Chapter III: Part I: The National Outlook (3)

His targets and his tents and things are nuisances all round,
As Jerry-Builders, Dooks, and other Toffs have lately found,
Compared with bricks and mortar and big landlords he's small beer,
So we'll snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British
Volunteer!

The Common's vastly handy, there's no doubt, to chaps in town,
And crowds of Cockneys to the butts can quickly hurry down;
But what are _all_ Town's Cockneys to one solitary Peer?
No; let us snub, snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British
Volunteer!

Your Citizen who wants to play at soldiers need not look
To have his little way as though he were a Royal Dook;
With building-leases--sacred things!--he must not interfere,
So let us snub, snub, snub, snub, snub the British
Volunteer!

If he _must_ shoot his annual shoot somewhere, why, let him go
To Pirbright or to Salisbury Plain, or e'en to Jericho.
But out from his loved Wimbledon he'll surely have to clear,
A final snub, snub, snub, snub, snub to the British
Volunteer!

_Punch_ was not generous or just in representing the Duke of Cambridge as a mere obstructive; and the sequel has not verified his forecast. Wimbledon Common remains a great playground of the people, and the annual meetings of the National Rifle Association, held at Wimbledon from 1860 to 1888, have not suffered in prestige or value since the move to Bisley in 1890.

References to the inadequate state of the national defences reach their highest frequency in 1888. We have the duel between Lord Randolph Churchill preaching retrenchment and Lord Charles Beresford advocating expenditure on an increased Navy. This is followed up by _Punch's_ "Alarmist Alphabet" dedicated to our naval and military experts, to whose warnings our rulers attach no particular importance:--

A's the Alarm that the Country's defenceless.
B's the Belief such assertions are senseless.
C's the Commission that sits with regard to them;
D's our Defences--the one topic barred to them!
E's the Expense--it's supposed we shall grudge it!
F is the Fear of increasing the Budget.
G stands for Guns, which we thought we had got.
H is the Howl when we hear we have _not_.
I's the Inquiry, abuses to right meant;
J is the Judgment (a crushing indictment!);
K is the Knot of red tape someone ties on it;
L's Limbo--where no one will ever set eyes on it!
M is the Murmur, too quickly forgotten.
N is our Navy, which some say is rotten.
O's the Official who bungles with _bonhomie_.
P's Party-Government--all for Economy.
Q is the Question engrossing our Statesmen.
R is Retrenchment, which so fascinates men.
S stands for Services, starved (out of Policy).
T is the Time when--too late!--we our folly see.
U is the Uproar of Struggle Titanic;
V is the Vote we shall pass in a panic.
W's War--with the Capture of London.
X our Xplosions of fury, when undone.
Y is the Yoke we shall have to get used to.
Z is the Zero our Empire's reduced to!

[Sidenote: _The Race of Armaments_]

Simultaneously Britannia figures in a cartoon as the "Unprotected Female" surrounded by a litter of burst guns, broken contracts, broken blades, unfinished ships, etc. Then we find _Punch_ suddenly appearing at Downing Street at "the first meeting of the Inner Cabinet," and shattering the complacent satisfaction of the Premier and the War Secretary by a peremptory and menacing demand for speeding-up in the supply of rifles and more energetic recruiting. In July, under the heading of "_Punch's_ Parallels," the tercentenary of the Armada is celebrated in a satiric perversion of the famous game of bowls into "a nice little game of Ducks and Drakes--with the public money," in which Lord George Hamilton, the First Lord of the Admiralty, is attacked as a lethargic aristocrat. Another cartoon shows Moltke rebuking the Duke of Cambridge for persistently discouraging the volunteer movement; while the enforced expense of life in the regular army is condemned in "The Pleasant Way of Glory." Commenting on the swamping of the subaltern's pay by compulsory but unnecessary outlay, _Punch_ remarks that "the life of the British officer, as thus revealed, seems to resolve itself into a prolonged struggle to keep up a false position on insufficient means"; and he regrets that Lord Wolseley seemed to acquiesce in the evil instead of encouraging British officers to be more frugal. Such criticisms are not unfamiliar even to-day, for the old traditions die hard. On the general question of national and especially naval defence, _Punch_ was not by any means a voice crying in the wilderness. Public opinion had been worked up by other powerful advocates, amongst whom _Punch_ rightly mentions Mr. W. T. Stead. The debate on the Address in the session of 1889 was prolonged and acrimonious. Early in March, however, Lord George Hamilton moved a resolution, on which the Naval Defence Bill was founded, authorizing an expenditure of £21,500,000 on the Navy. The measure, of course, met with some opposition from various quarters, but public opinion was manifestly in its favour, and it received the Royal Assent before the end of May.

Throughout this campaign it is interesting to note how the personality of the German Emperor obtrudes itself as a disquieting factor in the international race in armaments. At the close of 1891 a lady with alleged abnormal "magnetic" power was giving performances at the Alhambra, and _Punch_ adapts the incident in a cartoon suggested by the Kaiser's _dictum_--inscribed in the Visitors' Book of the City Council at Munich--_Suprema Lex Regis Voluntas_. The accompanying verses on "The Little Germania Magnate" are derisive, not to say abusive, with their references to "Behemoth Billy," "Panjandrum-plus-Cæsar," "Thraso" and "Vulcan-Apollo." _Punch_ was evidently inclined to regard the German Emperor as one of those "impossible people" who, as _The Times_ had suggested in a happy phrase, ought to "retire into fiction." Unfortunately he remained a fact, and was not to be killed by _Punch's_ mouth.

MEN AND MASTERS: WORK AND WAGES

In the preceding volume I endeavoured to trace and account for the waning of _Punch's_ reforming zeal and democratic ardour, and to illustrate his gradual movement from Left to Right Centre in the 'fifties, 'sixties, and early 'seventies. Many abuses had been remedied, the barriers of class privilege had been broken down, the cleavage between the "Two Nations" was less glaring, national prosperity had increased, the ladder of learning had been set up by Forster's Education Act. Free Trade and Gladstonian finance had eased the burden of the working man and the taxpayer. England was not a Utopia, but she had travelled far from the days of the Hungry 'Forties. In December, 1883, the late Sir Robert Giffen, one of the most trustworthy and deservedly respected of the much abused tribe of statisticians, published a comparative table of the consumption of the agricultural labourer in 1840 and 1881. _Punch's_ comment takes the form of an imaginary letter from a farm hand under the heading of "Food and Figures":--

"Sir, Maister _Punch_,

"Look 'ee here, Sir. Squire Giffen, a-spoutin' tother night about I
and we country folk, stuck to it that we wur better fed nowadays than
we wur forty-one year ago; and them as 'eard 'im say that there, they
up and swore as how we wur a grumblin', cantankerous, discontented,
set o' chaps as didn't knaw naught of our own jolly good luck. Now
look 'ee 'ere, Maister _Punch_; 'ere be Squire Giffen's figures. Says
he that forty-one year ago, that be in 1840, I eat this 'ere in the
first column, say in about a couple o' weeks, and that now I gets
through this 'ere, wot he's set down in the second, in the same matter
o' time."

[Sidenote: _Food and Figures_]

The table follows, and then Hodge continues:--

"Now addin' all that there up, that be for 1840, about 69 lbs. of food
for I; while now he says, says he, 'Hodge, you old pig, you swallows
373 lbs.--that be six times as much--just as easy in the same time,
and you grumbles at it too!' Now look 'ee 'ere, Maister _Punch_, if I
does that there--and figures is figures--well ain't it plain that a
feed up like that must give I such a fit o' blues from indigestion,
as sets I hankerin' about franchise and land stealin', and such like
things o' which I knows and cares just naught, and gets I called by
a set o' chaps, as wants nothin' more than to make summat out o' me,
yours all of a puzzle,

"DISCONTENTED HODGE."

(_Overheard at Ironopolis_)

INTELLIGENT WORKING MAN: "Arbitration! Ca' _that_ arbitration! Why, _they've given it against us_!"]

"Appetite comes with eating"; and here we have a concrete and "luciferous" example of the somewhat grudging approval which made _Punch_ acknowledge improved conditions, while at the same time he expressed his misgivings at the leverage which the improvement furnished to agitation and unrest. In the 'forties _Punch_ had recognized that the legitimate grievances of the underfed masses were a real danger. He now recognized, or at any rate implied, that when well-fed they might become equally dangerous under the guidance of extremists. He still believed that there was a great fund of inert anti-revolutionary sentiment amongst the rank and file of the people, but long before the days of "direct action," was alive to the possibilities inherent in the oligarchical rule of Trade Unionism. He saw that a well-organized minority in a key industry might dislocate the whole fabric of production, and when in 1877 the miners attempted to restrict output in order to keep up the price of coal and the rate of wages, addressed the following remonstrance to Mr. Macdonald, the mining M.P.:--

THE ARGUMENT A MINORI

So you suggest that they our coals who quarry
Should shorten shifts to raise black diamonds' price?
But, if so, why should other workers tarry,
Each in his craft, to follow your advice?
Till soon, hauled o'er the coals, like spark in stubble,
Over-production's doctrine goes ahead,
And all trades work half time, and come down double
For beef and beer, for house, and clothes, and bread!

Towards the close of the 'seventies industrial distress was so general that in January, 1879, _Punch_ abandoned his critical attitude and appealed for united effort and a cessation of party strife to drive the wolf from the door. The "New Charity" that he recommended was a voluntary curtailment of the luxuries of the rich--balls, entertainments, dinners, and theatre parties, the purchase of jewels, wines, etc.--in order to help in relieving distress. This involved a surrender of his old argument in favour of the production of luxuries on the ground that they provided lucrative employment. At the same time, the terrorism applied to non-Unionists by the "Rebecca" gangs in Durham moved him to vigorous protest, and in the verses on "blacklegs" in April he writes:--

Blackleg _versus_ Blackguard be it!
Let's see which shall have their way!

SPIRIT OF ANARCHY: "What! No work! Come and enlist with me--I'll find work for you!!"]

[Sidenote: _Henry George and Socialism_]

Henry George's _Progress and Poverty_, which attained a wide circulation in 1883, comes in for a good deal of hostile criticism. It was an epoch-making book; and though, as water to wine when compared to the strong drink of modern anti-capitalistic literature, it was thought worthy of serious attention by _Punch_. In his cartoon in January, 1884, Red Riding Hood is confronted by the Wolf of Socialism, with Henry George's book peeping out of his pocket. _Punch_, who reminds us that Mr. Labouchere called the author "George the Fifth," admits that gross inequalities existed, but saw no remedy in Henry George's policy, which he regarded as wholesale robbery, and in "St. George and the Dragon" ranked the American author along with Proudhon, the author of the saying "Property is Theft." Yet a few weeks later he rebukes the Duke of Albany, who, in a speech at Liverpool, had recommended that the poor should be taught cookery. _Punch_ was a great believer in cookery, but held that your hare must be caught first:--

Prince, you spoke a word in season
'Gainst uncleanly plates and slops,
But the workman cries with reason
"Teach me first to catch my chops."

In 1886 the number of the unemployed rose to a formidable figure. There was rioting in Pall Mall and Piccadilly on February 8th after a meeting in Trafalgar Square, and _Punch_, under the heading, "Sneaking Sedition," indulged in a violent tirade against the "firebrand fanatics," Messrs. Hyndman, John Burns, and Champion. It is headed by a picture in which _Punch_ is gleefully stringing up three puppets whose faces are portraits of the three "blatant trumpeters of sedition who prated a mixed mob to passion heat, and then discreetly withdrew whilst that passion found vent in wrecking and ruffianism." The writer denies with an exuberance of fiery rhetoric that they represented the unemployed, or anything but "fanatic hatred and shallow conceit--that is to say, themselves." They were "cowardly Catilines of the gutter," recruiting sergeants of the "Army of Anarchy," "Sedition-spouters," who egged on "the drunken, violent _un_working-Man" to outrage. _Punch_ appealed to all honest working men to repudiate these so-called but misrepresentative leaders, and "sweep these social democrats for ever from the land." It is a tremendous tirade, but disfigured by a great deal of sheer abuse, and the cause of law and order was not assisted thereby. Sedition cannot be quelled by strong language, and _Punch_ admitted that honest wage-earners were exploited by Capitalists, Monopolists, and Middlemen; that all must compassionate the workless working man, and that all should help him by friendly aid at the moment and hereafter by well-considered reform. In the same number a strong appeal is made to the opulent to help the Mansion House Fund for Unemployed, and not to be scared by frothy street sedition. There had been wild talk at the Trafalgar Square meeting about gallows and lamp-posts for Ministers and Members of Parliament, and _Punch_, who on occasion was a true prophet, may be pardoned for his failure to foresee a time when John Burns would be denounced as a crusted bureaucrat and Mr. Hyndman publish an enthusiastic eulogy of the Clemenceau whose motto was "_Je fais la guerre_."

(With a thousand apologies to Sir John E. Millais, Bart., R.A.)]

ONE OF THE REAL "UNEMPLOYED": "How am I to make _my_ voice heard in this blackguard row!"]

[Sidenote: _Unemployed and Unemployables_]

(_Æsop slightly altered_)

MR. P.: "Don't lose your head, my man! Who'd suffer most _if you killed it_?"]

The contrast between the unemployed and the unemployables is repeatedly emphasized in these years. Works were closed down because the hands took themselves off to join a procession of unemployed. Wasters refused work, preferring hymn-singing in the streets and levying doles from credulous householders. A cartoon in 1887 shows one of the "real unemployed" exclaiming: "How am I to make my voice heard in this blackguard row?" Socialism is seen "Sowing Tares"--after Millais's picture. Anarchy as the tempter prompts unemployment to plunder, looting, and riot--the wrong way. But _Punch_ was not content with chastising sedition-mongers, and in another cartoon rebuked callous complacency as a real danger in a time of serious distress. The contrasts of splendour and discontent were curiously illustrated in these years. In the spring of 1886 there was a "scene" at the Opera when the scene shifters struck work in the middle of the performance, and appeared on the stage begging for money. In 1887, the year of the Queen's Jubilee, special constables were sworn in, and Mr. Gladstone as the "Grand Old Janus" is shown with one face applauding a constable "downing" an English rough, while the other frowns on an R.I.C. man standing over a rebellious Irishman. It was in the same year that the growth and popularity of street processions moved _Punch_ to protest against the invasion of the Parks by public meetings, which drove away quiet people who used them for recreation from fear of King Mob and the rabble rout. The procession habit has long since come to stay, though it is only of recent years that the presence of children has become a feature in these demonstrations. As for the Hyde Park stump orators, the types genially satirized in one of the _Voces Populi_ series in 1889 include the Elderly Faddist, the Irish Patriot, the Reciter, and the Physical Force Socialist. The Reciter, who dates back to the time when the Latin satirist spoke of him as a nuisance in the dog-days, has disappeared from the Parks, though he flourishes in Georgian coteries. The other types remain with us, together with some new varieties. But there is little new under the sun. In 1887 the Annual Register mentions the exploit of a political agitator who chained himself to the railings in a conspicuous position in Central London, thus depriving the militant "suffragettes" of the credit of introducing this method of protest.

[Sidenote: _Praise for Cardinal Manning_]

PROCRUSTES: "Now, then, you fellows; I mean to fit you all to my little Bed!"

CHORUS: "Oh, Lor-r!"

["It is impossible to establish universal uniformity of hours without inflicting very serious injury to workers." (_Motion at the recent Trades Congress._)

]

In the great dock strike of 1889 _Punch_, on the whole, showed a disposition to side with the men. In his first cartoon in September the working man appeals to the employer to think less of his luxuries, more of Labour's needs. A week later _Punch_ appeals to the working man not to kill the guinea-fowl (Trade), that lays the golden eggs, by striking. In October, employer and employee are shown at the game of Beggar-my-Neighbour, the master playing Lock-out against Strike. _Punch_ pleads for give-and-take. _Both_ will lose by the game they are playing. The same argument is further developed a few months later in another cartoon in which the foreign competitor is the _tertius gaudens_. The foreign Fox goes off with Trade, while the two dogs, Capital and Labour, are asleep. To return to the dock strike, we may note that Cardinal Manning's intervention was warmly applauded. _Punch_ thought the Cardinal ought to have been made a Privy Councillor and Lord Mayor Whitehead a baronet for their services as conciliators. Praise for a Cardinal and a Lord Mayor is indeed a wonderful change from the _Punch_ of forty years earlier. The settlement of that "deed of darkness," the gas strike in 1889, prompted the cartoon showing the indignation of Bill Sikes and the Artful Dodger over the frustration of their plans. Industrial troubles were rife in 1890. The Labour May Day, already instituted, inspires a set of verses after Tennyson, in which an enthusiastic operative sings,

"Toil's to be Queen of the May, brother, Labour is Queen o' this
May!"

The introduction of an eight hours' day, already vigorously agitated for, set _Punch_ thinking on what would happen if the principle were logically applied all round--to the Courts, restaurants, theatres and the medical profession. He returned to the subject in the following year, and came to much the same conclusion--that it would turn out a new bed of Procrustes, on the ground that the universal uniformity of hours of work could not be established without inflicting serious injury on the workers. Socialism still continued to preoccupy _Punch_ in 1890. This time it is depicted as a snake attacking an eagle in mid-air, rather a strange inversion of natural history. The eagle is _Trade_, the wings are _Labour_ and _Capital_. The prosaic critic will ask how the snake got there except on the wings of a soaring imagination. John Burns is still a favourite _bête noire_, and is severely rebuked for his dictatorial and aggressive speeches at the Trade Union Congress and his action in connexion with industrial trouble on the Clyde, the ghost of Robert Burns being invoked to chastise his namesake in an adaptation of "The Dumfries Volunteer." At the Congress John Burns had said that he was "in the unfortunate position of having probably to go to Parliament at the next election, but he would rather go to prison half a dozen times than to Parliament once.... He must know on what terms he must do the dirty work of going to Parliament." This was not a happy utterance, though it hardly merited _Punch's_ bludgeoning. Burns was "perhaps Boanerges spelt little": he "laid about him like mules who can kick hard"; "the mustard had gone to his nose," etc. But in view of the way in which Mr. Burns sank without a ripple from public notice in August, 1914, there is point in the caution:--

[Sidenote: _The Coal Strike of 1890_]

Be warned in good time--why there isn't a man, Sir,
Or at most one or two, whom the universe misses;
You strut for a moment, and then, like poor _Anser_,
You vanish, uncared for, with splutter and hisses.

To modern readers, however, the most instructive passages dealing with industrial unrest in 1890 relate to the Coal Strike. In March of that year _Punch_ published a prophetic journal of events, looming possibly somewhere ahead, of life in London after being without coal for sixteen weeks. It is interesting to compare this forecast with the realities of 1921. According to the prophet, people have burned their banisters and bed furniture; a syndicate of noblemen start boring for coal in Belgrave Square, but are stopped by the sanitary inspector. The wood pavement is pulled up and riots have broken out. The Archbishop of Canterbury preaches on the Plague of Darkness in the Abbey by the light of a farthing candle, which goes out; etc. Even if the recent stoppage had lasted sixteen instead of thirteen weeks, it is more than doubtful if _Punch's_ prophecies would have been fulfilled. At best they are an exercise in burlesque, and lacking in circumstantial imagination. _Punch_ might have foreseen the scenic possibilities of a long coal stoppage and its clarifying effect on the atmosphere. And with his belief in the solid sense of the people he ought to have refrained from the suggestion of riot. But he may be pardoned for failing to foresee how oil would come to our rescue. At the close of the same month _Punch_ addresses a versified remonstrance to the miners. He admits that pay should be liberal for dangerous underground work, but deprecates the use of the strike weapon as ruinous to trade and other industries by the laying up of ships and the closing of factories and railways. So, just two years later, in a cartoon on "Going on Play," he condemns the miners' strike, which aimed openly at creating an artificial scarcity, and thereby kept up wages. A poor clerk is seen expostulating with a working man: "It's all very well, but what's play to you is death to us." In the omnibus strike of 1891 _Punch_ was decidedly sympathetic towards the overworked drivers and conductors, just as he backed up the hairdressers in the same year when they agitated for an early closing day and better and healthier conditions. The verses on the Democratic Village of the Future, a paradise of sanitation in which there would be no more "bobbing to their betters," and the rule of Squire and parson would cease, are largely ironical, and the Socialist appropriation of May Day inspires a long warning to this "new May Day Medusa"--the International--in a "Hymn of Honest Labour" in May, 1892.

[Sidenote: _Bidding for the Labour Vote_]

Irony predominates, again, in the cynical verses of a year earlier satirizing the tendency of all parties to bid for the Labour vote:--

STRIKING TIMES

New Version of an Old Street Ballad (By a Labouring Elector)

Cheer up, cheer up, you sons of toil, and listen to my song,
The times should much amuse you; you are up, and going strong.
The Working Men of England at length begin to see
That their parsnips for to butter now the Parties all agree.

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way,
And their prospect of obtaining it grows brighter every day!

It isn't "Agitators" now, but Parties and M.P.'s,
Who swear we ought to have our way, and do as we darn please.
Upon my word it's proper fun! A man should love his neighbour,
Yet Whigs hate Tories, Tories Whigs; but oh! they all love Labour!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

There's artful Joey Chamberlain, he looks as hard as nails,
But when he wants to butter us, the Dorset never fails;
He lays it on so soft and slab, not to say thick and messy,
He couldn't flummerify us more were each of us a Jesse!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

Then roystering Random takes his turn; his treacle's pretty thick;
He gives the Tories the straight tip--and don't they take it--quick?
And now, by Jove, it's comical!--where will the fashion end?--
There's Parnell ups and poses as the genuine Labourer's Friend!

Chorus--It's high time, etc.

Comrades, it makes me chortle. The Election's drawing nigh,
And Eight Hours' Bills, or anything, they'll promise for to try.
They'll spout and start Commissions; but, O mighty Labouring Host,
Mind your eye, and keep it on them, or they'll have you all on
toast!

Chorus.

It's high time that the Working Men should have it their own way,
They'll strain their throats--you mind your votes, and you may find
it pay!

We have now seen _Punch_ more as the critic than the friend of organized Labour, and it will be remembered that even in his most democratic days he evinced a deep-rooted distrust of delegates and Union officials. But there is another side to the picture, in which the old championship of the poor and oppressed is as vigorous and vocal as ever. If _Punch_ was more mistrustful of Trade Unionism, he was at least as unsparing as in his early days in pillorying examples of the greed and tyranny of masters and employers who misused their opportunities of exploiting unorganized or partially organized labour. In the notes made for this section during this period the very first relates to the sinking of the _La Plata_ and the burning of the _Cospatrick_, two emigrant ships, in 1875, and the indignation felt when it was found that the cargo of the latter vessel was highly inflammable and the boats inadequate in number. The scandal moved _Punch_ to rewrite Dibdin, with compliments to Mr. Plimsoll for his campaign against coffin ships, which had not yet been carried to its successful legislative conclusion. He also published, in January, 1875, a mock inquiry--after the manner of Dickens's Bardell _v._ Pickwick trial--by shipowners into the loss of the emigrant ship _Crossbones_. The Court exculpates the offenders after finding that the cargo--containing all sorts of combustible and inflammable materials--was of the most harmless description, adding as a rider that the boats should in future be always launched keel upwards. The old abuse of the "climbing boys" still reared its unsightly head; Lord Shaftesbury, in the debate on his Chimney Sweepers' Bill, in May, 1875, quoted the remark of a master sweep: "In learning a child you can't be soft with him; you must use violence," and _Punch_ enlarged on this text in his best manner. No appeal on behalf of children left him unmoved. When subscriptions were invited in 1878 to lay out a children's playground near St. Peter's, London Docks, he suggests that the fortunate children of the West End should help to give this playground to their less favoured brothers and sisters of the East. As a lover of children, _Punch_ was quick to recognize those who had laboured on their behalf.

[Sidenote: _George Smith of Coalville_]

In the Christmas number of 1879 he tells the life story of George Smith, of Coalville, who began life as a poor lad in the brickfields; worked his way up to the post of foreman and manager; and then devoted his life to calling attention to the cruel overwork and ill-treatment of the children whose labour he had once shared. In spite of neglect, opposition, and obloquy, he secured the passing of an Act which brought these hopeless little outcasts under the eye of Inspectors, limited their hours of labour, and secured them some measure of teaching. Though his action gave grievous offence and he lost his job, he set to work to render a similar service to the children of the bargees, and was the main agent in passing a law for the registration and inspection of canal boats. In these labours he sacrificed not only his time, but his means, and _Punch_ appealed to his readers to contribute to the support of "this practical preacher of good will to man, this friend of the friendless, this helper of those who, till he came, had none to help them."

BOARD-SCHOOL MASTER: "Now then, boys, we must get to work again!"

ADVANCED SCHOLAR: "Please, Sir--mayn't we have somethin' to relieve the craving of 'unger fust?"]

In 1881 the hard time of boys in attendance on weighing machines, said to be on duty for thirteen or fourteen hours a day, aroused _Punch's_ sympathy and ire. Invention, however, rather than philanthropy, furnished a remedy in the "automatics."

In the same year _Punch's_ appeal for the fund to provide poor children with country holidays, embodied in "The Children's Cry," enabled him to forward £280 to the promoters. In 1885 the "almost formidable success" achieved by the experiment of Poor Children's Play-Rooms, in the parish of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, delighted his heart. In 1888, _Punch_, in "Cramming _versus_ 'Clemming'" emphasizes the need of providing free meals for poor children. At the very end of the period under review in this volume I have come across a notice of a book purporting to show up the cruelties practised on young people and animals in training them for acrobatic performances. The book was poor as literature, but if true called for searching inquiry. Children have, we may safely assume, been long safeguarded from the mishandling alleged to have been possible in 1892; but at the moment of writing these lines--August 11, 1921--an inquiry is being held into the treatment of animals by showmen and conjurers.

Nor was _Punch_ less concerned with the conditions of women workers. In his "Dream of Fair Women" suggested by factory inspectors' reports in 1875, he points to lack of combination among women as the incentive to slave-driving on the part of "foggers". He prefaces a set of verses in October with a passage from a Report on the Black Country:--

The women are said to take the place of fathers as well as husbands,
while the men are idle and drunken.... At Bromsgrove I heard also of
the growing custom of idle, lazy young lads looking out for skilled
industrious wives, in order to obtain an easy life.

[Sidenote: _Men, Women and Dogs_]

It was, as _Punch_ puts it, an inversion of the old legend of Penthesilea and the Amazons. Women were unsexed by labour and serfdom. As for the men:--

_You_ loaf, train your whippets, and guzzle and gorge,
While they sweat at the anvil, and puddle and forge.

So at the time of distress in the mining districts in 1875 the miners are accused of using charitable relief for the welfare of their dogs rather than of their families. "How is it," asks a benevolent directress, "you've brought two cans to-day, Geordie?" And a miner on strike replies: "The yain's for my mither, marm, and t'uther for the greyhound."

FARMER'S DAUGHTER: "I say, Jem, fancy! Mother said to me to-day I was to help in the Dairy, and might help in the Milking! Because she did when she was a Girl! I said I'd go for a Gov'ness first!"]

There is little mention of the hardships of life on the land, though labourers' wages were still very low; but the rise of the farmer class to "gentility" is noted in 1885 in the picture of the farmer's daughter seated at the piano and declaring that she would rather go as a governess than help in the dairy. _Punch's_ sympathies were more readily enlisted on behalf of shop and saloon girls. The movement began in Bristol in 1876, where a number of ladies issued a circular to employers asking that chairs should be provided for shop girls; the plan was adopted in Manchester, and, following the lead of Lancashire, _Punch_ repeatedly urges the plea for more considerate treatment. The matter was "beyond a joke," and _Punch_ recommended ladies to patronize shops where they were allowed, and boycott others. The subject was taken up by the _Lancet_, and the movement spread to Scotland, where a group of ladies made a personal tour of inspection in Edinburgh to see which shops provided seats. One of _Punch's_ pictures in this year shows a considerate customer handing a chair over the counter to a tired shop-girl, and a set of verses describes a girl driven into sin by need of rest. As he put it in his plea for "More Seats and Shorter Hours," "A country where humanity interposes on behalf of an over-driven cab-horse will surely not go on suffering hard-working, weak and defenceless girls to be driven to death with impunity." There was only one other place in which seats are not allowed. "That is the House of Commons, but there the torture is only inflicted on one-half of the Members." We hear little nowadays of the hardships of shop-girls, but the seating accommodation of the House of Commons is even more inadequate than in 1880. _Punch_, however, discussed Sir John Lubbock's Shop Hours Bill in 1887 with an impartiality that borders on inconsistency, showing the other side of the question and the popular preference in poor districts for shopping in the evening, districts in which "St. Lubbock" was looked upon as a well-meaning but fussy philanthropist.

[Sidenote: _"The Cry of the Clerk"_]

As an individualist, a lover of independence, and an opponent of monopoly, _Punch_ was in a difficult position. Some, at any rate, of the monster shops led the way in the humane and considerate treatment of their assistants. But the freezing out of the small shopkeeper struck him as an undoubted hardship, and in 1886 he published a prophetic article describing an interview in the "dim and distant future" between a Stranger and the last shopkeeper in London. It is an allegory of the tyranny of capitalism and monopoly, of the cult of bigness and universality, the triumph of ubiquitous caterers. That "dim and distant future" has not yet arrived, and after thirty-five years the small shopkeeper is still going almost as strong as in the days when _Punch_ uttered his dismal prophecy. But his most impassioned plea in the 'eighties was not uttered on behalf of the working man or woman, or the small shopkeeper. It was reserved for the victims of State parsimony, underpaid clerks and Government officials. The campaign on behalf of these new _protégés_ of his opened with "The Cry of the Clerk," a long wail, charged with sentiment, uttered by an overworked and underpaid drudge:--

I don't growl at the working man, be his virtue strict or morality
lax;
He'd strike if they gave him my weekly wage, and they never ask
_him_ for the Income-tax!
They take his little ones out to tea in a curtained van when the
fields are green,
But never a flower, or field or fern in their leafy homes have my
children seen.
The case is different, so they say, for I'm respectable--save
the mark!
He works with the sweat of his manly brow, and I with my body and
brain--poor Clerk!

* * * * *

Why did I marry? In mercy's name, in the form of my brother was I
not born?
Are wife and child to be given to him, and love to be taken from me
with scorn?
It is not for them that I plead, for theirs are the only voices that
break my sorrow,
That lighten my pathway, make me pause 'twixt the sad to-day and the
grim to-morrow.
The Sun and the Sea are not given to me, nor joys like yours as you
flit together
Away to the woods and the downs, and over the endless acres of
purple heather.
But I've love, thank Heaven! and mercy, too; 'tis for justice only I
bid you hark
To the tale of a penniless man like me--to the wounded cry of a
London Clerk!

FAIR BUT CONSIDERATE CUSTOMER: "Pray sit down. You look so tired. I've been riding all the afternoon in a carriage, and don't require a chair."]

The verses lack the desperate poignancy of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," but they made their mark and were quoted in their entirety in _The Times_. Subsequent articles and verses especially single out the telegraph clerks as the victims of State slave-driving. _Punch_ declares that there was no rest for the telegraph "operator," and describes a letter of appointment from the Government to one of this class as being really a death warrant, offering £65 a year with the prospect of rising to £160 after twenty years' service. Early in 1881 he writes under the heading, "Wiredrawn Salaries":--

The giggling girls, precocious boys, and half-starved clerks, who
form the Telegraphic Staff of that money-grubbing department of
Government--the Post Office--have petitioned for a slight increase
of pay, and have been officially snubbed for their pains. They have
petitioned for eight years, and for eight years they have received no
answer. The Manchester clerks were too wise to petition. They struck,
and their demands were at once attended to.

[Sidenote: _New Views of the Strike Weapon_]

This is not very polite to the ladies, but the comment is significant, since it shows that _Punch_ was, on occasion, ready to abandon his old view of the inefficacy of the strike weapon. In June of the same year he announced that "The worms have turned":--

The chief art of Government is to do nothing with an air of doing
much. The best administrators are those who have thoroughly mastered
the axiom that zeal is a crime, and who are clever at sitting upon
troublesome questions. Unfortunately there are questions that will
not be sat upon, and the grievance of the Telegraph Clerks is one of
them. The Government have "considered" this grievance so long and so
dreamily, that at last the discontented Clerks have threatened to
strike. They may not at present have the organization and the command
of funds of the "working man," who is always on the verge of striking,
but these will come in the fullness of time. The Government have
roused a spirit of self-reliance in these overworked and underpaid
servants of a money-grubbing department, which no tardy concessions
can destroy. The patronizing, not to say fatherly articles in some
of the newspapers will encourage this spirit, for under the tone of
warning is an ill-concealed fear that skilful telegraphists are not
to be obtained from the fields and gutters. How much better it would
have been to have "considered" less and acted more, and have yielded
gracefully.

The Government were not, however, the only offenders whose parsimony excited _Punch's_ indignation. In 1878, when the wages of the railwaymen on the Midland were reduced, he prophesied increased inefficiency and more accidents. Railway servants were, in his opinion, overworked and underpaid. Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1890, Major Marindin, in his report on the collision at Eastleigh, found that an engine-driver and stoker had failed to keep a proper look-out, but noted that they had been on duty for sixteen and a half hours. _Punch's_ comment took the form of the cartoon of "Death and his brother Sleep" on the engine. The overloaded country postman had excited _Punch's_ compassion in 1885, and in the same year the outrageously long hours--sixteen a day and seven days a week--imposed on tram drivers and conductors had come in for severe censure in an article which also mentions the sweating of East End tailors' apprentices. It was this scandal, and the campaign which it provoked, that led to the appointment of a Royal Commission with Lord Dunraven as Chairman. _Punch_ joined in the controversy with a whole series of articles, cartoons, and verses. His first contribution was headed with a picture of a fat fur-coated contractor raking sovereigns out of the "sweating furnace," and took for its text Lord Dunraven's statement that "as regards hours of labour, earnings, and sanitary surroundings, the condition of these workers is more deplorable than that of any body of working men in any portion of the civilized or uncivilized world." A set of ironical advertisements followed of clothes made by sweated labour, including "The Happy Duchess Jacket--straight from a fever-stricken home," and "The Churchyard Overcoat," the product of slave-labour in the East End. Then we have "The modern Venus attired by the Three Dis-Graces"--a stalwart fashionable lady waited on by three starveling sempstresses; a mock Ode on the Triumph of Capital, full of ironic eulogy of Mammon; and, most remarkable of all, a long sardonic poem, published in September, 1888, under the heading, "Israel and Egypt; or Turning the Tables," which is at once an indictment of, and an apology for, the Jew Sweaters.

_Punch_ prefaces the poem with two extracts:--

"The Children of Israel multiplied so as to excite the jealous fears
of the Egyptians.... They were therefore organized into gangs under
taskmasters, as we see in the vivid pictures of the monuments, to
work upon the public edifices. 'And the Egyptians made the Children
of Israel to serve with rigour. And they made their lives bitter with
hard bondage in mortar and in brick and in all manner of service in
the field.'"--Smith's _Ancient History_.

"The Sweater is probably a Jew, and, if so, he has the gift
of organization, and an extraordinary power of subordinating
everything--humanity, it may be, included--to the great end of getting
on.... The conditions of life in East London ruin the Christian
labourer, and leave the Jewish labourer unharmed."--_The Spectator_ on
_Sweaters and Jews_.

[Sidenote: _Jews and Gentiles_]

The verses compare the treatment of the Israelites under Pharaoh with the modern sweating of the Gentile by the Jew middleman:--

Yes, the Gentile once "sweated" the Jew,
But the Hebrew has now turned the tables; Dunraven will tell you
that's true.

SWELL (_at West-End Tailor's, to the Foreman_): "Ah--look here, Snipson, I've been reading all about this Sweating System, don'tcherno!--and as I find that the Things I pay you Eight Guineas for--ah--you get made by the Sweaters for about--ah--Two-and-Six--I've made up my mind--ah--to do the thing well, without screwing you down. So--ah--just take my order _for a Seven-and-Sixpenny Dress Suit_."]

The moral is summed up in the last four lines:--

And, behold, though the Sun-God is silent, the Son of the Sun-God
asleep,
Still merciless Mammon is master, the slaves of the Gold-God still
weep;
Be his ministers Hebrew or Gentile, his worship is cruelty still;
Still the worker must sweat 'neath the scourge that the stores of
the tyrant may fill.

Lord Dunraven withdrew from the Commission, and _Punch_ congratulated him on his retirement, though it "seemed caused by a fad," when the Report was published in 1890. The recommendations were inadequate, in _Punch's_ view. He spoke contemptuously of applying the "rose-water cure" and whitewashing the sweater, whom he depicts as a monster vampire. Socialism, as we have seen, was a serpent of the boa constrictor type. The tendency to big combines was typified by an octopus, labelled Monopoly, controlling cotton, iron, coal, salt and copper, and threatening a distressful lady (Commerce) perilously navigating a frail canoe.

Bumbledom was not dead, but its activities were less blatant. _Punch_ gibbets the stinginess of the Lambeth Workhouse when in 1875 the Guardians decided that Christmas pudding was too rich in good things and recommended a plainer variety. Fourteen years later, under the sarcastic heading, "Luxury for Paupers," we encounter the following elegant extract from the _Standard_ of December 5, 1889:--

"At the Chester Board of Guardians yesterday, a discussion took place
as to whether, in view of the Christmas dinner, it would be advisable
to allow the inmates to have knives to cut their meat. It was
explained that at present the paupers had to tear the meat to pieces
with their fingers and teeth.... The Rev. O. Rawson proposed that they
should buy knives and forks.... Mr. Charmley, farmer, opposed the
proposal.... The motion to hire knives and forks on Christmas Day only
was put, and carried by thirteen votes to ten."

[Sidenote: _Manchester under the Microscope_]

The negligence and delay in administering Parish relief moved _Punch_ in 1876 to declare that sick paupers were worse treated than sick cows or horses. As an illustration of "The way we die now," there are further exposures of cruelty in lunatic asylums, and the hard-heartedness of Guardians in harrying "bundles of rags." But these revelations are fewer than in former years, and dwell more on mismanagement and extravagance than actual inhumanity. Thus the report of the committee of inquiry into the administration of the Metropolitan Asylums Board in 1885 revealed gross waste and extravagant consumption of wine and stimulants, not by the patients, but by the officials. _Punch_ was "so long accustomed to hear of the wondrous doings of 'Manchester the Great' and the grand example she set to the rest of the Kingdom in all that constituted good and pure government and sound finance," that he could not repress a certain malicious satisfaction at the result of the audit of the accounts of her Corporation by the "Citizens' auditor," published in the autumn of 1884. The first instalment, reviewed in October, is an entertaining document winding up with an allusion to the pantomime of the _Forty Thieves_, fully justified by the further revelations summarized by _Punch_ a month later:--

MANCHESTER'S PLUCKY AUDITOR

This bold Gentleman continues his amusing revelations to the
apparent delight of the ratepayers, and the disgust of the bumptious
Corporation. We can only make room for one or two extracts. This is
the bill for a dinner, at the Queen's Hotel, for the Members of the
Baths and Wash-houses Committee, at which it will be seen that they
drank punch, sherry, hock, champagne, claret, port, gin, whiskey,
brandy, _liqueurs_, and mild ale:--

"To Twenty-one dinners, caviare, turtle, etc., 15s. each, £15 15s.
0d.; sherry, 16s.; hock, 50s.; punch, 7s. 6d.; champagne, 138s. 6d.;
claret, 50s.; port, 25s.; mild ale, 1s.; liqueur, 20s.; coffee, 10s.
6d.; cigars, 64s. 6d.; soda, 22s. 6d.; gin, 2s. 6d.; whiskey, 15s.;
brandy, 27s. 6d.; service, 21s.

"In addition to the above, the Committee had sent up to the Baths
the day before the opening, one dozen bottles of whiskey, 48s.;
one dozen gin, 36s.; half-a-dozen brandy, 84s.; half-a-dozen port,
48s.; half-a-dozen sherry, 48s.; two dozen soda, 4s. 6d.; one dozen
lemonade, 4s. 6d.; one dozen potass, 4s. 6d.; two boxes cigars, 22s.
6d. each; and half-a-dozen bottles of St. Julien, 36s.; making a total
of £52 2s. paid to the proprietors of the Queen's Hotel."

He adds that strenuous efforts have been made to find out the Gentleman who called for Mild Ale, and, when got, consumed a shilling's-worth of it.

If there were many such auditors, audits would form a most amusing portion of our comic literature.

In these circumstances _Punch_ expressed a natural joy that Municipal Reform was tackled at last in Sir William Harcourt's Bill, while in his "Bitter Cry of Alderman and Bumble" he showed these two worthies bursting into tears over the iniquities of "Werdant 'Arcourt."

The housing problem comes up early in 1877 _à propos_ of the late Sir B. W. Richardson's hygienic theories. _Punch_ admits that he was probably on the right track, but waxes sarcastic at the expense of crotchety alarmists, and his own suggestions are more whimsical than helpful. It was not until 1883 that he began to take the problem seriously. I deal in another section with the fashionable craze for "slumming," which _Punch_ ridiculed as insincere and absurd. But there is genuine indignation in his verses on a judge's remarks at Manchester, and on the report of an inquest, at which it came out that a whole family occupied one bed on the floor; in the poem (after Hood) on the Real Haunted House, comparing slum dwellers with rural labourers; in the cartoon, "Mammon's Rents," on the text, "Dives, the owner of property condemned as unfit for habitation, is getting from 50 to 60 per cent. on his money"; and in "The Slum-dweller's Saturday Night" (after Burns), where _Punch_ drives home his old point of the futility of foreign missions when we had all this unreclaimed slum savagery at home. The personal investigations of slum areas undertaken by Sir Charles Dilke, then President of the Local Government Board, traced the evil to the greed of grasping landlords.

To this year belong _Punch's_ tirades against the iniquity of unjust rates. In December he has quite a long article based on the hardships of shopkeepers, small and large. He quotes two cases. The first is that of a small shopkeeper. The street in which he lived had been recently widened. Immediately his landlord raised his rent £30 a year, and his rates were at once raised from £16 to £30. Another victim carrying on business in a principal City thoroughfare paid a rental of £800 a year, his gross profits being £1,500. The street was improved; his rent was increased to £1,000; and £40 a year were added to his rates in consequence of an improvement which had already cost him £200 a year, which the landlord had received without the expenditure of a single shilling. One does not expect to find precise information on rating and rentals in a comic journal, but in the 'eighties at any rate _Punch_ did not shirk such topics.

[Sidenote: _Housing and Health_]

In the issue of December 8, 1883, _Punch_ ventured to remind his readers that on the 16th of that month, exactly forty years had elapsed since Hood's immortal "Song of the Shirt" appeared in his pages; but it was perhaps an overstatement to say that the "Bitter Cry" was as "loud and heart-rending" then as in the 'forties. The handling of the Housing Commission in 1884 is decidedly irreverent, and the account of its meetings and the speeches of Lord Salisbury, Mr. Lyulph Stanley (now Lord Sheffield), and Mr. Jesse Collings borders on the burlesque. Only towards Cardinal Manning does _Punch_ extend a limited measure of sympathy. There was, however, no alloy in his praise of Sir Edward Guinness's gift in 1880 of £250,000 for the better housing of the poor. When Christ Church Cathedral was restored in Dublin by the liberality of a wealthy distiller, a poor Irishwoman, as she gazed on the building, remarked: "Glory be to God! To think that whisky could do all that!" _Punch_ more discreetly commended "good Edward Guinness" as the "munificent host of 'The Tankard.'"

This was the year of the Health Exhibition, the second of that annual series which was a special feature of the 'eighties. On their recreative aspect I speak elsewhere. It may suffice here to say that _Punch_ summed up the conflict of aims which they represented in the phrase "Commerce _v._ Cremorne." His anticipatory notice of the "Healtheries" abounds in burlesque suggestions for hygienic exhibits; in the account of the opening praise is largely tempered with irony; and his "insane-itary guide" shows how largely these Exhibitions depended on _al fresco_ entertainments, illuminations, and bands.

The growth of the modern mania for amusement was still in its infancy, but _Punch_ has some instructive remarks on the decline of the many institutions which had begun with the highest instructional aims and aspirations:--

The Crystal Palace at Sydenham ... commenced its career with the
highest aspirations. The British Public were to be shown the
architectural glories of the Alhambra and Pompeii, and soon found
themselves watching the evolutions of Léotard and Blondin. In
like manner the Westminster Aquarium was inaugurated by the Duke
of Edinburgh, as a sort of supplement to "the mission of Albert
the Good," but soon had to fall back on Zazel and a "Variety
entertainment."

_Punch_ accordingly prophecies a similar evolution in the character of the South Kensington Exhibition, and the sequel proved that here, at any rate, he was a true prophet.

Students of Criminology will find much to interest them in _Punch's_ pages during this period. We have already seen that he had abandoned his objection to capital punishment in the 'sixties. Commenting on the debate in June, 1877, _Punch_ defended the maintenance of the gallows as an _ultima ratio legum_--much on the lines of J. S. Mill, who had, more than anyone else, converted him from his old view. Later on, when the abolition was rejected by 263 votes to 64, he writes:--

We keep our gallows for the brute whom no rope weaker than the hempen
halter will bind, and no terror less terrible than Tyburn Tree will
hold in awe. There are such ruffians; and for them the gallows is, and
will be, kept for the present standing.