrated her eightieth birthday), with a batch of papers, labelled "Further demands in China," behind his back. The political atmosphere was not conducive to the calm discussion of international peace. Punch's espousal of the cause of Dreyfus became increasingly vehement and provocative. In May, under the heading "A bas la Vérité," Truth is shown saying "I must get out" (of her well), while the French generals reply: "Not if we know it." A month later, in "At Last," Tenniel depicts indignant Justice triumphing with the Sword of Revision, and trampling Lies and Forgery under foot. The universal preoccupation with the topic is illustrated in Phil May's picture of the little street boy crying because his father "has got Drifus fever." In September, Napoleon's shade is shown scornfully surveying a group of degenerate generals eagerly discussing a "secret dossier", and saying, "Vive l'armée! Yes! But it was not with generals like you that I won my campaigns!" In the face of death Punch has always shown restraint, and, whether from ignorance or of set purpose, wrote of President Faure:—

He sought to serve his country's needs

And dying died with harness on.

But the address to France "in memory of the verdict of Rennes" amounts to an indictment of the whole nation:—

Who speaks of pardon? Nay, for France there's none,

Nor can be never till the damnèd blot

Be wiped away and expiation done.

Then, not till then,

May be renewed the bonds that once have been,

Since we, whatever else, are honest men.

Meanwhile, we know you not!

Go, hide your face until your heart is clean.

The Verdict of Rennes

Punch, it is true, spoke with a different voice on the same page, but it is doubtful whether his levity was calculated to heal the effect of his self-righteous indignation:—

SOME FURTHER SELF-DENYING ORDINANCES

To be observed by those who wish to testify their righteous indignation at the Rennes verdict by boycotting next year's Paris Exposition, and in the most material and convincing manner to bring about the complete rehabilitation of the unfortunate prisoner.

It is proposed—

That no more French leave shall be taken by individuals desirous of absenting themselves from their duties or annexing other persons' property. Undergraduates will faithfully attend every lecture, city clerks will bury no more aunts, cooks will cease to entertain policemen, and there will be a close time for burglary, kleptomania and kissing under the mistletoe.

That the use of French chalk shall be abandoned in ballrooms, and dancing given up altogether, except on village greens.

That "Frenchmen," alias red-legged partridges, shall be shot on sight, and given to the retriever to eat.

That elbow-grease shall be substituted for French polish.

That French beans shall be cut and given the cold shoulder at table.

That the French language (which at the present moment chiefly consists of the verb conspuer) shall be tabooed, except in the case of solecisms like nom de plume, double entendre, à l'outrance, and so forth. Café, coupé and similar words shall be pronounced "caif," "coop," etc., as in Canada. Dépôt shall be "depott"; sang froid, au revoir, tableaux vivants and the like shall be similarly anglicized. Boulogne to be called "Boolong," if mentioned at all, which is inadvisable. No more bull-fights to be attended.

That French grey shall in future mean, as circumstances demand, either black or white.

Towards America Punch shows a tempered benevolence in his open letter to President McKinley, whom he warns against the new-fangled policy of Imperial expansion. His welcome to Mr. Choate, on his appointment as American Ambassador, is entirely cordial: "There are only two things necessary to make your visit a success. Don't believe all you hear, and read your Punch regularly." I do not know whether Mr. Choate took the second piece of advice or not; the first was quite unnecessary. He was a huge success as an Ambassador, though his chief claim on the abiding affection of England rests on his noble and self-sacrificing exertions, in extreme old age and up to the day of his death, in furthering the cause of the Allies and strengthening the brotherhood in arms of America and Great Britain.

Lord Milner Censured

Meanwhile events in South Africa were rapidly approaching a critical stage. At Mr. Chamberlain's request, a conference between Sir Alfred Milner and President Krüger was held at Bloemfontein early in June to adjust the conflicting claims of the Transvaal Boers and the Uitlanders, whose position Sir Alfred Milner had compared to that of "helots." Punch summed up the conference in two cartoons. In the first, headed "Moral Suasion," Milner is seen endeavouring to pacify Krüger as a cow: "I will sit on the stile and continue to smile." In the second, "The Smile that Failed," the High Commissioner remarks:—

I have sat on this Stile

And continued to Smile,

But it's had no effect on the Cow.

THE SMILE THAT FAILED

Sir Alfr-d M-ln-r again sings:—

"There was a 'High Com.' who said, 'Now

I've conferred with this wily old cow!

I have sat on this stile,

And continued to smile,

But it's had no effect on the Cow!'" (Exit.)

"Yer know, them Boers 'as been storin' guns and hambition for years!"

The Boer War

A very different reading of the situation is given in the letter to Sir Alfred Milner published a week later. Here the High Commissioner is heavily censured not for the failure of the conference, but for the "ridiculous" and "frothy" tone of his dispatch about "helots," and for his rash, impetuous and overbearing temper. In July Punch was still inclined to make light of the whole business, apparently expecting an amicable settlement, and in a burlesque "Story of a Crisis" in "Nabothsland" reflected adversely if obliquely on the pretensions of the Uitlanders. Yet early in September sympathy with the Uitlanders underlies the verses condemning the inconsistency of Little Englanders, who in theory espouse the cause of all oppressed nationalities but their own. The damning blot on the Uitlanders' cause was that they were English. If they had been Finns, for instance, the Little Englander would have shed his last drop of ink in their defence. This was at the lowest a good debating point, and at all points preferable to the unfortunate picture ridiculing the unmilitary appearance of the Boers, President Krüger being shown in the act of reviewing his veterans, a number of fat, unwieldy farmers. The declaration of war came early in October, and Punch unhesitatingly declared his support of the decision in the cartoon "Plain English," where John Bull says to the Boers: "As you will fight, you shall have it. This time it is a fight to a finish." So it was; but few, except Lord Wolseley, expected that the finish would only be reached after a long, obstinate and costly struggle. Lord Wolseley's warning in September, 1899, foreshadows the more famous anticipation of the duration of the Great War made by Lord Kitchener fifteen years later. Many other parallels and contrasts are suggested in Punch's pages as he reflects the varying moods of England during the chequered progress of the campaign. The divisions of opinion at home were more acute than in 1914. Moreover, we entered on the Boer war in a spirit of confidence and complacency which rendered the initial reverses more surprising and depressing. Otherwise the alternations of despondency and elation; the criticisms of mismanagement, laxity and indifference, want of intelligence and imagination; and the charges against the enemy of disregarding the rules of the game have a curiously familiar ring. Punch reflected popular opinion in resenting the "detachment" of Mr. Balfour in describing our reverses as "inevitable," and in rebuking the optimism of other Ministers; in his demand for the "facts"; in attributing to President Krüger gratitude to the Opposition for their assistance; in his cheering message to Baden-Powell for "keeping his end up" in Mafeking. Yet he commented severely on the diamond speculators for their "operations" during the war; he had a good word for Lord Morley when he was attacked as a Little Englander; and a strong rebuke for the agencies which announced tours to the South African battlefields as early as April, 1900. Punch had shown John Bull as Mark Tapley—when Kimberley had been relieved and Lord Roberts was advancing—but his comments on the publication of the Spion Kop dispatches reveal grave dissatisfaction with the conduct of the Natal campaign:—

SOME ONE HAD BLUNDERED

Sir Redvers devised an impossible plan

Which he trusted to Warren, an obstinate man;

Lord Roberts sent home some dispatches, and there

He freely expressed what he thought of the pair.

The War Office published these documents plain,

To the joy of their foes, and the grief of the sane;

And while they were reading them, all the world wondered,

And promptly concluded that everyone blundered.

Humorous relief was provided by the report that Krüger had encouraged his burghers by circulating the news that London had been captured by the Russians, a method foreshadowing the imaginative exploits of the Germans in the late war. It was based, however, on an incontestable fact—our unpopularity in both hemispheres. The Boer delegates had been welcomed in America, though Punch sought to discount the effect of their propaganda by a cartoon in which Columbia reassures John Bull: "Don't mind those noisy boys of mine. You know, my dear, it's Election Time."

The Anglophobe feeling was much more vocal in France, and Punch gives a curious account of the Transvaal section of the Paris Exhibition in October, where signatures were invited and freely appended to addresses to the two Presidents, the bust of Krüger was crowned with palm branches, poetic eulogies were circulated, and the walls covered with "Mort aux Anglais," "Chamberlain est un vache," etc. Meanwhile, Mafeking had been relieved, and Punch had defended the "loud extremes of passionate joy" which added the now well-nigh forgotten verb "to Maffick" to our current vocabulary. Lord Roberts's uninterrupted advance to Pretoria had moved Punch, with many others, to declare very prematurely on June 6th that the war was practically over, though it lasted nearly two years longer, and the slow progress of "rounding up" the Boers actually prompted the suggestion from a leading paper that Lord Kitchener should be recalled and Lord Roberts sent out again. President Krüger's flitting is illustrated in a cartoon in which "Oom Paul" is seen in a small boat, with two millions of treasure, quitting the sinking ship Transvaal; while in a set of verses, written after reading of his triumphal progress through France, Punch prophesies for him a green old age in Grosvenor Square. The C.I.V.'s returned in the autumn and were welcomed by the City of London; and shortly afterwards "a Mr. Williams offered respectful apologies to Satan for mentioning him in the same breath with Lord Kitchener." Punch, even in his most Chauvinistic mood, never indulged in such abuse of the Boer generals, and at the end of 1900 paid a well-deserved compliment to the elusive De Wet in his cartoon of "De Wet o' de Wisp."

China and Australia

Before dealing with the subsequent progress of the "guerrilla war," we may turn aside for a moment to other developments overseas. In an epigram on "The Millennium" in August, 1900, Punch writes:—

In some problematic day

Strife and wrath shall fade away,

Crews no longer blessing pouring

On the coxes who have cox'd,

When the Boers shall cease from boring

And the Boxers shall be boxed.

The revolt of the Boxers in China and the joint expedition of the European Powers assisted by Japan to relieve the Legations in Peking are treated in two cartoons. In the first, in which the Chinese Dragon is seen in the background, Japan expresses her readiness to help the European Powers. She is glad to join them, "but permit me to remark that if some of you hadn't interfered when I had him down, it would have saved all this trouble"—a legitimate comment on the intervention of Germany and Russia after the Chino-Japanese war. In the second, "The Closed Door," Europa is seen armed with an axe, preparing to break her way in to the relief of the Legations. Apocryphal reports of what was happening in China reached a high-water mark of mendacity this summer, and the English Press did not escape the charge of credulity, to put it mildly. Reports of the death of the Dowager Empress were so common as to inspire Punch with a poetic homage to the "lady of the charmed life," and when she shifted her capital, he showed Krüger looking over a wall at her exodus with the remark: "My idea!"

It was in 1900 also that the Australian Commonwealth Bill was introduced by Mr. Chamberlain. Punch in his first reference to the measure, animated by a recognition of Australia's loyalty in the Boer war, assumed that Clause 74, abolishing the appeal to the Privy Council, would be passed. Australia is seen showing the new latchkey she has had made, as she wanted a little more freedom, and Britannia declares her readiness to trust her. This proved premature, and a little later on Punch, in a letter to the Australian delegates, waxes sarcastic over the "niggling, pedantic and pettifogging inquisition which it was proposed to institute into the demand for Federation"—à propos of the Privy Council Appeals. As a matter of fact, the clause was amended, because the States were not at one on the point, and all seven Chief Justices favoured the maintenance of the right of Appeal.

Lord Roberts returned to England at the close of the year, and Punch saluted his arrival in "The Home-coming of the Chief." His great services are acknowledged, not least his self-sacrifice in the hour of bitter personal loss:—

Ah! but while a nation's cries

Storm against our sullen skies

'Midst the madness and the mirth

Flung about your victor's way,

If behind the brave array

All the hidden heart were known,

Save for love of England's name

Gladly would you yield the prize,

Glory, triumph, wealth and fame,

Could you win one grace alone,

Could you have your boy again

Home from where he takes his rest

Lying under alien earth

By Colenso's dreadful plain,

With the Cross above his breast.

"REQUIESCAT!"

That is truly and finely said, and yet how strangely the epithet "dreadful" sounds to those who have found all the vocabulary of horror beggared by the experiences of the Great War! The opening of the New Year was clouded by the passing of Queen Victoria. In all the sixty years of Punch's existence, even in the moods when his comments on Court and Crown had been frank to the verge of audacity, loyalty to the person of the Sovereign had never failed. His adverse criticism was seldom malicious, and was almost always animated by a desire that the Sovereign should never fall below the standard of noblesse oblige. The days of resentment against the Queen's prolonged seclusion had long passed. She had ceased to be "the Royal Recluse," and was unsparing of herself in the discharge of her duties up to within a few weeks of her death. When she spoke in one of her messages of "her beloved people," there could be no question of her sincerity, or of the devotion with which her love was returned.

As Mr. Balfour said significantly of her: "Even those who loved not England loved her," and in later years those who came to scoff at her memory remained to praise:—

THE QUEEN

Born May 24, 1819. Died January 22, 1901.

The tears we disallow to lesser ill

Here is no shame for English eyes to shed,

Because the noblest heart of all is still—

Because the Queen lies dead.

Grief asks for words, yet silent grief were well;

Vain is desire, as passionate prayer was vain;

Not all our love can bring, by any spell,

Breath to those lips again.

Ah! had but Death forgone his royal claim,

Demanding ransom, life for life the price,

How loyalty had leaped to kiss the flame

Of such a sacrifice!

God knows, in many a need this thing has been—

Light hearts for her have dared the desolate grave;

From other hurt their blood has saved the Queen,

From Death it could not save.

And of the dregs to drink from sorrow's cup

This is most bitter, that with life's release

She might not leave her children folded up

Between the wings of Peace.

Yet, for a solace in that darkest hour,

When even Kings have found themselves alone,

Over a people's love she kept her power

Firm as her fathers' throne.

Candid Friends and Hostile Critics

The "Khaki" election of the previous autumn, at which the Government had appealed to the country to decide the issue of fighting the war to a finish, had resulted in the return of the Unionists by a majority of 134, but did not abate the activities of the "Stop the War" party. They were stimulated to further and more vehement protests by the policy of the Concentration Camps, and the loss of life through epidemics caused by the compulsory herding together of those who were interned. Between the denunciations of British "brutalities" by the German Press and the talk of "hecatombs of slaughtered babes" by British Liberals—between "candid friends" and hostile critics—there was not much to choose. Punch invoked the shade of Bismarck to rebuke the excesses of the German journalists; he ridiculed Miss Emily Hobhouse's descriptions of Concentration Camp horrors by giving a list of the luxuries which were not provided there—hairpins, curling-tongs, etc.—and in a cartoon at the close of the year represented the "Stop the War" group as making such a noise that Peace's voice could not be heard. Cleavage was shown in the ranks of the Opposition, and Punch did not fail to emphasize the divergences between Mr. Asquith and the Imperialist Liberals on the one side, and "C.-B." and Sir William Harcourt on the other. General Baden-Powell arrived in England in July, and Punch's greeting aptly describes his mood and that of the man in the street:—

Time has flown; but not forgotten is the tale of Mafeking!

Who that lived that Day in London could forget its echoing ring?

How the Town broke into bunting, Piccadilly to Mile End!

How each man for joy saluted every other man as friend!

How we crowded to the city in an orgy of delight,

Tumbled out of bed for gladness, waving Union Jacks all night!

Even if we overdid it after deadening suspense,

Better this than anti-British Queen's Hall windbags' insolence!

Though we later coined a playful word, our soberer sense to show,

I would rather "maffick" daily than abet a treacherous foe!

In the controversies that arose over the treatment of various British generals, I may note that Punch supported the motion for an inquiry into the circumstances under which General Colvile was deprived of his command, which was negatived in the House by 262 votes to 248. Over the still more thorny question of General Buller's conduct of the Natal campaign he preserved an impartial attitude, while implying that the general would not exploit his grievance for political purposes. Early in the war Punch paid a rather left-handed compliment to the war correspondents; they are represented as welcoming war because it brought them remunerative employment. In the autumn of 1901 we find him pressing their claims for war medals, and observing that the Press had been shut out but not shut up.

The war, he also notes on the authority of a daily paper, had produced more poets than any similar crisis in English history. A more striking parallel with recent war-products is to be found in Punch's review of the depression, discontent and decline of trade which it had begun to cause before hostilities ceased. This is clearly shown in July, 1901, in the Preface to Vol. cxxi, where Punch rebukes John Bull, no longer in his Mark Tapley vein, for listening to pessimists, and encouraging a seditious and pernicious Press. In the opening stages of the war Punch had been none too friendly to Lord Methuen, but he was righteously indignant at the "Ghoul-like ecstasy" of the Irish Members who cheered the news of the defeat and capture of that gallant soldier in the spring of 1902. The end of the war came in June, and is chronicled in Punch's "Cease Fire" cartoon. The happiest incident of the surrender was the speech made by Lord Kitchener to the Boer delegates at Vereeniging when he said that "if he had been one of them, he would have been proud to have done so well in the field as they had done." Punch did well to record it, for it reflected the national respect felt for a stubborn foe. For confirmation we need only turn to the laconic entry in the National Register for August 16, 1902: "The Boer generals, Botha, De Wet and Delarey ... proceeded to London, and had an enthusiastic popular reception." Subsequent events have justified the somewhat complacent remark attributed to John Bull in the cartoon two months later, à propos of the grant of £3,000,000 to the Transvaal, and the Boers' "Appeal to the Civilized World": "Look here, my friend, stick that up, if you like; but I think you'll find that I talk less than the others and give more."

Lord Kitchener's Return

Lord Kitchener had returned in July, and Punch's welcome ends on a prophetic note:—

You're a worker from of old,

K. of K.

Pomps and pæans leave you cold,

K. of K.

You would like to land in mufti,

You would hurry down the dock

Not in trappings, plumed and tufty,

But in checks and billycock!

And you haven't, now It's over,

Come to stay;

Nor to lie at length in clover,

But to change your train for Dover,

K. of K.

For, although the work's appalling

Which should have you here at hand,

Yet you've heard the East a-calling

Out of India's coral strand;

And, as soon as time and place

Let our feelings find release,

And we've called you, to your face,

First in War and first in Peace;—

Thither where the Empire needs you,

K. of K.,

And your own "Ubique" leads you,

Lies your way!

Mr. Roosevelt had succeeded to the Presidency of the United States on the assassination of Mr. McKinley, and Punch, after condoling with Columbia, saluted the "Rough-Rider."

Our closer relations with Japan and their effect on Russia are symbolized in the cartoon in which she remarks as a tertia anything but gaudens: "H'm—I don't like these confidences." In Europe the subject that provoked Punch's closest attention was the treatment of the Poles by Germany. There is an amusing story in "Charivaria," probably apocryphal, but not beyond the possibilities of Prussian pedantry:—

Fifty Prussian schoolgirls have been arrested at Gnesen on a charge of high treason, and the police are said to have their eyes on several Kindergartens, where it is reported that the children have been playing "I'm the king of the Castle" and other games suggestive of Majestätsbeleidigung.

But the whole essence of "Prussification" is summed up in the last quatrain of a brilliant adaptation of the "Pied Piper of Hamelin" to the situation in Posen:—

You can take a Pole, as I understand,

And play on his nerves with a German Band;

But you can't convert his natural temper, or

Get him to jig for a German Emperor.

Lord Salisbury had resigned in the summer of 1902, and Mr. Balfour had succeeded to the Premiership. It was not exactly a case of "Amurath to Amurath," but with nephew succeeding to uncle, and the presence of another nephew and a son-in-law in the Cabinet, there was some ground for the once familiar gibes against the "Hotel Cecil." Punch was not unfriendly to the new Premier, and applauded his handling of the negotiations initiated by Germany to secure a British subsidy to the German-controlled Baghdad railway. In "The Trap that Failed," the British Lion "doesn't like the look of it and resolves to go round the other way"; and the verses (after Omar Khayyám) indicate the surprise of "the Potter of Potsdam" at the unexpected firmness of Mr. Balfour. The gradual improvement of our relations with other foreign Powers is symbolized in "The Chain of Friendship," showing King Edward joining in a dance with France, Italy and Portugal; while the strengthening of the Anglo-French Entente is illustrated in the cartoon in which King Edward, presenting the British Lion, says to the French President: "See, M. Loubet, he offers you his paw." An element of reserve, however, is shown in a dialogue in French, mildly satirizing the new Anglomania; and in the burlesque sketch foreshadowing the ludicrous and disastrous influence on both countries of the Entente—e.g. the re-introduction of the duel on the initiative of the Daily Mail; the presentation of Waterloo Station to the French and, as a set-off, the presentation of the Keys of Calais to the Lord Mayor of London by the Paris Municipal Council. To turn from gay to grave, this was the year of the assassination of the King and Queen of Serbia, recorded in the cartoon of "Murder as the King Maker."

Ireland, Army Reform, and India

Home politics fill a larger space in 1903 in Punch's pages than for some years previously. Remedial legislation in Ireland inspires the cartoon of Mr. Balfour as St. Patrick—a saint invaluable to the harassed cartoonist—driving out the snakes of sedition. The basis of Mr. Wyndham's Land Purchase Act is well shown in the cartoon illustrating the financial relations of the two countries. Tenant and landlord both present money-boxes labelled "Land Purchase" to John Bull, asking him to "put a thrifle in them"; John Bull scratches his head, but he pays all the same. The difficulties of Mr. Brodrick in securing national support for Army Reform are set forth in the verses on "The Unhappy Warrior" (after Wordsworth), and the cartoon "Ready, aye unready," with John Bull asleep on sentry duty—à propos of the Report of the Royal Commission on the South African war. A little later, John Bull's short memory is satirized in his protest against the size of his new watch-dog. Forgetting that he had clamoured for increase, he now declares that he cannot afford him.

At the opening of the year Punch had lavishly chronicled the glories of the Delhi Durbar. "The Pilgrims to the East" included three members of his staff, who did justice to the occasion both with pen and pencil, and Sambourne's fine cartoon, "Vivat Imperator," forms an instructive pendant and palinode to Punch's anti-imperialist misgivings of 1876, when he regarded the assumption of the new title as a piece of shoddy Disraelian Orientalism.

Lord Salisbury's death in 1903 removed a great figure, whose prestige has grown with the knowledge available in later years. We have learned to revise the old view of his political stature as compared with that of Lord Beaconsfield, and to reject the often-quoted but quite erroneous saying attributed to Bismarck that he was "a lath painted to resemble iron." Punch's memorial tribute admits that he "nothing common did or mean":—

When Lord Salisbury, resigning the Premiership, practically retired from public life, a gap was made in the House of Lords no living man might fill. Only once has he returned to the scene of memorable labour. He came with the rest of the cloaked Peers to pay homage to King Edward the Seventh when first he seated himself on the throne which he had long regarded from the point of view of the Cross Benches. There was hope that the ex-Premier would, from time to time, still give the House and the country the advantage of his sagacious counsel, the pleasure of listening to his brilliant speech. But, like the other tall man in another chair, "his heart was worn with work." He was sick of the sometimes mean rivalry of political life, and felt he had earned his leisure.

In a manner unique Lord Salisbury had the faculty of standing apart from his fellow men, regarding them and appraising them as if he himself did not belong to the genus. It was as if a man from Mars had visited our planet, studying its pygmy population with amused, on the whole scornful interest. With one exception he was the only statesman who never bent the knee to the Baal known in political chatter as The Man in the Street. The exception is, of course, the Duke of Devonshire, who had further kinship with the Marquis in respect of absolute freedom from desire to get anything for himself out of the game of politics. Intellectually and morally—this latter more precious because more rare—Lord Salisbury uplifted and maintained at high level the standard of English public life. He was a man whom foreigners, equally with his own countrymen, unreservedly trusted, because of a personal quality worth the whole armoury of diplomacy.

With his withdrawal from the stage, the House of Lords as a debating assembly lost its chief attraction. It was worth sitting through a dreary couple of hours for the chance reward of hearing him speak. Whilst others discoursed he sat impassive, taking no note, making no sign of hearing, or caring about, what the noble lord on his legs said or left unspoken. Only a curious rapid movement of the crossed leg betokened cogitation, betrayed closest attention, and the framing of some sentences that would presently play about the adversary's head like forked lightning.

The Fiscal Fray

An event of greater immediate interest which coincided with the passing of Lord Salisbury was the resignation of Mr. Chamberlain. On his return from a strenuous and exhausting tour in South Africa, he had thrown himself with immense energy into the Tariff Reform campaign, and withdrew from the Cabinet in order to devote his entire energies to the prosecution of the cause. Punch's pages throughout the second half of 1903 furnish a lively chronicle of the progress of Mr. Chamberlain's crusade and the wonderful egg-dance of Mr. Balfour. Early in September the situation is portrayed in "The Parting of the Ways." Mr. Balfour, "long troubled by philosophic doubt," is shown on the road with a knapsack labelled "Treasury Returns" and "Board of Trade Returns," looking at a sign-post, one arm pointing to Chatsworth, the other to Highbury, and saying: "Well, now, I suppose I must really make up my mind."

A week later we have the Fiscal Hamlet in "The Unready Reckoner." Prince Arthur remarks: "O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not the art to reckon," while on the wall hangs a portrait of Mr. Chamberlain as Ophelia. In November, under the heading "An Eye for Effect," Punch exhibits "Foreign Competition" as a Guy on a barrow, with Mr. Chamberlain in charge and conversing with Mr. Balfour:—

Arthur: "Ain't you made 'im too 'orrible?"
Joe: "No fear! You can't make 'em too 'orrible!"

Simultaneously, Punch published a burlesque on the Daily Mail's canvass, with expressions of opinion from Henry James, Rudyard Kipling and Mr. A. B. Walkley. The Daily Express, not to be outdone, offered a prize of £25 to the owner of the first parrot taught to speak distinctly the phrase: "Your food will cost you more." The "folly of the fray" was not overlooked, but Punch did not misread its essential significance in his cartoon of Mr. Chamberlain in the guise of the political Ancient Mariner who had slain the albatross of Conservative unity.

Foreign politics once more dominated the scene in 1904, when the legacy of friction, bequeathed by Russia's intervention at the close of the Chino-Japanese war and her Manchurian policy after the "Boxer" outbreak, bore its inevitable fruit in the Russo-Japanese war. The sympathy of England with Japan is reflected in the pages of Punch. He rebuked the hissing of Russian performers at a performance in the provinces; but satirized the indignation generally expressed in Russia that Japan should have begun hostilities without a formal declaration, or, as Punch put it, without consulting Russia as to whether the date was convenient to her. The fervent patriotism of the Japanese army is cordially applauded: John Bull is shown in a mood of envy, thinking he must try to introduce it at home. The unfortunate Dogger Bank incident, when Admiral Rozhdestvensky's fleet, on their way out to the Far East, fired on a fleet of British trawlers, aroused great indignation, mixed with bitter satire of Russian nerves and thrasonical satisfaction. Punch published a scarifying parody of Campbell's "Battle of the Baltic" on this "famous victory" over a "hostile trawling fleet" engaged in "gutting plaice." Later on in "Admirals All" there is an equally sarcastic comment on the Report of the North Sea Court of Inquiry, at which the Russians were exculpated by an Austrian Admiral. Nor was Punch's indignation expressed against Russia alone. The acceptance of Russian orders by British coal exporters is chastised in a cartoon with the legend as under:—

Old King Coal

Was a sordid old soul,

And a sordid old soul was he:

He sold to the Russ,

And he didn't care a cuss,

And the Baltic fleet crossed the sea.

On the fall of Port Arthur, however, Punch did not forget to acknowledge the heroism of the defence: here, at least, "the honour of the Russian eagle was untarnished." The war ended in May, 1905, but before its close Russian internal unrest had become menacing and hampered the prosecution of hostilities. Punch read the signs of the times truly in his cartoon of Death as the Czar of all the Russias, with a figure holding a "Petition" lying slain at his feet; and again in his rather cruel verses to "The Little Father":—

THE LITTLE FATHER

Nichol, Nichol, little Czar,

How I wonder where you are!

You who thought it best to fly,

Being so afraid to die.

Now the sullen crowds are gone,

Now there's nought to fire upon;

Sweet your sleigh bells ring afar,

Tinkle, tinkle, little Czar.

Little Czar, with soul so small,

How are you a Czar at all?

Yours had been a happier lot

In some peasant's humble cot.

Yet to you was given a day

With a noble part to play,

As an Emperor and a Man;

When it came—"then Nicky ran."

Little Czar, beware the hour

When the people strikes at Power;

Soul and body held in thrall,

They are human after all.

Thrones that reek of blood and tears

Fall before the avenging years.

While you watch your sinking star,

Tremble, tremble, little Czar!

THE CZAR OF ALL THE RUSSIAS

The contrasted outlook in Russia and Japan is shown in "Peace and After"—gloom and storm in the one country, general rejoicing in the other. The signing of the Peace in October brought mutiny and insurrection in Russia, repressed for the moment by grape-shot and concessions. Punch distrusted the former method, and warned the Tsar through the mouth of Louis XVI: "Side with the people, Sire, while there is yet time. I was too late." The instalment of constitutional government granted was shorn of its grace by the antecedent display of ruthlessness. Punch typified this situation in his cartoon of the Tsar armed with a sword and leaning on a cannon, with corpses strewn around, and saying: "Now I think the way is clear for universal suffrage." But Punch was premature in saluting the first Duma—opened by the Tsar in person in May, 1906—as the Infant Hercules strangling the twin snakes of Bureaucracy and Despotism. It was the Duma which was strangled by these forces, of which the first was the more potent and malign.

Belgium and Germany

Another foreign monarch who came in for severe criticism in these years was King Leopold II of the Belgians. Quite recently he had been treated by Punch with a benevolence that bordered on fulsomeness. But 1904 was the year of the "Congo Atrocities," and Punch, in a cartoon modelled on the ancient Egyptian lines, compared him with the Pharaoh Rameses II whose scribes counted over the hands cut from his vanquished enemies. This was suggested by the stories of the similar treatment of the natives in the rubber plantations vouched for by the British Consul at Boma. The value of this evidence has since been impaired by the fact that the Consul in question was none other than Roger Casement. From Belgium to Germany the transition is easy. In the last two years of the Unionist administration, German aggressiveness is a constant theme of comment, mainly inspired by misgiving, occasionally enlivened by burlesque belittlement of scaremongers. To the latter category belongs the forecast, at the close of 1904, of the invasion of London, seized during a week-end exodus of its inhabitants. Nor should we fail to note the series of appreciative articles on life in Berlin in 1905, in which "Tom the Tourist" finds the German capital "one of the liveliest, pleasantest and handsomest of cities," and descants on its good beer, pleasant company, genial hospitality, and the absence of any sign of hatred of the British. The writer even goes so far as to compare the Sieges-Allée favourably with some of the statuary of London. But a different note is struck in the lines on the vicarious patriotism of those who objected to conscription; in the references to the inadequacy of our coast defences; in the satisfaction expressed in the appointment of Sir John Fisher as First Sea Lord, and the improvement in naval gunnery; and in the satire directed against the new German Chancellor, Count von Bülow, for his cynical "blague." As "Der Taubadler," he reproves President Roosevelt for Jingoism, and declares:—

Our passion for ruling the brine

Is based on a single and pure design—

To serve as a sort of Marine Police,

Patrons of Universal Peace.

Lord Roberts's warning speech at the London Chamber of Commerce in the late summer of 1902 had prompted the cartoon "The Call to Arms." John Bull, aroused from slumber and only half-awake, asks "What's wrong?" Lord Roberts, the warning warder, replies: "You are absolutely unfitted and unprepared for war!" whereon John Bull rejoins drowsily: "Am I? You do surprise me," and goes to bed again. Growing distrust of the Kaiser is shown in the cartoon in which he figures as "The Sower of Tares" after Millais's picture, while Punch simultaneously manifests his satisfaction at the strengthening of the Anglo-French Entente. The British working man, if Punch is to be believed, disliked all foreigners, but his pet aversion was "them blooming Germans." There was, at any rate, a legitimate grievance in the fact that fifty-nine foreign pilots were employed on our coasts, whereas abroad our ships were compelled to take native pilots; and the Nelson Centenary on October 21, 1905, impelled Punch, in an address to the hero of Trafalgar, to deplore the decay of national patriotism in a vein of pessimism happily falsified ten years later:—

Much you would have to marvel at

Could you return this autumn-tide;

You'd find the Fleet—thank God for that—

Staunch and alert as when you died;

But, elsewhere, few to play your part,

Ready at need and ripe for action;

The rest—in idle ease of heart

Smiling an unctuous satisfaction.

I doubt if you could well endure

These new ideals (so changed we are),

Undreamed, Horatio, in your

Philosophy of Trafalgar;

And, should you still "expect" to see

The standard reached which you erected,

Nothing just now would seem to be

So certain as the unexpected.

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.

AN UNDER-RATED MONSTER

Britannia: "That's a nasty-looking object, Mr. Boatman!"

Lord Tw-dm-th: "Bless your 'eart, mum, 'e won't 'urt you. I've been here, man an' boy, for the last six months, an' we don't take no account o' them things!"

Punch was more preoccupied with Lord Haldane's new army scheme, and when the War Minister, in introducing it, declared that the country would not be "dragooned into conscription," interpreted his statement "in other and less conventional terms" as indicating a conviction that "it is the inalienable right of the free-born British citizen to decline to lift a finger in his country's defence." Lord Haldane's proposals for retrenchment are symbolized in his efforts to make big toy soldiers fit his box, instead of making the box fit the soldiers. Wasters and loafers who had cheered "Bobs" on his return from South Africa are shown expressing indignation at his wanting to enforce universal military service. Punch's reluctant admission of our national lethargy finds vent in a dialogue emphasizing the predominance of the Panem et Circenses spirit—devotion to the Big Loaf and spectacular games—coupled with a loss of our supremacy in games. The pageant mania became acute in 1907, when Punch satirically asks, "Can you cite any other country where it is impossible to walk out of doors without colliding with an historical pageant?"

Lord Haldane's visit to Germany in 1906 is burlesqued in a diary professing to reveal his paramount interest in German philosophy and literature; and a picture, in which he appears in a Pickelhaube, expresses the misgivings of two British soldiers who had overheard him "talking to himself in German—something horrible." This attitude of critical distrust is maintained throughout the next four years. In March, 1908, the new gun designed for the Territorial Force prompts a dialogue between the War Minister and Field-Marshal Punch:—

Mr. Haldane: "In the event of invasion, I shall depend upon my brave Territorial force to manipulate this magnificent and complicated weapon."

F.-M. Punch: "Going to give them any training?"

Mr. H.: "Oh, perhaps a fortnight or so a year."

F.-M. Punch: "Ah! Then they'll need to be pretty brave, won't they?"

Further satire is expended in August of the same year on "A Skeleton Army; or, The Charge of the Very Light Brigade":—

Haldane (at Cavalry Manoeuvres): "You see those three men? Well, they're pretending to be one hundred. Isn't that imaginative?"

Mr. Punch: "Realistic, you mean. That's about what it will come to with us in real warfare."

HISTORY DEFEATS ITSELF

Shade of Paul Krüger: "What! Botha Premier? Well, these English do 'stagger humanity'!"

Punch was not happy about our Navy either, and in 1906 he had rallied Lord Tweedmouth, then at the Admiralty, for reassuring Britannia against the German menace. It was no use to say, "We don't take no account of them things"; the monster was there, and could not be belittled. By the end of the year, however, Punch's complacency was restored by the advance in our naval gunnery, and Britannia is seen proudly showing the impressive tabulated results of our big gun practice. The Germans are the only modern people who have a single word to express delight in the misfortunes of others—Schadenfreude. It is not a noble sentiment, but a suspicion of it mingles with Punch's comments on Germany's internal troubles. In 1878 he had shown Bismarck squeezing down the Socialist Jack-in-the-Box, and nearly thirty years later repeats the formula at the expense of Count von Bülow; but the Socialist Jack-in-the-Box was now a much more formidable figure: it was "a bigger task for a smaller man."

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Triple Alliance fell in 1907, and Punch indicated that Italy's allegiance was already wearing thin. In performing the trio "We are a happy Family," Austria's "We are" is marked piano, and that of Italy dubioso.

In the domain of high politics, Imperial and International, 1907 was marked by two notable events. The grant of autonomy to the Transvaal undoubtedly contained an element of risk, but the sequel showed that magnanimity was the best policy. General Botha's Premiership proved a symbol of reconciliation destined in time to bear "rare and refreshing fruit," and Punch was fairly entitled to invoke the reluctant testimony of Krüger's shade: "What! Botha Premier? Well, these English do 'stagger humanity'!" Secondly, there was the Hague Conference, over which Punch maintained his attitude of scepticism, on the ground that each Power was unwilling to lead the way in disarmament. In his cartoon of the various nations at the door of the Conference everybody says, "After you, Sir," to everybody else. The Government's extensive programme of legislation for the following session is shown in the picture of "C.-B." at the piano accompanying the Infant Prodigy, 1908. The programme includes the "Twilight of the Lords," "Etudes Pacifiques"; "Danse anti-Bacchanale" and "Irish Rhapsody" with Campobello, McKenna, Asquith and Birrell as soloists. The campaign against the Lords, opened at Edinburgh by "C.-B." in October, 1907, suggested the cartoon of the "Fiery Cross" with the Premier as a kilted warrior shouting, "Doon wi' the Lords!" while the accompanying verses, in the ballad manner of Scott, describe the passing on of the fiery cross by Lord Crewe, John Morley, Mr. Sinclair (now Lord Pentland), Lord Tweedmouth, Mr. Runciman, and "Lloyd McGeorge."

Naval Misgivings

The mention of Lord Tweedmouth reminds one that the question of our naval supremacy had entered on a new phase. As Punch put it in his "Charivaria" in November, 1907, "There seems to be a difference of opinion between the Prince of Wales and Sir John Fisher. Some little time ago His Royal Highness, speaking at the Guildhall, cried: 'Wake up, England!' Sir John, speaking in the same place, has now issued the advice: 'Sleep quietly in your beds.'"

In the spring of 1908 occurred the awkward incident of the Kaiser's letter to Lord Tweedmouth on Naval Retrenchment. Punch, in his "Essence of Parliament," benevolently minimizes the First Lord's indiscretion, which, along with other causes, led to his withdrawal from the Admiralty; at the same time there appeared some highly ironical reflections on the attitude of the advocates of the Two-Power-Standard. In an ingenious adaptation of Tennyson's ballad of "The Revenge," Sir Thomas Howard refuses to fight because he is one ship short of the Two-Power-Standard.

In early Victorian days the Duke of Wellington was commonly alluded to as "the Duke" par excellence. In the opening years of the present century, in political circles at any rate, when people spoke of "the Duke" they always meant the Duke of Devonshire, and for reasons which are tersely and correctly given in Punch's brief memorial verses when he died in March, 1908:—

If to have held his way with steadfast will,

Unspoiled of Fortune, deaf to praise or blame,

Asking no favour but to follow still

The patriot's single aim:—

If, in contempt of other pride of race,

By honesty that chose the nobler part,

Careless of fame's reward, to win a place

Near to the common heart:—

If these be virtues large, heroic, rare,

Then is it well with him, the dead, to-day,

Who leaves a public record clean and fair,

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

Obedient to the conflict; I, whose soul

was made for glorious battle, who could lead

Ten thousand thundering horsemen to the charge,

Have kept the peace, while others urged to war.

"MUMMY, WHAT'S THAT MAN FOR?"

Simultaneously Punch illustrates the growing patriotic fervour at home. Golfers are becoming shy of being detected on their way to or from the links by men in uniform. And Punch praises An Englishman's Home as a "wonderful play," in which the case for national service is presented "with rare tact, and void of offence even to the most violent anti-militarist." Indeed, he goes so far as to admit that the author's advocacy is impaired by his making the vulgar cheerful young "slacker" delightfully human, while the good young patriot is too stagey and talkative. German aggressiveness is illustrated in the cartoon showing the German sailor adopting our "Jingo" song, the copyright having expired. Editorially, though obliquely, Punch deplores the subservience of vital questions of foreign policy to party questions, and gives special praise to Sir Edward Grey. "Prenderby," who impersonates a detached view, pleads for a Coalition Cabinet—a Ministry of all the patriots. In the spring of 1909 Mr. Asquith figures as the Night Watchman who cries "All's well," but John Bull from his window replies: "So you say. All the same, I shall sit up for a bit." This was the time of the cry for more Dreadnoughts: "We want Eight and we won't wait." The vote of censure on the Government for their inadequate naval preparations was rejected by 353 votes to 135, and Punch satirized the Labour Party's idea of battleships in a pictorial representation of H.M.S. Inoffensive, Innocuous, etc. It is curious to find in another of Punch's editorial dialogues one of the speakers constantly harping on what might happen in 1914 when Dreadnoughts would be obsolete; while the happy-go-lucky attitude of the average subaltern towards a possible war is expressed in the wish attributed to one of them: "Let's hope it will come between the polo and the huntin'." Lord Roberts's National Service Bill was thrown out in the Lords in July by a narrow majority. Punch's artist is most frankly honorific to Lord Roberts; but the summary of the debate given by his Parliamentary representative is not even non-committal, for it contrives to disparage Lord Milner while emphasizing the opposition of the Duke of Northumberland and the caution of Lord Lansdowne.

Mr. Birrell as Chief Secretary

At the close of the year the impenitence of the Belgian administrators of the Congo is held up to execration in the cartoon of the slave-driver outside the European Hall of Deliberation, armed with a whip, and saying, "I'm all right. They're still talking"; while a naked slave lies helpless and prostrate in the foreground.

After a brief and ineffectual tenure of office at the Board of Education, Mr. Birrell had, whether out of heroic self-sacrifice or ignorance, accepted the most thankless and arduous of all portfolios—that of the Irish Chief Secretaryship. For the sequel, one has to turn to the Report of the Hardinge Committee of Inquiry into the Dublin revolution of Easter, 1916—one of the most lacerating public documents ever devoted to the dissection of Ministerial incompetence. But in 1909 there was, no doubt, much that appealed to Punch in the notion of setting a professional humorist to govern a quick-witted people. There never was a greater mistake. Much was and is forgiven to a Minister who amuses the House, but the legacy of hatred, faithfully cherished by those who forgot nothing but benefits received, was not to be cancelled by epigrams which provoked the facile laughter of St. Stephen's. There was, however, a probably quite unintended though extra appropriateness in the title of the verses to him as "The Right Man in the Wrong Place," for the chief ground of complaint against the Chief Secretary was that he was conspicuous by his absence from Ireland at all critical moments, and eclipsed the "Absentee landlords" at their own game. In 1909 Punch contented himself with showing Mr. Birrell as a Lecturer on Old Age Pensions as a means of allaying discontent, and reducing the method to absurdity. The boon was naturally popular, since, as Punch noted on good authority, it had been claimed and received by more than 50,000 people not qualified under the Act.

THE CONSTITUTION IN THE MELTING POT

The Three Witches: "Double, double, toil and trouble!"

Macbeth, act IV, scene 1.

Wait and See

In 1910 two general elections, fought on questions of internal policy, and the conflict over the Parliament Bill diverted attention from foreign politics. Lord Rosebery's scheme for the reform of the Upper Chamber is treated in light-hearted fashion in the cartoon of the Selection Committee of the Peers' Royal Academy. Lord Curzon and Lord Lansdowne criticize Lord Rosebery's "problem picture": Lord Halsbury bluntly ejaculates, "Take it away." Punch, however, recognized the serious intentions of the Government in "The Constitution in the Melting Pot," where Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George are the three witches bending over the cauldron. The Unionists had gained some ground in the January elections, but not nearly enough; in December, when party feeling ran much higher, they failed to improve their position, in spite of the offer of a Referendum to determine the question of Tariff Reform, and of their insistent warnings as to the danger of single-chamber Government. Punch, with some reserves, was decidedly opposed to the Government programme, and a hostile critic alike of the platform exuberance of Mr. Lloyd George and the "wait and see" policy of Mr. Asquith:—

Schemes are shattered, plots are changed,

Plans arranged and re-arranged!

Words are eaten; every day

Broken pledges thrown away;

Here the riddle—where the key?

Wait and see!

Does his wandering course reveal

Only love of Britain's weal?

Does he toil through heavy sand

Seeking how to keep his land

Clean and prosperous and free?

Wait and see!

Is it that he turns his eyes

To a goal that needs disguise?

Just a paltry party score,

Checked by some about him, more—

More particular than he?

Wait and see!

Is he one whose wavering mind

Lightly veers to every wind,

Hither pitched and thither tossed,

While the country pays the cost

Of his flaccid vertebræ?

Wait and see!

Be it not that he has sold

All the faith that men should hold

Sacred; that he walks his ways,

Flogged by those whom he obeys,

At whose word he bows the knee—

Wait and see!

Wait and see, and wait again:

But the country waits in vain.

Waits for order—finding none;

Sees but duty left undone.

What will Britain's verdict be?

Wait and see!

THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

Our Mr. Asquith: "Five hundred coronets, dirt cheap! This line of goods ought to make business a bit brisker, what?"

Our Mr. Lloyd George: "Not half; bound to go like hot cakes."

"I SPY!"

Both (together): "Peep-bo! I see you!"

THE NEW JOHN BULL

After the proposed "Federalization" of the British Isles.

The proposed "federalization" of the British Isles is burlesqued in the figure of John Bull, looking very much ashamed of himself, arrayed in top-boots, with a kilt, a shamrock-sprigged waistcoat, a Welsh steeple-crowned hat, and a shillelagh. The "People's Budget" is disparaged in a picture showing the general apathy of those whom it was intended to benefit. And as for the threatened creation of 500 Liberal Peers to outvote the recalcitrant "backwoodsmen," Punch satirized the plan as a mere piece of window-dressing. In "The Chance of a Lifetime" Mr. Asquith is seen arraying his shop-front with 500 coronets "dirt cheap," Mr. Lloyd George as his assistant handing up the hat-boxes with the comment, "Bound to go like hot cakes."

Death of King Edward

Perhaps the shrewdest comment on international politics made by Punch in this year is to be found in his "Charivaria" column for November 9:—

Sir Edward Grey declared at Darlington that he saw no need for war. Unfortunately, however, this is a great age for luxuries.

Here Punch added a gloss to a wise truism. A remark in the Isle of Man Weekly Times at the beginning of the year touched the nadir of sordid parochialism. Discussing the "inevitableness" of a war with Germany, the writer observed: "It would mean the ruination of the Island. It would kill all chances of a successful season, upon which the Island depends." Punch "lifted" the quotation, but here the text beggared any comment.

By the assassination of the King and Crown Prince of Portugal in the autumn, monarchy was ended in the country of our "Oldest Ally." Punch denounced murder whether as the maker or unmaker of kings; and on this occasion added to his condolences with the survivors a caustic reference to France, who is shown briefly congratulating Portugal on becoming a Republic; but she is "too busy to talk, having just escaped another revolution at home"—an allusion to the railway strike and its suppression by the drastic measures of M. Briand's Ministry. The death of King Edward in May, at the height of his popularity and prestige, was happily unattended by violence or upheaval, and left the position of the Crown unshaken. Punch was not one of those who regarded King Edward as the initiator of our foreign policy, but gratefully acknowledged his services in smoothing the path of his Ministers:—

At midnight came the Majesty of Death—

Kings of the earth abide this King's decree—

Sudden, and kindlier so, to seal the breath

And set the spirit free.

And now the Peace he held most near his heart,

That Peace to which his country's steps he led—

So well for us he played his royal part—

Broods o'er him lying dead.

TOWARDS THE RAPPROCHEMENT

Crown Prince of Germany (in India, writing home): "Dear Papa, I am doing myself proud. These English aren't half bad fellows when you get to know them."

Thus passes Britain's crown from King to King,

Yet leaves secure a nation's deathless love,

Dearer than Empire, yea, a precious thing

All earthly crowns above.

The German Menace

In the winter of 1910 the German Crown Prince visited India, and was welcomed and fêted wherever he went. Punch regarded the tour as making for rapprochement and represented the Prince as an amiable young sportsman writing home to "dear Papa" to say that he was "doing himself proud and finding the English not half such bad fellows when you get to know them." A more critical view of Germany's intentions is revealed in the cartoon "The Blind Side," in which a German officer applauds a Dutchman for the resolve to fortify his sea-front against England as a true economy. It might be costly, but "see what you save on the Eastern Frontier where there's nobody but us." A similar element of misgiving is betrayed in "the New Haroun Al Raschid"—a dream of Baghdad, "Made in Germany"—with the Kaiser in Oriental costume seated on the engine of a "non-stop" express to the Persian Gulf.

A LITTLE-NAVY EXHIBIT

Design for a figure of Britannia, as certain people would like to see her. (See reports of debate on the proposal to reduce expenditure on the Navy.)

The War in Tripoli

In the spring of 1911 the proposed reduction of expenditure on the Navy inspired Punch's "Little-Navy Exhibit"—a design for a figure of Britannia, "as certain people would like to see her," with a pointless trident, diminutive shield and helmet, in spectacles and elastic-sided boots, leading a starveling lion with its tail between its legs. Simultaneously Germany's idea of the Pax Germanica is satirized in a picture of the Teuton Dovecote, with cannons pointing from each door, surmounted by the German Eagle warning the Arbitration bird: "No foreign doves required; we hatch our own, thank you." Our relations with the U.S.A. are symbolized in "Dis-armageddon," President Taft and Sir Edward Grey shaking hands over a grave with the notice, "All hatchets may be buried here." Hostility to the "Declaration of London" had grown throughout the year. It had been described as "a sword for the Unionist Party"; picture posters represented the destruction under it of neutral ships carrying food to Great Britain, and Punch, without going the lengths of the Morning Post, the Imperial Maritime League, or Mr. T. Gibson Bowles, was far from enthusiastic over its ratification. "I'm sure," his Britannia remarks, looking at herself in the glass, "my costumiers want me to look my best. But I have a sort of feeling that this thing may rather hamper my sea-legs." Germany's complaints against the policy of "isolating" or "surrounding" her were now frequently heard, and are unsympathetically treated in the portrait of the German officer in full uniform, with his knuckles to his eyes, dolorously protesting, "Nobody loves me—and they all want to trample on me!" Nor was Punch inclined to look more favourably on Italy's policy of aggrandisement in North Africa. The inglorious war with Turkey in Cyrenaica brought no credit to the combatants or to the Concert of Europe. Punch summed up the situation by showing Dame Europa (of the Hague Academy for Young Gentlemen) looking sourly with folded arms at two boys "scrapping" in a corner, and observing, "I thoroughly disapprove of this, and as soon as ever it's over I shall interfere to put a stop to it." The conduct of the war led to ugly charges against the Italians, and in "The Euphemisms of Massacre" Turkey, surveying a scene of carnage at Tripoli, sarcastically remarks: "When I was charged with this kind of thing in Bulgaria, nobody excused me on the ground of 'military exigencies'!"

The Anglo-Russian agreement in regard to Persia was defended by Sir Edward Grey in November, 1911, as having ended friction between the two Powers. Punch thought otherwise, and in December he showed the Bear cheerfully sitting on the tail of the Persian Cat while the British Lion remarks: "If we hadn't such a thorough understanding I might almost be tempted to ask what you're doing there with our little play-fellow." Yet Sir Edward Grey's explanations satisfied the Unionists better than the advanced Liberals and the Labour Party. Already the Government were being attacked for seeing events through French spectacles, and in a memorable cartoon Punch recorded the emergence of the demand for "The New Diplomacy." An "Advanced Democrat," having made his way into a room with "Private. Members Only" on the door, remarks to the Foreign Secretary: "Look here, we've decided that this isn't to be a private room any more; and you're to put your cards on the table and then we can all take a hand." Whereon Sir Edward Grey replies: "What, and let my opponents see them too?" In this context one may be permitted to recall a picture, published about the same time, of a constable applying a familiar test to a belated reveller protesting his sobriety:—

Constable: "Can you say 'British Constitution'?"

Belated One (with strongest "Die-Hard" convictions): "There ishn't one now!"

Punch's Almanack for 1912 treats of current events in a light-hearted spirit. There is one picture, however, with an ominous and prophetic heading, "Period—The War of 1914," in which an irate M.F.H. abuses the invaders—unmistakable Germans—for heading the fox. The artist, Mr. J. L. C. Booth, a very gallant gentleman, fell in Gallipoli in 1915. But there were other and more unmistakable omens at the opening of the New Year, when M. Caillaux, before resigning, had attempted to reconstruct his Cabinet with M. Delcassé as Foreign Minister—a situation typified by Punch in his cartoon of "The return of the scapegoat." M. Caillaux resigned under a cloud; M. Delcassé failed to form a Government, but remained on as Minister of Marine under M. Poincaré. For the moment Germany's troubles at home diverted attention from her foreign relations. The demands of the Socialists are illustrated in the dialogue between the Kaiser on the summit of a rocky peak and a figure climbing up to the summit. "What business have you here?" asks the Kaiser, and the Socialist answers: "I, too, want 'a place in the sun.'"

THE NEW DIPLOMACY

Advanced Democrat (to Foreign Secretary): "Look here, we've decided that this isn't to be a private room any more and you're to put your cards on the table and then we can all take a hand." Foreign Secretary: "What, and let my opponents see them too?"

In March the Navy estimates issued by Mr. Churchill as First Lord were expressly stated to be conditional upon the naval programmes of other nations: Punch accordingly showed him as the Plain Dealer hoisting as his signal "England expects that every nation will do its duty—by not increasing its armaments." The rival views on naval concentration are shown a little later in the "Geography Lesson" given by "Dr." Kitchener—Lord Kitchener had gone to Egypt as Agent-General in the previous year—to Master Churchill and Master Asquith. "What do you know about the Mediterranean?" he asks, and Master Churchill replies: "Well, it looks a nice place for ships; but, to tell you the truth, we've been concentrating our attention on the North Sea lately, haven't we, Herbert?" and Master Asquith replies: "That is so."

The appointment of Baron Marschall von Bieberstein as German Ambassador in London was well received. He was Germany's strongest diplomatist. He had raised the prestige of his country to an unexampled pitch at Constantinople without losing the respect of his British colleagues, and was credited with the desire to promote a better understanding with England. Unfortunately he died suddenly before Punch's expectations could be realized. Meanwhile Mr. Haldane at the War Office had "turned turtle (dove)" to such an extent that in Punch's view his occupation was nearly gone. Yet the travesty of Dicksee's "Harmony," with the Kaiser playing on a Krupp organ to a stout and adoring Germany, is by no means reassuring. Consols were steadily "slumping," and the organized resistance of Ulster was already regarded as serious. Punch's views in the course of the next few years underwent a good deal of modification, but he was never sympathetic to Sir Edward Carson. When the old cry, "Ulster will fight," was raised to discredit the son of the statesman who had invented the phrase, Punch called it "a silly game. If Ulster fights against free speech, then Ulster will be wrong." When the "Covenant" of Resistance to Home Rule was signed by the Ulster Loyalists in September, 1912, Punch satirized their action under the heading "Ulster will write," with General Carson on horseback, waving a pen and crying, "Up, nibs, and at 'em!"

THE BOILING POINT

Punch, it is to be feared, did not credit the Balkan League with exalted ideals in entering on the conflict with Turkey in 1912. Bulgaria, in his cartoon of August 28, challenges Turkey, at grips with Italy, to mortal combat, and Turkey replies: "Certainly," adding to Italy, "I hope you won't think me discourteous if I cannot continue to give you my undivided attention." Two months later we are shown the Great Powers all sitting on the seething pot of "Balkan troubles" but unable to keep the lid down. By November a "New Eagle" with four heads—Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece—is seen approaching the door of the Council of Europe. More acute in its reading of the signs of the times is the picture of Turkey, a sinister figure, rubbing his hands as he reads the placard: "Austria threatens Serbia. European Crisis," and saying, "Good! If only all those other Christian nations get at one another's throats, I may have a dog's chance yet"—a situation realized by the launching of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in July, 1914. Early in December an armistice was agreed to, and by the middle of the month a conference of Balkan delegates assembled in London. The deliberations of the Peace Conference continued till the end of the year, but in the Christmas cartoon of "Prince Charming and the Sleeping Beauty," Sir Edward Grey has not yet succeeded in inducing Peace to wake up. As a matter of fact, the Conference was suspended on January 6, 1913, on the 26th the Balkan delegates broke off further negotiations with the Porte, and on February 3 war was resumed. Punch's comment on the threatened intervention of Roumania was severe but not unmerited; the "Bayard of Bukharest" observes politely to Bulgaria, "I am sure, dear old friend, you will wish to recompense me for not stabbing you in the back from behind in the previous bout, and I am therefore proposing to anticipate your kindness by making off with your coat (Silistria)." Sir Edward Grey's hope, expressed in the House of Commons in March, that Turkey would now confine its energies to "consolidating" itself in Asia Minor, met with ironical approval from Punch, who in the following month represented Turkey responding to Europa's complacent assurance that the war was "practically over" with the still more complacent comment: "My felicitations, Madam. Everything seems to point to the outbreak of a sanguinary peace." And unfortunately the cynical anticipation was only too well verified in the sequel. King Nicholas's defiance marked the opening stages of the new conflict—typified in the Montenegrin bantam blocking the road for the great Powers, but getting out of the way at the last moment. Skutari was occupied by troops of the Powers on May 14, and on May 30 the Treaty of Peace between the Allies and the Porte was signed at St. James's Palace. But Punch, in his cartoon of "Peace comes to Town," was not unfair in making Sir Edward Grey adjure the fair damsel riding behind him to sit close and not slip off as on the last occasion they fared that way together. So many outstanding questions remained unsettled that a pacific solution was impossible; the Balkan war was resumed on June 30. Bulgaria put up a great fight against the Serbians and Greeks, but the advance of the fresh Roumanian army into her territory rendered her position desperate. Punch had already shown Turkey offering its services as benevolent mediator to the Balkan "allies." Before the end of the month the Turks had re-entered the field and re-occupied Adrianople only three months after they had been driven out. "Quite like old times, being back here," the Turk says to Dame Europa in Punch's cartoon, and when Europa replies, "Ah! but you'll be kicked out, you know," he retorts calmly, "Well, that'll be like old times too." An armistice was signed on July 31, and the second Treaty of Peace was signed by Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia on August 10. Bulgaria, whose losses in the two wars had been very heavy, was seriously penalized by the new adjustment of boundaries and the consequent loss of territory. Roumania was cordially congratulated by the Kaiser for her "wise and statesmanlike policy," and Greece, who gained a vast acquisition of territory around Salonika, expressed through the mouth of King Constantine—King George had been assassinated at Salonika in March—her indebtedness to Germany for the war training of her officers. Punch's comment was sardonic. In "Deutschland über Alles" the King of the Hellenes observes to the Kaiser, "Our success, as you know, was entirely due to you," and the Kaiser replies: "Thanks, thanks," adding, aside, "I suppose he can't be referring to our organization of the Turkish army."

The Balkan Cockpit

The attitude of the Concert of Powers over the question of Adrianople is indicated in the cartoon in which Sir Edward Grey tells the Turk, the man in possession, that he will have to go, but that the Powers haven't decided who was to turn him out. European intervention proving hopeless, the matter was left for direct negotiations between Bulgaria and Turkey, with the result that the new frontier gave Turkey about one hundred square miles more territory together with Adrianople. Punch, on the eve of the signature of the treaty, anticipated the triumph of Turkey, who is seen pasting up, on the door of the Hotel Adrianople, a notice, "Under the same old management," over a previous notice, "Under entirely new management," and expressing regret at being unable to oblige Europa by retiring. Europa, with the Treaty of London in her hand, saves her face by replying with dignity: "Not at all. You may remember that at the very start I strongly insisted on the status quo." The Powers had decided at the close of 1912 that Albania was to receive autonomy, but the International Commission of Control was unable to check guerrilla fighting between Serbians and Albanians. Europa found it, in Punch's phrase, a very difficult task to hush the infant Albania; and Prince William of Wied, chosen by the Powers as sovereign, or "Mpret" of Albania in November, 1913, excited more ridicule than sympathy during his brief and troubled tenure of office.

The Balkan wars, which began in an organized attempt to liberate Christians from the Turkish yoke, developed into an internecine struggle for aggrandisement amongst the members of the League. The Balkan Peninsula unhappily justified its description as "the cockpit of Europe," or, to quote the words of a traveller who visited it between the first and second wars: "one vast madhouse, where sanity seems ridiculous and folly wisdom." The Treaty of Bukharest, so far from allaying discord, only fomented the ambitions which precipitated the world conflict.

Ulster Bars the Way

France's reversion to three years' service—applauded by Punch in his cartoon "Pour la Patrie"—had been countered by the German Army Bill introduced by the new German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, in a somewhat ominous speech in April. Punch had already symbolized the acceleration of the armament race in his picture of Hans and Jacques, each bowed down under a tremendous burden of warlike equipment, exclaiming in rueful unison: "And I hear there's more to come."

Mr. Churchill's scheme of a naval holiday inspired hopes which were partially shared by Punch, but damped by the German Chancellor's speech on the ground that the idea had not been taken up as practical in England either by Parliament or public opinion. The renewal of Mr. Churchill's suggestion later in the year met with an even more unfavourable reception. Admiral Tirpitz makes his début in Punch as an apostle of German naval expansion; General Bernhardi had followed up his notorious book on Germany and the Next War with articles pointing to Ireland as an ally of Germany in the enemy's camp; and the outrages on Alsatian civilians by German officers at Zabern and Metz emphasized the danger of militarism at home as well as abroad. The incident was historic because it was the first notable example of the cleavage between the army and the people in Germany, the Radicals and Socialists having carried a vote of censure in the Reichstag against the Imperial Chancellor. The war closed all ranks for a time; but Zabern was a straw which showed how the wind was beginning to blow—the wind which became a tempest in the autumn of 1918.

If Great Britain in 1913 was not exactly a cockpit or a madhouse, she was not without her domestic troubles. One of the earliest cartoons of the year exhibits the Home Rule Bill advancing under the shield of the Parliament Act. The advance was barred by Ulster, for this was the year of the formation of the Provisional Government, the enrolment of the Ulster volunteers, proclamations against the importation of arms, the emergence of "King Carson," and a general recrudescence of party acrimony. Punch, in a laudable desire to see ourselves as others see us, depicted in "A Nation of Fire-Eaters" a peaceful Teuton horrified by a placard enumerating all the "armies" in Great Britain—the Ulster Volunteer army, Miss Sylvia Pankhurst's army, Mr. Devlin's army, etc. The spirit of the picture is ironical, but it throws a light on Bernhardi's reading of the signs of the times in Ireland. In July Mr. Asquith is seen endeavouring to cajole the Orange Girl, who looks at him sullenly; and another picture in the same number shows Sir Edward Carson arming "Loyal Ulster." In October the possibility of a settlement on the basis of the exclusion of North-East Ulster is indicated in "Second Thoughts"; Mr. John Redmond is shown driving four pigs—Connaught, Munster, Leinster and S.W. Ulster—through the gate of Home Rule. N.E. Ulster is heading in a contrary direction, and Mr. Redmond wonders whether he should "lave this contrairy little divil loose the way he'd come back by himself aftherwards." A month or so later Mr. Birrell warns Carson not to tempt him or "on my honour and conscience I shall have to put you through this." This being the "ever open door" of a prison with the inscription "All fear abandon ye who enter here"—a reference to the speedy release of Mr. Jim Larkin, the turbulent leader of the Dublin strike. Here the satire is aimed at the futile leniency of the Chief Secretary to all disturbers of the peace. Three weeks later, alluding to the prohibited importation of arms into Ireland, Punch ridicules the inconsistency of Sir Edward Carson, who, armed himself to the teeth, is warning Customs Officer Birrell to search Mr. Redmond, a harmless-looking passenger, carrying a small dispatch-case: "That's just the sort of bag he'd have a couple of howitzers concealed in." Mr. Bonar Law's support of Sir Edward Carson's campaign is ingeniously shown in "The New Brunswicker"—after Millais' well-known picture—deserting the Tariff Reform lady, "but only for a time," in order to go to the Ulster Wars.

"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.

THE WINGS OF VICTORY

Britannia: "These things seem all the rage in Paris and Berlin; and I really can't afford to be out of it!"

A propos of the theft of the "Mona Lisa" portrait from the Louvre, Punch portrayed Mr. Asquith as "Il Giocondo" with an inscrutable and enigmatic smile. The internal embarrassments of the Cabinet certainly must have taxed the smiling capacities of the Premier to the utmost, to say nothing of Ulster and the militant suffragists. Yet when Dame Curzon is depicted tempting Master Asquith to take a joy-ride on a donkey labelled "General Election," Master Asquith replies that he is not taking any violent exercise this season, but thinks of waiting till 1915. There are not a few people who in the interests of the country are very thankful that the Liberals were still in power and not in opposition when the great decision had to be made a year later. There is a touch of unconscious and complacent prophecy in the picture of Britannia girding on "The Wings of Victory"—the new rage in Paris and Berlin—"because she can't afford to be out of it." It took us four years to make good the title, but it was done in the end.

The gap that separates us from pre-war years is illustrated in many curious ways. For example, in March, 1913, Punch has a picture of a lady asking to have a cheque for £15 cashed all in gold "if you've got it." In those golden days of peace such a question was simply a mark of feminine ignorance; two years later it would have argued insanity.

England's Detachment

In the seven months that remained before the outbreak of the Great War you may search the pages of Punch in vain for evidences of a provocative attitude towards Germany or of anything indicating national preparedness for the conflict. Punch, as a mirror of middle-class public opinion, faithfully reflected our domestic troubles and preoccupations. International politics are conspicuously absent from the Almanack of Christmas, 1913, except for a picture of Sir Edward Grey producing doves from a hat labelled Balkan Crisis, and portraits of Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the Sultan of Turkey and the King of Montenegro, offering tickets of admission to the Concert of Europe. Comment, criticism and satire are monopolized by Ulster, labour troubles, Marconi and oil scandals, the dancing mania, social extravagance and the spread of the cinema habit. The first cartoon of the New Year of 1914 is devoted to Mr. Lloyd George's land campaign; there is nothing aggressive in the picture of Mr. Churchill as a sailor surrounded by a Tory chorus singing, "You've made me love you; I didn't want to do it"—à propos of the Navy Estimates; nothing provocative in "The Price of Admiralty," where Britannia, outside a door marked "Cabinet Council (Private and Controversial)," is seen waiting to know whether she is to lay down the ships she wants, on which Mr. Punch adds "or lay down your trident." No serious misgiving is aroused by Turkey's purchase of a Dreadnought, and Punch's comment on General Leonard Wood's pessimistic report on the practically unarmed condition of the U.S.A. army, if not exactly unsympathetic, is light-hearted and detached.

Home Rule and the attitude of Ulster diverted the eyes of England from the Continent. The Zabern incident did not escape Punch's eye, but his comment, which suggests an imaginary interchange of garrisons between Germany and England, was too fantastic to be really pointed; and the announcement that Sir Edward Grey would accompany the King on his visit to Paris in April passes with a brief compliment to the Foreign Minister on his well-earned little treat.

There is an excellent burlesque account of a Cabinet Council in February, illustrating the temperaments of the different Ministers—the imperturbable and irrepressible equanimity of Mr. Lloyd George; the inarticulate disapproval of Lord Crewe; the egotism of Mr. Burns; the bland ignorance of Mr. Birrell. But foreign politics are not once mentioned: the Premier and his Cabinet are chiefly concerned with discussing their detractors in the Press and the Ulster problem. Incidentally Mr. Lloyd George scouts the proposal to revive the Heptarchy because it was a Saxon, not a Celtic institution. This is all irresponsible burlesque, but it was highly intelligent burlesque. In Parliament, members were not worrying about the German menace. They were more interested in Lord Murray's statement about the Marconi business, the debate on contributions to the Party funds and the distribution of honours; above all, in the Government's plan of amending Home Rule so as to conciliate Ulster. Punch, still inclined to be critical of the Northern loyalists, begs Miss Ulster not to turn up her nose at the pretty bouquet of concessions offered her by the Premier, but to have a good look at them first.

The Government certainly did not expect war, but whether by lucky chance or in a moment of wise prevision, a momentous decision was taken by the Admiralty in March:—

"The Admiralty has decided that, in the place of the grand manoeuvres this year, there shall be a surprise mobilisation. Last year's manoeuvres were, we believe, something of a fiasco, but to ensure the success of the surprise mobilisation, five months' previous notice is given."

Punch's comment, at any rate, is free from any bellicose imputations. He, at least, had no inkling of the larger surprise which was to be sprung on us from another quarter. The Supplementary Naval Estimates, raising the total to 48 millions, and providing for reserves of oil fuel and the very modest new aircraft programme, were passed by a six to one majority. Labour members registered a protest, but nothing was said about Germany. Home Rule, Welsh Disestablishment and Plural Voting still were the burning questions of the hour. As for Home Rule, it is strange to read how, in the debate on the second reading in March, Mr. William O'Brien referred to Ulster as "the new 'Orange' Free State, which has just received official recognition." Punch records the phrase; also the vote of censure brought against Mr. Lloyd George "on grounds of repeated inaccuracy, particularly on account of his ineradicable tendency to speak disrespectfully of dukes"—a vote negatived by none too large a majority. Mr. Balfour meanwhile was disporting himself at Nice, and his absence was much commented on: it was not exactly a case of Nero fiddling while Rome was burning; but Punch, under the heading of "Mr. Balfour's Mixed Double Life," made fair game of his giving up to lawn tennis what was meant for his country. Another conspicuous absentee from England at this period of storm and stress was Lord Northcliffe. A notice appeared in the Daily Mail in the following words:—

Lord Northcliffe rarely sees and never reads a letter, being mainly nowadays engaged in golf and travel.

Punch treated the announcement with a sad want of respect, as who should say, "O si sic semper!" The most curious thing in Punch's pages for March is the picture of the Recruiting Sergeant addressing a rather loutish-looking youth: "Now I can tell character when I see it, so mark my words. If you join now, you'll be a swankin' general in five years." Thus not for the first time did Punch, writing as a jester, prove an unconscious prophet.

An Unconscious Prophecy

"THERE'S MANY A SLIP ..."

Credit is assigned to Mr. Churchill for "calling in a new element to redress the balance of the old"—Neptune emerging from the deep to gaze at his new allies, the aeroplane and airship. But attention was abruptly switched off from the Admiralty to the War Office by the troubles at the Curragh Camp, the threatened resignations of General Gough and other officers as a protest against the coercion of Ulster, and by the blunder and resignation of Mr. Seely. Punch applauded the spirit both of Ulster and the Army: in his cartoon, "Many a slip," he showed Mr. Asquith, while offering the cup to Mr. John Redmond, confronted by a hand with a sword marked "Army Resignations." Punch recognized the promptitude with which Mr. Asquith came to the rescue by doubling the functions of Premier and War Minister, but was less benevolent in his gloss on the comment of a faithful supporter who declared that "the best we can do is to keep our eye on Mr. Asquith":—

BALLAD OF THE WATCHFUL EYE

O keep your eye on David,

The demigod of Wales,

Before whose furious onset

Dukes turn their timid tails;

Whom Merioneth mystics

Praise in delirious distichs

And, matched with whose statistics,

Munchausen's glory pales.

O keep your eye on Winston,

And mind you keep it tight,

For nearly every Saturday

You'll find he takes to flight;

Now eloquent and thrilling,

Now simply cheap or filling,

And now bent on distilling

The purest Party spite.

O keep your eye on Haldane,

Ex-Minister of War,

The sleek and supple-minded

And suave Lord Chancellor;

Whose brain, so keen and subtle,

Moves swifter than a shuttle,

Obscuring, like the cuttle,

Things that were plain before.

O keep your eye on Birrell,

So wholly free from guile,

Conspicuous by his absence

From Erin's peaceful isle;

Who wakes from floor to rafter

The House to heedless laughter,

Careless of what comes after

Can he but raise a smile.

O keep your eye on Masterman,

Dear David's henchman leal,

Whose piety and "uplift"

Makes ribald Tories squeal;

In every public function

Displaying the conjunction

Of perfect moral unction

With perfect Party zeal.

Last, keep your eye on Asquith

And he will bring you through,

No matter what his colleagues

May say or think or do;

For in the dirtiest weather,

He moulted not a feather

And safely kept together

His variegated crew.

Mr. Punch certainly kept his eye on Lord Haldane to good purpose—witness the stanzas "To the Cabinet (suggested by a recent doctoring of Hansard)":—

The judgment of the People's "Yea" or "Nay"

Wherefore should virtuous men like you shun?

You are—or so you confidently say—

Prepared for Dissolution.

Then snatch a hint from Haldane's little fake,

Who glanced with eye alert and beady at

His speech in proof, and, for appearance' sake

Added the word "immediate."

To persons with short memories it may be needful to recall the fact that, when challenged in the House of Lords, Lord Haldane had said on March 23:—

"No orders were issued, no orders are likely to be issued, and no orders will be issued for the coercion of Ulster."

But when his speech was printed in the weekly record, it was found that the word "immediate" had been added before "coercion," thus showing that self-protection is often the most dangerous and damaging policy.

THE ULSTER KING-AT-ARMS

Ulster and the "Plot"

Punch had applauded the spirit of Ulster, but he did not approve of the uncompromising policy of her leader. In "The Fight for the Banner," Mr. John Redmond and Sir Edward Carson are shown pulling the flag of "Peace for Ireland" asunder, while John Bull remarks: "This tires me. Why can't you carry it between you? Neither of you can carry it alone." By way of contrast, one may note the cartoon "After Ten Years," with France and Britannia clasping hands in celebration of the solidity and endurance of the Entente.

"For the third time in the course of three successive Sessions the Home Rule Bill passes the second reading stage." So Punch wrote of the "business done" in Parliament on April 6. But the arbitrament of the vote did not allay the suspicions of the Opposition. April and May were given over to acrimonious discussions of the alleged "Plot" by the Government to overawe Ulster by armed occupation. Punch admired the imperturbability of Mr. Asquith, who is shown combining in his own person the rôles of prisoner, judge and jury. Mr. Austen Chamberlain demanded a judicial inquiry into the "Plot," but was beaten by eighty votes in a House of 608 members. Simultaneously Punch depicted Sir Edward Carson as the Ulster King-at-Arms, armed and defiant, and declared through the mouth of John Bull that "he was not going to have Civil War to please either Radical Extremists or Tory Die-Hards." Simultaneously, too, Punch printed a most eulogistic notice of Mr. Norman Angell's Foundations of International Policy, in which the reviewer declared that if he were a politician he would "move for a further supplementary Naval Estimate to expend the price of a Dreadnought in distributing this fighting pacificist's book to all journalists, attachés, clergymen, bazaar-openers, club oracles, professors, headmasters, and other obvious people in both Germany and Britain."

Mr. Lloyd George's last Budget topped two hundred millions, but showed a small surplus. Punch portrayed the income-tax payer as an old cow complaining that "it isn't milking, it's murder." The enhancement of the death duties Punch regarded as a raising of the fares to Styx, which would cost the Plutocratic Shades more.

The debates on the Home Rule Bill suggested to Punch a contrast between 1906 and 1914, the efforts of the Liberals to improve the situation having only resulted in turmoil, discontent and bitter recrimination. The third reading was carried on May 25 by 351 votes to 274, Mr. William O'Brien having cheerfully remarked that the Bill, if it became an Act, would be born with a rope round its neck. Heated discussions took place over the refusal of the Government to disclose the details of the Amending Bill. The Speaker had invited Mr. Asquith to supply further particulars, as the Opposition had insistently demanded, but, according to Punch, the Premier's luminous and courteous response did not add a syllable to the information already vouchsafed, whereupon Mr. Bonar Law had asked the Speaker to "let the curtain be rung down on a contemptible farce." The third reading of the Welsh Disestablishment Bill had been carried a week earlier; the Plural Voters Bill passed the same stage three weeks later. For the rest, the main topics which engaged attention in the House were gun-running, Suffragist outrages, and the latest amendment of the much-amended Insurance Act. "Scenes" were not infrequent, and Punch deplores the "pot-house manners" displayed by members on both sides. The emergence of the National Volunteers, a counterblast to the force enrolled by the Ulster Loyalists, added to the general disquiet, but there were no public signs of any general awakening to the impending catastrophe. Sir Percy Scott's letter on the submarine menace created a considerable stir, but Punch, like the majority of his readers, refused to treat it seriously. The efficiency of the Territorial Army as seen from the inside is illustrated in the cri de coeur ascribed to one of the rank and file during the course of the manoeuvres: "Thank 'Evin we've got a Nivy!" There is a jocular reference in mid-June to the toast "Der Tag" in German war vessels, and an unconscious prophecy in the warning of an old Lancashire lady to a young friend intending to go by an excursion to London: "Doan't thee goà to London: thee stop in owd England." On June 10, it may be added, a "Peace Centenary Costume Ball" was held in the Albert Hall in honour of the 100th anniversary of peace between Great Britain and the United States, and the lady who represented Britannia carried a palm branch instead of the customary trident.

Midsummer Madness

With the opening of July the London season was in full fling; the pleasure-hunt had never been so unbridled; midsummer madness was at its height. Society, bejewelled as never before, was given up to the cult of the Russian Ballet and the worship of Chaliapine. Punch's "Holiday Pages" make strange reading, emphasizing, as they do, the passion for amusement, freak and fancy costumes, the cinema craze and "full joy days." Punch's staff did not escape the infection, and one of them writes from a golfing resort:—

"Carpe diem"—yes, that's the motto.

"Work be jiggered!" and likewise "What ho!"

I'm not going back till I've jolly well got to!

Strauss's Joseph had been produced in June by the Russian Ballet, and lent point to "Blanche's" letter on the "Friendship Fête," an imaginary entertainment organized "to celebrate our not having had any scraps with any foreign country for some little time" by the performance of a Kamschatkan opera-ballet. The satire is effective, but it is largely unconscious or subconscious. The Smith-Carpentier fight made a greater impression on the man in the street than the murder of the Crown Prince Ferdinand at Sarajevo.

The death of Mr. Chamberlain, who, after long enforced absence from the political arena, passed away on July 2, hushed political strife for a moment. All sections were united in deploring the tragic eclipse of a great fighter and a great man who, in Punch's words, "loved his Party well but loved his country more."

Turkey appears early in the month as unready to fight Greece before the autumn, "when the ships come home." The cartoons until the last issue in July deal with the Budget and Home Rule. Mr. Asquith on July 13 announced the winding up of business; there would be no autumn session, but Parliament would reassemble early in the winter. On July 29 the chief cartoon, "What of the Dawn?" deals with the anxieties of Ireland, and the most important event chronicled in the "Essence of Parliament" was the Premier's announcement that, on the initiative of the King, a conference on the Ulster question between the British and Irish parties had been arranged to meet at Buckingham Palace.

THE POWER BEHIND

Austria (at the ultimatum stage): "I don't quite like his attitude. Somebody must be backing him."

On the Eve

MUTUAL SERVICE

Britannia (to Peace): "I've been doing my best for you in Europe. Please do your best for me in Ireland."

Punch was not wholly blind to the peril of Serbia. In his second cartoon, "The Power Behind," we see the Austrian Eagle threatening the little Serbian bird and suspecting that someone must be backing him—the someone being the Russian Bear hidden behind a rock. The immediate situation was not misread, but Punch, in his own words, was in an "irrepressible holiday mood," and little thought that on the day on which his cartoon appeared Austria would declare war on Serbia. Yet even this warning did not bring home to Punch the imminence of the "Grand Smash." The makers of wars have no consideration for the producers of weekly papers. The issue, dated August 5, had gone to press before Germany declared war on Russia and France, and was published only a few hours before Great Britain was at war with Germany. The cartoon of the week shows Britannia appealing to Peace to do the best for her in Ireland, having done her best for Peace in Europe.[3] The "Essence of Parliament" is more concerned with gun-running at Clontarf than the prospect of a European convulsion, and the verses on the "Logic of Ententes: composed on what looks like the eve of a general European War," and intended to reflect the views of an average British patriot, are governed by the feeling that the whole thing is "an awful bore." Britons "never can be Slavs," and the last couplet runs thus:—

"Well, if I must, I shall have to fight

For the love of a bounding Balkanite."

An even more detached and ironical note is sounded in the fantasy headed "Armageddon"—a satire on Porkins, a blatant young golfing "nut" who thinks that England needs a war to cure her of flabbiness. The granting of his desire is traced to the cynical intervention of the Gods of Olympus in promoting a little scrap over a love affair in an obscure corner of the Balkans:—

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.

Underpaid Women Workers

On behalf of unorganized labour, when it was unfairly exploited by the employer, Punch continued to lift up his voice in the old strain. In 1893 the hard case of the shopgirls, slave-driven by exacting masters, always standing, too tired at the end of the week to profit by Sunday, prompts him to a plea for a true Day of Rest. The verses, like the "Cry of the City Clerk," are vitiated by their sentimentality. There is more vigour in the lines "'Arriet on Labour" in the same year, which show that the new type of woman was not confined to the upper classes. 'Arriet is a workgirl who works hard, loves her freedom and nights off, has no respect for spouting Labour candidates, and no envy of married drudges:—

Labour? Well, yus, the best of hus must work; yer carn't git quit of it;

And you and me, Poll, like the rest, must do our little bit of it.

But oh, I loves my freedom, Poll, my hevenings hoff is 'eaven;

But wives and slavies ain't allowed even one day in seven.

Jigger the men! Sam spouts and shouts about the 'Onest Worker.

That always means a Man, of course—he's a smart Man, the shirker.

But when a Man lives upon his wife, and skulks around his diggings,

Who is the "'Onest Worker" then? Yours truly,

'Arriet 'Iggings.

Another "hard case" exposed by Punch in the following year was that of the rural schoolmistress, contrasted unfavourably with Crabbe's version. Punch took his cue from a paper read by Dr. Macnamara at a meeting of the N.U.T. and drew a lamentable picture of the weary, overworked and miserably underpaid teacher, "passing poor on £40 a year." The picture was obviously drawn at second-hand, but the line in which the schoolmistress is described as "a lonely, tired, certificated slave" was an excellent summary of a real hardship. Women workers were not only slave-driven by employers and underpaid by the State; they were also handicapped by the competition of their sisters who only worked for pocket-money. This, at least, was the burden of a complaint made by an old-fashioned woman in the Daily Chronicle in the autumn of 1895:—

"In every branch of work we see well-to-do women crowding into the ranks of competition, in consequence of which wages are lowered, and women who really want work are left to starve."

This letter inspired Punch to deliver a fierce homily in verse on the wickedness of well-to-do women "playing at work," to the detriment of their poor sisters. As a set-off, however, we may note that in 1897 Punch condemns mistresses for exploiting "Lady servants," getting them to do double the work for half the ordinary wages because of their inability to stand up for themselves. Sweated women workers were still to be found in the tailoring trade, and Punch did well in 1896 to retell in his columns the story of the tailoress, Mary Ould of Peckham, as unfolded before the Lambeth County Court. She had to buy her own materials and pay her fare for fetching and carrying work; she toiled till 10 p.m. from Saturday till Thursday and, at ¾d. per coat, earned 3s. The pillorying of these abuses did credit to Punch's humanity, but as they were nearly always chosen from unorganized trades, they became increasingly difficult to reconcile with his increasing hostility to trade union organization, and his distrust of legislation expressly designed to satisfy the demands of Labour. Philanthropic efforts to relieve the squalor of the home life of the poor were another matter. To the appeals of the Children's Country Holiday Fund Punch always lent a ready ear, and when Canon Barnett arranged an exhibition of Watts's pictures in Whitechapel, Punch vigorously applauded the scheme. Pictures were as good as sermons, and better than many:—

Where Whitechapel's darkness the weary eyes of the dreary worker dims,

It may be found that Watts's pictures do better than Watts's hymns.

ART IN WHITECHAPEL

"Well, that's what I calls a himpossible persition to get yerself into!"

The Children's Champion

At the same time the Philistine attitude of the East End matron is not overlooked in Phil May's picture. Much depended on the spirit in which this campaign of enlightenment was conducted, and Punch continued to rebuke and satirize the lack of sympathy and comprehension shown by the fashionable "slummer." He had "no use" for people like "Mrs. Slumley Smirk," the District Visitor, who asked to be warned if any illness was about, as then she wouldn't wish to come near; and he was even more satirical at the expense of Socialism as conceived by certain members of the aristocracy—vide the imaginary interview with "Lady Yorick" in 1905—who sought to have it both ways, and, as I notice elsewhere, represented a new and inverted type of snobbery.

For the scandal of the insurance of poor children's lives he held not the parents, but the "Bogus Insurance sneak," mainly responsible. He is at least half in sympathy with the soliloquy in St. James's Park of the Socialist loafer who deprecates the amount of food wasted on the ducks and swans. He applauds the revival of Folk Dancing in 1903; in 1905 there is a long and charming sketch of an old Cambridge bedmaker who had recently died at an advanced age; and in the following year Punch published a delightful imaginary description of a socialistic experiment, by which poor children were sent on visits to "upper-class" families, and treated as guests and equals, to the mutual profit of both classes. The scheme is suggested as an improvement on bazaars and similar activities. On the other hand, Punch indulges in ironic comment on the result of well-meant efforts to teach poor children to "think imperially"—a subject on which he spoke with more than one voice. In an Empire Day Essay a London school-child wrote in 1908:—

"There are a lot of Empires like Chinese Empire, Hackney Empire, Stratford Empire, and Russian Empire. Hackney Empire is different to ours because they sing there, and ours is places."

THE CAPTURE OF WINDSOR CASTLE
by the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scout Movement

The best-inspired and most fruitful of all movements for the uplifting of the children of the people which belongs to this period was that of the Boy Scouts. It was entirely independent of State or official encouragement, and sprang from the ingenious brain of one man, General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and Punch, as an Individualist, was not inclined to think worse of it on that account. As a matter of fact, he greeted the Boy Scouts with the utmost cordiality from the very outset. In 1909 his cartoon on "Our Youngest Line of Defence" shows the Boy Scout reassuring Mrs. Britannia: "Fear not, Grandma; no danger can befall you now. Remember I am with you." Later on in 1911 came the delightful cartoon of the Boy Scouts capturing Windsor Castle, and, on the very eve of the war, in Punch's Holiday Pages we encounter the late Mr. F. H. Townsend's admirable picture of our "dear old friend the foreign spy (cunningly disguised as a golfer) visiting our youngest suburb on a Saturday afternoon in quest of further evidence of our lethargy, general decadence and falling birth-rate." As a result of observing the activity and numbers of the Boy Scouts, he gets a serious shock, and at once telegraphs to his Commander-in-Chief "urging that the conquest of the British Isles be undertaken before the present generation is many years older." This oblique and imaginative tribute was happily conceived and well deserved. The spirit of the Boy Scout movement was at least a contributory factor in helping us to win the War. What was even more important was the conversion of a great many Pacificists from their mistrust of the alleged "militarism" of the movement, and their recognition of its essential value as an instrument in fostering self-respect, truthfulness, altruistic kindliness and cleanliness of mind and body.

OUR DEAR OLD FRIEND THE FOREIGN SPY

Strikes and Unemployment

This record—and it is by no means exhaustive—of Punch's humanitarian activities must not blind us to the fact that throughout these years the principal object of his sympathy and compassion was not the working man but the middle-class tax-and rate-payer. In 1893 Punch depicts him bound to a post and in danger of being drowned by the rising tide of rates—L.C.C., Asylums, Libraries, Baths, Vestries. Punch, as we have seen, did not acquit the coal owners and coal merchants of rapacity, but he was not any more sympathetic to the miners—witness the following dialogue printed in the same year:—

THE STRIKER'S VADE MECUM

Question. You think it is a good thing to strike?

Answer. Yes, when there is no other remedy.

Q. Is there ever any other remedy?

A. Never. At least, so say the secretaries.

Q. Then you stand by the opinions of the officials?

A. Why, of course; because they are paid to give them.

Q. But have not the employers any interests?

A. Lots, but they are not worthy the working man's consideration.

Q. But are not their interests yours?

A. Yes, and that is the way we guard over them.

Q. But surely it is the case of cutting off the nose to spite the mouth?

A. And why not, if the mouth is too well fed.

Q. But are not arguments better than bludgeons?

A. No. And bludgeons are less effective than revolvers.

Q. But may not the use of revolvers produce the military?

A. Yes, but they can do nothing without a magistrate reading the Riot Act.

Q. But, the Riot Act read, does not the work become serious?

A. Probably. But at any rate the work is lawful, because unremunerative.

Q. But how are the wives and children of strikers to live if their husbands and fathers earn no wages?

A. On strike money.

Q. But does all the strike money go to the maintenance of the hearth and home?

A. Of course not, for a good share of it is wanted for the baccy-shop and the public-house.

Q. But if strikes continue will not trade suffer?

A. Very likely, but trade represents the masters.

Q. And if trade is driven away from the country, will it come back?

A. Most likely not, but that is a matter for the future.

Q. But is not the future of equal importance to the present?

A. Not at all, for a day's thought is quite enough for a day's work.

Q. Then a strike represents either nothing or idleness?

A. Yes, bludgeons or beer.

Q. And what is the value of reason?

A. Why, something less than smoke.

Simultaneously Punch published a cartoon (rather prematurely) in which Mars, expressing his readiness to arbitrate, appeals to Vulcan to do the same. Lord Rosebery's successful intervention as a mediator in the coal strike in December, 1893, is handsomely acknowledged in the cartoon in which he figures as the "G.O.M.'s handy boy." Lord Rosebery was still at the height of his personal popularity; it was not until 1905 that Punch described him as "unemployable." Unemployment had reached formidable dimensions, and then, as now, proved serviceable material to the political agitator. Mr. Asquith, as Home Secretary, had allowed political meetings in Trafalgar Square "so long as the proceedings were orderly," and Punch represented the disappointment of the extremists at having the ground cut from under their feet by this condition. A year later Punch depicted the Trafalgar Square of the future, with anarchy rampant in every corner, and early in 1894 the verses "The Devil's Latest Walk (after Coleridge and Southey)," fiercely attacking Socialist agitators as animated by sheer malice, are accompanied by a picture of a fiendish figure with horns and tail.

THE UNEMPLOYABLE
(Dedicated to Lord R-s-b-ry)

Gambling and Improvidence

It was about this time that, as we read in the Annual Register, "a large body of the unemployed attended service at St. Paul's Cathedral in response to an invitation from Canon Scott Holland, whose sermon was frequently interrupted by the applause of those present." Punch, in his then mood, would have probably explained this episode on the principle of "the Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be." Punch was no admirer of the art of Mr. George Moore, but he had paid him reluctant homage as a moralist in 1894, under the head of "All the Winners":—

Boycotted or not boycotted, if Esther Waters calls general and effectual attention to the growth of gambling, which is the real "curse of the country" in these days, it will do more good than all the Dodos and Marcellas and Barabbases and Heavenly Twins in all the Libraries in the land.

It was in the same spirit that a few years later Punch applauded the idea of establishing a Bureau of Common-sense to combat the extravagance and improvidence of the working classes. The suggestion was made by Judge Emden, the well-known County Court Judge, in dealing with the case of a man who, on wages of from 25s. to 30s. a week, committed himself to a twenty-five-guinea piano on the hire-purchase system.

"Agricultural Depression" bulks largely in Punch's pages in the 'nineties, but it is the farmer, not the farm labourer, who is singled out for commiseration. In 1893 he is shown as Buridan's Ass between two piles of sapless chaff—Tory and Liberal—overburdened by the triple load of Rents, Rates and Foreign Competition:—

What choice between the chaff of arid Rad

And that of equally dry-and-dusty Tory?

Chaplin would feed you on preposterous fad,

And Gardner[4] on—postponement! The old story!

While the grass grows the horse may starve. Poor ass!

Party would bring you to a similar pass!

In the summer of 1894 the verses "A Good Time Coming" foreshadow the end of the agricultural depression, but a few weeks later the farmer was bitterly disappointed. His crops had been plentiful, but the plenty had brought down the price of wheat in some cases to 16s. and 19s. a quarter. In short, there had been a golden harvest, but he couldn't get gold for it. Let it be noted, in parenthesis, that if Punch espoused the cause of the farmer, he was not wholly wedded to the old rural régime of the Squire and the Parson. In 1894 there is a humorously ironic lament by a lover of the "Good Old Times" in the form of a new version of "The Village Blacksmith," suggested by the actual return of a blacksmith to one of the new parish councils at the head of the poll. When the Conservatives came back to power in 1895, Lord Salisbury, in a new fable of Hercules and the Farmer, is represented as adroitly ascribing agricultural depression to Providence, and exculpating the Government which had done its best; but the farmer is unconvinced by this pious explanation. The remedy which the Government sought to apply in the Agricultural Land Rating Bill of 1896 failed to satisfy Punch. Mr. Chaplin is seen, in an adaptation of Æsop, shifting the burden of rural rates from the horse (country) to the ass (town). But the latter was Punch's special protégé, and the verses in May express accurately enough the cry of the poor townsman, the rate-crushed cockney, protesting against Mr. Chaplin's remedy when the income-tax was already 8d. in the pound! The income-tax payer this time is the patient ass, hoping that some at least of the surplus of six millions may be devoted to the relief of his gigantic burden. To return to Agriculture, a sidelight is thrown on the shortage of farm hands in 1901, in the picture of an elderly farmer rebuking a very small boy for slacking, only to be met by the retort "Chaps is scarce." The parallel to the Great War is obvious, but one would hardly have thought that the Boer war was on a large enough scale to affect the labour market in this way. In 1903 voluntary labour bureaus were started, but the results were disappointing, and Punch quotes an account of an experiment in Wiltshire. Fifteen men had been sent down from London; two returned in three days "because it rained"; and twelve more were back in a fortnight. Our increasing reliance on imported food had already prompted Punch to indulge in a forecast of the Stores of the Future, at which Tierra-del-Fuego Devonshire cream and similar products are offered for sale because it had become impossible to get any home-grown produce. The exodus from the land to the cities was already in full swing, and we find Punch as early as 1896 commending a clergyman who had started dancing classes in his village near Stroud as a counter-attraction to the lure of the towns. In this context it is worthy of note that in 1900 Punch suggested that, as a result of socialistic legislation in Australia and elsewhere, and the growing struggle for the good things of life, no one was willing "to do the washing up." Yet prices and taxes were low enough to excite the envy of the harassed post-war householder. Eggs were advertised at 16 for 1s., but even this did not satisfy Phil May's broken-down tragedian in 1900, who exclaims as he reads the announcement in a shop-window: "Cheap! Ha! Ha! Why, in my time they threw them at us."

JOE THE VENTRILOQUIST

Professor Ch-mb-rl-n: "You see, ladies and gentlemen, he talks just as well even when I go right away!"

Town v. Country

If all was not well with those who lived on or by the land, the town exodus of week-enders and the demand for small country residences had already created a cult of "rural felicity," the artificiality of which did not escape Punch when he satirized in 1904 the platitudinous appreciation of Nature and country life distilled in the halfpenny Press. At the same time the drastic legislation dealing with the land problem introduced by the Liberals on their return to power in 1906 found little or no sympathy from Punch. The cross-currents revealed in the Unionist Party by the great Tariff Reform controversy, the resignation of Mr. Chamberlain, the secession of the Free Trade Ministers, and the inability of the plain person to cope with the transcendental fiscal dialectics of Mr. Balfour, had made it difficult for Punch, born and bred in the principles of Free Trade, to accord a whole-hearted support to the Unionist administration in its later years. There was, however, no perplexity in his attitude towards the land policy of their successors. At all their stages Punch was hostile to the new "Lloyd Georgics." We may specially single out the cartoon in August, 1910, presenting a "study of a free-born Briton who, within the period usually allotted to his holidays, is required under threat of a penalty of £50 to answer a mass of obscure conundrums relating to land values, to facilitate his future taxation." The miseries of this inquisitorial process are further developed in an imaginary extract from a specimen return showing how some of the questions in the historic "Form IV" were to be answered. The sequel to this laborious and costly preliminary investigation falls outside the scope of this volume. Nor is it necessary to dwell at length on the movement, doubtless animated by a noble sympathy with the rural population, initiated by the Daily Mail in 1911 on behalf of the revival of windmills and standard bread. The new-found interest in the yokel is satirized in the song of the "Merry Hind" (after Masefield's Daffodil Fields), and the cartoon "The Return of the Golden Age" in February, 1913, where Mr. Lloyd George is seen emptying a cornucopia of "rare and refreshing fruit" into the lap of the ecstatic farm labourer. Hodge was at last fairly in the limelight, for both parties had their land policy, and the opening of Mr. Lloyd George's Land Campaign in October is symbolized by a picture of him as an irresponsible music-hall comedian with "Songs Without Wurzels. No. 1, Land of Hope (as arranged by the Cabinet)" in his hand. Mr. Asquith is seen as his accompanist, waiting for the "patter" to finish, and observing, "This is the part that makes me nervous." But the Pall Mall Gazette, then edited by the great Mr. Garvin, declared in December that "whatever can be done to improve the lot of the agriculturist will have the Opposition's cordial support," and, on the strength of this assurance, the Premier's anxiety, in Punch's view, was allayed. When Scout George reports to his chief "the enemy is on our side, sir," Scoutmaster Asquith replies, "Then let the battle begin."

THE RETURN OF THE GOLDEN AGE
(Vide The Lloyd-Georgics—passim)

Work, Wages, Pensions, and Doles

Farmers and farm labourers were regarded in Punch's survey as not much more than pawns in the game of party politics. The claims of organized labour in the other great industries and the general tendency of legislation in their interests found him a more vigilant and a more hostile critic. Even so mild a measure as the Early Closing Bill of 1896—with the principle of which he had been in agreement in earlier years—excited his misgivings and prompted a forecast of increasingly intimate interference with the private life of householders: the outline of his "Household Regulations Act" contains provisions for hours of rising, cleaning, meals, bills and rent. It is a burlesque, but none the less indicates resentment of patriarchal State interference. Yet Punch's general individualism admitted of exceptions. He noted the failure of the Voluntary Labour Bureau system, and was frivolously critical of the amateur attempt of a vicar to start Trust Houses to supersede Public Houses—a movement which later on came to stay and to achieve solid results. Here, however, allowance must be made for Punch's inveterate distrust of temperance agitators. State interference on behalf of minorities did not always meet with Punch's approval, and in 1898 we find him vehemently protesting against the recognition of "Conscientious Objectors" to vaccination. In a striking picture headed "The Triumph of De-Jenner-ation" he shows a grisly skeleton waving as his banner the Vaccination Bill, which Punch calls "the Bill for the encouragement of Small Pox." But the burden of his criticisms of Labour is concerned with the artificial restriction of output, the conversion of the trade unions from an industrial to a political organization, and the increasing tendency of State intervention to encourage a reluctance either to work or save. The picture of Hyde Park on "Labour Day" in 1898 with the grass strewn with recumbent sleeping figures is, if I read it aright, designed less in compassion for the unemployed than as a satire on the unemployable. Wages were high in the bricklaying trade, but a shortage of labour was complained of; as for the skill required, a surveyor had written to the Daily Telegraph stating that "any ordinary man could learn bricklaying in a fortnight," and Punch ironically foreshadows the invasion of the trade by underpaid clerks, barristers, etc. Ruskin College—opened at Oxford in 1899—is described as "a College for Labour Leaders" by Punch, who rather unnecessarily prophesied that it might become the scene of "strikes"; but the friction which arose between those who conceived that the function of the college was purely educational, and those who wished to make it a school of political thought, went far to justify Punch's misgivings. The plan of Old Age Pensions had long been in the air. The committee which reported in 1892 showed considerable divergence of opinion. Mr. Chamberlain, the chairman, condemned Mr. Charles Booth's proposal of the general endowment of old age as a gigantic system of outdoor relief for every one, good and bad, thrifty and unthrifty. The majority of the Royal Commission of 1893 were adverse to State pensions. The Rothschild Committee in 1896 found themselves unable to devise any satisfactory proposal. The Select Committee over which Mr. Chaplin presided put forward a scheme substantially on Mr. Charles Booth's lines, but in view of the cost and the hostility of the Government the matter rested till the passing of the Act by the Liberals in 1908. Punch, it may be noted, was no enthusiast for the scheme formulated by the Chaplin Committee; his cartoon of "Old Gaffer" and "Little Chappelin" (modelled on Southey's ballad) is undoubtedly hostile, and the accompanying verses end up on a cynical note when the "Old Gaffer" asks "Little Chappelin" what is the bag he is carrying, and is told:

"Only another dole," said he;

"It is a famous Ministry."

The Trade Union Congress at Plymouth in the same year censured Lord Mount Edgcumbe because, in throwing open his grounds to them, he had reserved the privacy of his lawn for a garden party. Punch accordingly indulged in some sarcastic verses, supposed to be written by a Trade Unionist, and ironically applauding the action of Mr. Ben Tillett, who had distinguished himself by his attack on Lord Mount Edgcumbe. This was fair game enough, though to-day it would probably have been passed over in silence. Punch no doubt was thinking of the saying that an Englishman's house is his castle; and hardly anticipated the time when an Englishman's or an English nobleman's castle would cease to be his home. To-day we read with an amused surprise Punch's comment in 1900 on the introduction of an eight-hours' day for domestics in Australia, and his forecast of a similar state of affairs in England under a new Patriarchal Statute. Nor is there anything wildly extravagant in his ironical anticipation of the cook of the future demanding £100 wages, though unable to guarantee more in return than "chop one day and steak the next." The higher education of servants, according to Punch, was tending to produce a type which knew everything except the things which really mattered. He tells us in 1902 of a lady who was delighted to get a cook who could develop her photographs, and gives us, in the same year, an excellent study (after Gilbert) of the "Up-to-date Cook-General":—

I am the very pattern of an up-to-date cook-general,

I've information vegetable, animal and mineral;

I've passed the seventh standard, and I vary the monotony

Of flirting with the butcher's boy by writing books on botany.

I know the chemistry of zinc, tin, potash and ammonium;

I practise on the fiddle, flute, piano and harmonium;

I understand minutely the formation of an icicle,

And in the season round the Park I like to ride my bicycle.

I've studied Herbert Spencer and I've views on sociology,

And as a mere parergon I have taken up conchology—

In short, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral,

I am the very model of an up-to-date cook-general.

In fact, when I have learnt to tell a turnip from an artichoke,

Or grill a steak that will not make my mistress's dinner-party choke;

When I can cook a mutton chop or any plain comestible

In such a way that it becomes not wholly indigestible;

When I can wash a cup without inevitably breaking it,

Or make a bed where folk can sleep at ease without remaking it;

In short, when I've an inkling of economy domestical,

You'll say, "Of all cook-generals this girl the very best I call."

For my culinary ignorance and all-round imbecility

Is only to be equalled by my housewifely futility—

But still, in learning vegetable, animal and mineral,

I am the very pattern of an up-to-date cook-general.

The Aristocrats of Labour

The plethora of processions in 1901 moved Punch to make various suggestions for the better conduct of such spectacles, mostly in the shape of fantastic and satirical concessions to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of sightseers. Warnings against the panem et circenses habit were legitimate enough, but Punch took a more aggressive line in his attack on the miners in 1901:—

A BLACK LOOK-OUT

(A paper picked up near the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.)

Pity the sorrows of a poor collier, who, if a shilling export duty is imposed upon coal, will have (possibly) to see—

1. His wife giving up her music and riding lessons.

2. His children not able to go to the seaside for a month or two.

3. His favourite licensed victualler unable to supply him with that extra quart he enjoys so much after he has drunk the others.

4. His dogs unable to compete for prizes because their upkeep will be too expensive.

5. His tailor sending in his account and respectfully requesting immediate payment.

6. His wine merchant writing to ask him why he has given up ordering champagne.

7. Worst (and, fortunately, most improbable) of all, himself having to work four days a week instead of three.

In earlier years Punch would have given chapter and verse for such charges; the later method, though it makes easier reading, carries less weight. Punch did not, however, wholly abandon the practice of "documenting" his criticism, and he turned it to excellent account in a discussion of the much-abused German clerk in 1898, when he quoted the following passage from the official Consular Report from Stettin, issued by the Foreign Office:—

Much of the commercial knowledge of Germany has been supplied by young Germans who have been employed as clerks in Great Britain, mostly as foreign correspondents. British clerks cannot be used as foreign correspondents, because not one in a thousand can correspond correctly in any foreign language.

For the effective German competition which threatened to oust British trade from the markets of the world, Punch did not hold any one class responsible. The fault was our national complacency, symbolized in 1901 by a lethargic John Bull priding himself on the superior excellence of his goods, but declining to take the trouble to make foreign customers understand it. The contrast between the German and the Briton in regard to practical business capacity is brought out in the papers headed, "Pashley's Opinions." "Efficiency" was the motto of the hour, yet Punch found it hard to reconcile the cry with the "Catchwords for the Million," especially the "Equal Rights of Man" as interpreted by trade union rules, especially those affecting bricklaying, which in his view sterilized competition and ambition. Another side of the subject is dealt with in the series of papers entitled, "How to get on," one of which satirizes the almost hysterical worship of "efficiency" by those who in the same breath declared that we were the greatest race on earth and also the greatest slackers, but confined their own energies to mere talk. The underlying principles, however, which govern Punch's contributions to the "Efficiency" controversy could not be better summed up than in the dictum of Mr. J. M. Beck,[5] the Solicitor-General of the United States: "The great evil of the world to-day is the aversion to work."

MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW AND THE PEOPLE

"Wot d'y' fink o' this 'ere G.B.S.?"

"Never tried it! I smokes V.B.D."

Sport and Crime

What troubled Punch, to borrow an epigram from another American anonymous writer, was "not so much the unemployment of the idle as the idleness of the employed." He is increasingly concerned with the popular pre-occupation with sport and criminal celebrities, combined with a corresponding apathy on important questions. Foreign politics were only brought home to the masses when they lent themselves to sensational or spectacular treatment, and, in 1903, Punch gibbets an announcement in the Scotsman: "Scenes resulting from the Macedonian Atrocities displayed by the Modern Marvel Cinematograph, at 3 and 8 (see Amusement Column)." The sentimental interest in criminals is bluntly rebuked as a perversion of the philanthropic maxim that "to know all is to forgive all"; the blame for this was attributed to the journals which catered for the million, but the avidity with which this pabulum was devoured, and the absence of any protest from those affected, was a disquieting symptom; and Punch was within his rights in making game of the Clarion when it scented class distinction in the abortive movement to introduce knee-breeches for evening wear.

Liberals and Labour

In the Unionist defeat at the election of 1906, Punch recognized not merely the return to power of the Liberals, but the coming of the "New Demos," the growing importance of the Labour Party, and the increasing impetus lent to its demands. His "farewell to the beaten side" is animated by no enthusiasm for the victors:—

You leave a record which shall bear the light

When History delves for Truth in after days,

Not as the sudden mob condemns at sight,

Or stints its grudging praise.

Meanwhile the heart of gratitude is cold;

A young new Demos, born of yester-eve,

Big-mouthed and blustering, overbears the old,

Waiting for no man's leave.

Every inhuman name that he can spell

He prints in red for all to know you by,

Citing his gods to prove he would not tell,

Nor yet believe, a lie.

He paints your lurid portraits on the polls:—

"Drivers of slaves that oust the white man's brood."

"Bigots that bind in chains our children's souls!"

"Filchers of poor folk's food!"

Had you been Czars to drain the people's blood,

Or sought to earn a country's dying curse,

Dragging her remnant honour through the mud,

He could have done no worse.

His hooligans are out with stones and dirt;

And in the darkness you must hide your head,

Nor look for Chivalry to salve the hurt,

For Demos reigns instead.

Not much it helps to know that those, ere long,

Who lent him aid and did a mutual deal,

Will find their henchman, grown a shade too strong,

Stamping them under heel.

Little it serves that they, your old-time foes,

Who found him useful for their present ends,

Must seek you soon and plaintively propose—

"Please save us from our friends!"

But let this solace keep your hearts resigned—

That, till a second lustre's course is through,

The noblest heritage you leave behind

Demos can scarce undo.

The prophecy that the Liberals would invoke the assistance of the Unionists to "save them from their friends" was not fulfilled; the course of legislation up to the war indicated in the main a desire to consult the demands of Labour rather than to break away from the alliance. The summary of reasons "Why I lost" from defeated candidates furnishes a useful commentary on the verses quoted above. They include Chinese Labour, the Big Loaf cry, the Education Bill of 1902, the Trade Disputes Bill, Overbridge Trams, the Japanese Alliance and the Entente Cordiale. The messages were not actually received by Punch, but they are not an unfair interpretation of the issues which weighed with the bulk of the electorate. A "spirited foreign policy" was out of favour, and a cold fit had succeeded to the fervour of the "Khaki" election.

The Government lost no time in setting to work to redeem their pledge about Trade Disputes. Early in April, C.-B. figures in the cartoon "Hard to please" as a farmer soliloquizing over his dog (Labour), "He's had two platefuls of biscuits and isn't satisfied. Looks as if he wanted raw meat." The plates, labelled Workmen's Compensation and Merchant Shipping Bill, are both empty. The third, the Trade Disputes Bill, is full of biscuits as yet untouched. When the Attorney-General, Sir J. Lawson Walton, introduced that measure, Punch, in his "Essence of Parliament," speaks of it as a "ticklish Bill" conceding important demands in regard to picketing and conspiracy, but "as to the immunity of Trade Union funds from amercement consequent on civil actions, the Bill does not go the full lengths of the demands of Labour." The attitude of the Labour Party, who threatened to bring in their own Bill and to insist on its substitution for the Government measure, is symbolized in the cartoon showing Labour offering his scales to Justice in preference to her own, in which Capital and Labour are equally balanced, with the comment, "I think you'll find this pair works better—for me." The climbing down of the Government in the autumn session is illustrated in a further cartoon representing Labour as the predominant partner. The Liberal Party is seen on foot being pushed on by a donkey (Labour) drawing a cart in which the Trade Disputes Bill is sitting. "Yes," says the old lady, "I was wrong to threaten him with a whip. The dear creature must be led, not driven. Still—this isn't quite the way I meant to come." Comment in Punch's "Essence of Parliament" on the progress of the Bill is curiously meagre, but there is one illuminating paragraph on the Report Stage: "The Attorney-General explained that when at the earlier stage he argued against the immunity of Trade Unions from action at law, he did not mean to debar himself from subsequently insisting upon the justice of such immunity." The momentous and far-reaching consequences of a measure which created a privileged class and set them above the law were only dimly apprehended in Punch, who confined himself in his further comments to the lack of spirit shown by the Opposition in the Lords. Thus in "The Better Part of Valour" we see the Trade Disputes Bill standing over the prostrate figure of the Education Bill, about to batter its way into the Lords, while Lord Lansdowne remarks: "I bar your way? My dear fellow! Why, you've got a mandate." "Well, so had my friend here," rejoins the T.D.B., on which Lord Lansdowne replies: "Ah! but not such a big one!" The same idea is developed in the Epilogue, where the Lords are charged by the representative of "The People's Will" with having attacked and brutally ill-treated the Education Bill, while they were too cowardly to tackle the Trade Disputes Bill.

The Revolt of the Middle Classes

The Daily Mail, which had anticipated a Unionist victory at the polls, now espoused the cause of the "Middle-Class Serf," taxed and rated and bled beyond endurance "in the interests of the most pampered section of the community the labouring man," and rumours of the formation of a new political body, with a view to obtaining justice and recognition, impelled Punch to indulge in a forecast, half sympathetic, half sceptical, of "The Turning of the Middle-Class Worm":—

England, be warned! The time for patience passes;

You are more near the eve

Of a revolt among the Middle Classes

Than you perhaps believe;

Worn to a thread by Labour's licensed plunder

Of what poor desultory pay they earn,

Can anybody reasonably wonder

These worms should turn?

In 1897 Punch had resented Government interference with the management of workhouses, and fell foul of the Local Government Board when a Board of Guardians in Lincolnshire were asked to make a return of the number of currants put into the children's puddings. Ten years later the ground of this complaint had shifted; and the administrative scandals which Punch assails in 1907 are ascribed to the extravagance of Labour Guardians. Poplar is described as "the Pauper's Paradise"; and the new Bumbledom is shown, in a perversion of the scene from "Oliver Twist," "asking for more," while the miserable ratepayer ladles out champagne-cup for its refreshment. The "latest excursion" is "A day in Profuse Poplar," the lair of the "Gorgeous Guardians."

The Workmen's Compensation Act is treated as a set-off to the Prevention of Corruption Act, aimed at the abuse of secret commissions, and a butler is shown reassuring a cook and advising her how to get her own back by a carefully contrived accident. The same spirit is revealed in the picture of the workman whose innocence has been outraged by someone who said he had seen him hurry: "I never 'urry."

To this year belongs the farcical suggestion of a Society to Protect Employers, for the special benefit of persons who were afraid of their servants and had not the courage to dismiss them.

Punch was nearer the mark in his illustrations of the popular prejudice against the Army. A football enthusiast at a match commiserates "silly people who mess about with a rifle on Saturday afternoons"; and a "Spartan mother" standing at a barrack gate, uplifts her voice in thankfulness that her Bill "isn't wasting his time drilling," while Bill is shown in an inset engrossed in the contemplation of a pot of beer.

Heckling Thomas: "D'yer mean ter say if yer 'ad two 'osses yer'd give me one?"

Socialist: "Cert'nly."

H. T.: "And if yer 'ad two cows, yer'd give me one?"

S.: "'Course I would!"

H. T.: "An' if yer 'ad two pigs?"

S.: "Wot yer talkin' about? I've got two pigs!"

"The Open-minded Beggar"

Punch distrusted Socialism because, in his view, it led in practice to vicarious generosity. The Socialist would give half of everything, so long as he didn't possess it himself. Yet in apportioning the blame for the railway trouble in 1907, Punch did not spare Capital. Railway directors and trade unions were in his cartoon shown as equally animated by a disregard for the interests of the public. Incidentally we may note that the volunteer service rendered by the general public in 1919 is anticipated in a humorous sketch of the experiences of an amateur porter. Punch, even where he felt strongly, was alive to the extravagances of the extremists on his own side, witness the verses in 1908 which purport to express the perplexity of "an open-minded beggar":—

Reader, tell me, if you know,

What, on earth, is Socialism.

Is it—men have told me so—

Some preposterous abysm,

Into which we all may drop—

With the criminals on top?

Is the vehement Express

Justified in all it mentions;

And are Wells and G. B. S.

Worse than Sikes in their intentions?

Do those Fabian beasts of prey

Wish to take my wife away?

Or—observe that I am quite

Open-minded, gentle reader—

Are they sometimes nearly right

In the shocking Labour Leader?

Will the coming Commune be

Paradise for you and me?

Do you think it can be true

That the death of competition

Guarantees for me and you

Sinless Edens—new edition?

Or was Stuart Mill correct—

Will there be some grave defect?

Shall we all be servile wrecks

With the brand of Marx imprinted

On our miserable necks,

As The Referee has hinted?

Or—see Justice—shall we share

Perfect freedom with the air?

Will that entity, the State

Of Collectivist Utopia,

Actually operate

Something like a cornucopia?

Or will Hardie's fatted friends

Leave me only odds and ends?

In this monster maze of doubt

I am groping like a blind man.

Shall I boldly blossom out

As a follower of Hyndman?

Or continue to exist

As an Individualist?

So, dear reader, will you, please,

Tell a poor, distracted Briton

Whom, in troubled times like these,

He should put his little bit on?

And, philosopher and guide,

Do pick out the winning side!

Punch's comment on the Eight Hours Bill is influenced by the objections of those who opposed it on the ground that it would affect the cost of all the necessaries of life. King Coal observes, "This means that I shall have to reduce my output," and Commerce rejoins, "Then I shall have to reduce mine, too," and both agree in doubting whether the Government had ever thought of this inevitable result.

Old Age Pensions are shown in 1908 as having already become a millstone round the neck of the Government; and in that form Mr. Asquith is seen tying them to the person of Mr. Lloyd George as a presentation to be worn by all Chancellors of the Exchequer in perpetuity. "Several of our contemporaries," Punch observes, "are devoting their columns to an explanation of the best way to obtain an Old Age Pension. Mr. Punch's advice is: Don't save."

THE SLUMP IN MANNERS

Mr. Asquith: "He wouldn't have stood this kind of thing. I wonder whether I ought."

On the much-vexed question of Chinese Labour, Punch sided against its critics, and his cartoons in 1906 represent Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman forcing unwelcome freedom on the Chinese coolie. Ignorance of Imperial questions on the part of the Labour Party is a frequent theme of comment. In the same year we find an article describing an imaginary tour in the Colonies by Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Philip Snowden. Mr. Keir Hardie spent two months in India in 1907, and the reports of his speeches, which he declared to be gross exaggerations and fabrications, led to vehement protests in the British Press. His biographer states that "for a full fortnight Keir Hardie was the most violently detested man throughout the English-speaking world. Even Punch joined in the vituperation with a cartoon by Linley Sambourne, which showed Britannia gripping the agitator by the scruff of the neck and apostrophizing him: 'Here, you'd better come home. We know all about you there, and you'll do less harm.'" Punch's adverse comments were not merely pictorial, and though Mr. Keir Hardie laid himself open to criticism by his angularity, his vanity and such remarks as "India to-day is governed by a huge military oligarchy," his courage and sincerity passed unrecognized.

Strikes and trade depression furnish themes for comment in 1908. In one cartoon Trade is shown as a lean and ill-favoured goose that has lost confidence in herself; in another, an engineer going back to work after seven months' stoppage, meets a cotton-spinning girl just coming out, and is credited with the admission that his action has done no good to himself or anyone else.

In 1909-1910 the conflict between Lords and Commons over the Budget proposals overshadowed all other home issues. It even became a subject of debate at preparatory schools, and Punch quotes a bonâ fide letter from a boy of nine: "We had two debates yesterday about the Budget being rejected. I was against the Budget, but the ones who were for it won, because just about half the ones who were against it had to go away for their prayers." Mr. Lloyd George was now the champion and hero of the democracy, for this was the year of the famous Limehouse speech and its sequel at Newcastle, where he referred to the House of Lords as "500 ordinary men, chosen accidentally from the unemployed." Dukes were handled almost as roughly as by Punch in the 'forties, and "robber-barons" were held up to obloquy. Punch resented this wholesale vituperation, and indulged in some effective reprisals in his criticism of trade union indiscipline, notably the growing tendency towards unofficial and lightning strikes. Thus, in 1910, he published a cartoon showing a trade union official lying prostrate in the road, overthrown and left behind by a crowd marching under a banner inscribed "Down with Authority." The comments on the payment of Members in the same year imply that trade unions were hostile to a change which impaired their control. The State might pay M.P.s, but the trade unions must call the tune. Nor was Punch favourably impressed by the Government's scheme of Insurance against Unemployment, which, in his forecast, would only encourage the existing reluctance to work.

Constituent (referring to M.P. speaking in market-place): "It's the likes of hus that 'as to pay him £400 a year. It makes me that wild to think as we could 'ave two first-class 'arf-backs for the same money."

Claims for "Recognition"

Throughout 1911 and 1912 the claims of the new Trade Unionism met with little sympathy. "Look here, my friend," says John Bull of the "New Volunteer Police" to a Trade Union leader: "I've been hearing a good deal of talk of 'recognition.' Well, I represent the public, and it's about time my interests were 'recognized.'" A month later, in October, 1911, an "imported agitator" is shown talking to his comrade as they watch the President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Sydney Buxton) nailing up a notice of the new Government Conciliation Scheme, with Sir George Askwith as chairman of the Industrial Council. "Don't be down-hearted," he observes. "Let's hope we shall be able to make as much trouble as before." This was apportioning the responsibility for failure in advance; but unfortunately failure there was. Punch's frontispiece to 1912 is the "tug of war" of Labour and Capital. The coal crisis was again acute in February, but in its opening stages Punch's hostility was chiefly displayed against the coal merchant, who was against strikes, but the more they were threatened the better it suited his book. Punch derived a certain malicious satisfaction from the spectacle of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's exclusion from the coal conference; but recognized that the final arbiter was not this or that leader or statesman but Famine. The thorny question of "blackleg" labour having again emerged, Punch asserted the right of the community in no uncertain terms. John Bull declares that he can't make the striker work, if he won't; but if others want to, he can and will make the striker let them. This strike introduced a new figure into Punch's portrait gallery; "Prince Petroleo" being introduced for the first time as a possible "second string" and rival of the hitherto indispensable King Coal. But such light-hearted treatment is henceforth rarely found in the treatment of industrial troubles. By the summer John Bull is seen on the edge of the crater of Labour unrest, listening vainly for any reassuring voices from its depths. The methods of the Trade Unionist are contrasted with those of Justice: he is all for striking first and arguing afterwards. The threat of a general strike was heard in June, but Punch remained sceptical as to the response. Agitators might call spirits from the vasty deep; but there would be no answer. In 1913 Dublin, for the first time in its long and chequered career, became the chief focus of industrial unrest in the British Isles, for this was the year of the strike of the Dublin transport workers, and the emergence, in the person of the notorious Jim Larkin, of a super-agitator of the most strenuous type. Strange things were done in the name of Liberty Hall—his headquarters—Mr. Birrell's absenteeism having become chronic, not to say conspicuous. Larkin was arrested and imprisoned, but released with a rapidity which reduced the penalty to a farce; and the assaults on the Dublin police during the strike riots in the winter were sufficiently severe to excuse Mr. Punch for calling their assailants the "be-labouring classes."

Labour Members in Transition

Mr. John Burns's political evolution, since the days when Punch savagely attacked him at the time of the Trafalgar Square riots in 1884, had long removed him from the range of attack on the score of his revolutionary views. His former associates regarded him as a renegade; independent observers found in him an energetic and arbitrary bureaucrat. Punch appreciated his manliness, but could not resist having an occasional dig at his complacent egotism, and when the Cabinet was reconstructed early in 1914, there is a picture of him praising the four new appointments as "excellent choices—with perhaps the exception of Samuel, Hobhouse and Masterman"—in other words, all but his own.

Towards Labour members of the House of Commons, Punch, as we have seen, had of recent years been none too friendly: least of all to Mr. Keir Hardie. But on the occasion of the debate in the House over the resignations at the Curragh in March, 1914, Punch's Parliamentary representative credits them with intervening effectually as representatives of the vast social and political weight behind them. In particular he praises Mr. John Ward and Mr. J. H. Thomas for their warning against militarism. "General Gough may feel keenly the Ulster situation. Tommy Atkins will feel not less keenly the industrial situation." For Mr. Thomas went on to point out that in the following November four hundred thousand railwaymen would come to grips with their employers, and if they did not attain satisfactory terms they might simultaneously strike. And if the Opposition doctrine in regard to Ulster were sound, added Mr. Thomas, "it will be my duty to tell the railwaymen to prepare for the worst by organizing their forces, the half-million capital possessed by the Union to be used to provide arms and ammunition for them." Mr. Thomas still occasionally utters blood-curdling warnings, but is now the special bête noire, to put it mildly, of the Labour extremists. General Gough's views on Ulster and Ireland have undergone considerable modifications, and Mr. John Ward, who denounced military juntas, is Colonel John Ward, D.S.O., the gallant soldier, fearlessly candid friend of Labour and uncompromising foe of Bolshevism.

The Rector: "Now, Molly, would you rather be beautiful or good?"

Molly: "I'd rather be beautiful and repent."

Uncle George: "What! Hate all your lessons? Come, now, you don't mean to say you hate history?"

Niece: "Yes, I do. To tell you the truth, Uncle, I don't care a bit what anybody ever did."

Miss Smith: "Now, Madge, tell me, which would you rather be—pretty or good?"

Madge (promptly): "I would rather be pretty, Miss Smith; I can easily be good whenever I like to try."

[4] Mr. Herbert Gardner, President of the Board of Agriculture, afterwards Lord Burghclere.

[5] "The Revolt against Authority." Fortnightly Review, November, 1921.

[EDUCATION AND THE CHURCHES]

The passing of the old order in Education had for its chief landmark the Act of 1871, but the change admits of endless illustrations. Many of these lie outside the scope of our survey; but no treatise on the Modern Child would be complete which did not take account of Punch's contributions to this engrossing problem. To take one example, the precocious representatives of the "younger generation" in Leech's pictures are almost invariably shown as the "sedulous apes" of their elders as men of the world. In the period under review in this volume imitation gives place to independence. The precocious child of both sexes—Leech's precocious children were almost without exception boys—is sometimes pedantic, but the distinctive note is one of scepticism and revolt. The young iconoclast has "found out all about Santa Claus and is now going to look into this Robinson Crusoe business." When the Rector asks Molly would she rather be beautiful or good, Molly audaciously replies: "I'd rather be beautiful and repent." Another version of the same retort is illustrated in Mr. Shepperson's charming picture. And when Uncle George, shocked by his little niece's declaration that she hated all her lessons, asks appealingly, "Come, now, you don't mean to say you hate history?" he receives the blunt answer: "Yes, I do. To tell you the truth, Uncle, I don't care a bit what anybody ever did." In this magnificent declaration of independence Punch sought to reduce to an absurdity the new doctrine of "self-expression" as adopted by the nursery. Punch's love of children was beyond question, but he remained in substantial accord with the Greek sage who said that the roots of education were bitter but the fruit sweet; that to avoid or evade the discipline of parents and teachers was to forgo learning and virtue. The modern and already fashionable inversion of the old method, by which education was to be "brightened" and sweetened at the outset, and every study turned into a game, seemed to Punch subversive of what was not merely an old but an inevitable order, and the new science of psychological "Pædology" found in him an invariably hostile critic. Passing over a burlesque article on the "Scientific Investigation of Infancy" based on a paper in the Fortnightly in 1895, I may note the first of his rejoinders to those austere educationists who have made war on Wonderland. In that year Mr. Holman, an inspector of schools, in an address delivered before the College of Preceptors, declared that "the race has outgrown fairy-tales, and to use them for early education is practically to bring about a reversion to type. They express the ideas of a profoundly ignorant primitive man. The hero has more often than not to lie, steal and cheat and to be an ingrate to accomplish his ends." A mass meeting of fairy-tale heroes and heroines, convoked by Punch, carried by acclamation a resolution of protest against this heresy, which, by the way, has of late years been espoused by the redoubtable Madame Montessori. Punch carried the war into the enemy's camp in a revised version of Cinderella, rewritten so as to combine instruction with amusement, and based on the latest scientific, ethnological, and psychological discoveries and theories; while in "New Lamps for Old" he retold other nursery tales so as to meet the supposed requirements of the modern child. I am afraid it must be taken as a confession of the failure of his efforts that in 1911 Punch described an "advanced child" replying to his grandmother's offer to tell him a story, "Oh, no, Granny, not a story, please! They're so stodgy and unconvincing and as out-of-date as tunes in music. We should much prefer an impressionist word-picture or a subtle character-sketch."

Tommy: "Do you believe in fairies, Mrs. Hardacre?"

Mrs. H.: "No, certainly not."

Tommy: "I'm so glad you're candid about it. There's such a pose among grown-ups nowadays to pretend they do."

The War on Wonderland

The attempt to teach gardening at certain schools in the 'nineties was "guyed" in the account of a disastrous imaginary experiment—the encouragement of Small Holdings for Small Boys at a fashionable Preparatory School. Here Punch is irresponsible and reactionary; but there is point in his criticism of the new-fangled cult of "nature study," on the ground that even playtime was now made a burden and toil for children by object lessons. In the same year (1900) the doctrine of self-expression was proclaimed in strident tones by Mr. Bernard Shaw in a lecture to the members of the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain. "Any grown-up person," said the prophet, "guilty of the crime of trying to form the character of children ought to be drowned. If there is to be any progress at all, it must be recognized that the children know better than their teachers." This was almost beyond the reach of comment or parody, but Punch did his best. Cranks, whether official or unofficial, he treated with impartial disrespect, and shortly before falling upon Mr. Shaw he had gibbeted a school inspector who had been alleged in his report to have penned this immortal sentence:—

The lower babies' mental arithmetic leaves much to be desired.

In the verses on "Spoilt Parents" in 1901 Punch expresses an obviously ironical approval of filial insubordination as encouraged in America, and a year later took for his text a passage quoted from an essay written by an Australian girl of thirteen, in which she had referred to "The Lady of Shalott" as "a fairy tale I remember in my childhood." In 1903 the activities of the "Pædologist" furnished Punch with abundant material. He celebrates, again with ironical applause, the expulsion of Euclid; he refers to an American lady who, in discussing suitable literature for children, had found a "moral squint" in Jack and the Beanstalk and Bluebeard; and he founds an excellent set of verses on an article in the Contemporary by Dr. Woods Hutchinson. The child, according to this eminent writer, passes through all the stages of evolution; "he is born not an Anglo-Saxon, but a Cave-dweller," and Punch proceeds to expound the "recapitulation theory" as follows:—

When Edward, crawling on the floor,

Invades the eight-day clock,

Pray do not spank him any more

For dirtying his frock.

He is a little troglodyte,

As were our sires before us,

Who vanished when there hove in sight

The grim ichthyosaurus.

When, ætat. four, with savage joy

The hunter's art he plies

Upon the panes, don't scold the boy

For torturing the flies.

He has but reached the second scene