Chapter II: Part I: The National Outlook (2)

We have no right to wait for men's good word,
No right to pause before men's unearned hate:
No right to turn the ear, when threats are heard
Of what will, some day, be the neutral's fate.
"Do right and fear not" must be England's stay,
As it has been, let wrath say what it will.
So with love's unthanked labour let us pray,
And do our best to ease war's weight of ill!

Paris, March 1st, 1871.]

[Sidenote: _1871--and its Sequel_]

In the autumn the consideration shown by some German troops in Champagne is welcomed; by the end of the year the reply of Göttingen University to an appeal protesting against the threatened destruction of the scientific and art treasures of Paris--a document breathing the familiar spirit of unctuous rectitude--roused _Punch_ to indignant satire in "A Deutscher Dove-Coo," the name of the principal signatory being Dove. So a month later the pseudo-Walpolian letters issued as "Strawberry Leaves" reflect the popular disgust with which German brutality was viewed, but at the same time the popular dislike of England's participating in the war. When the siege of Paris ended at the close of the month, _Punch_ congratulated Thiers on his statesmanship, but rebuked the Parisians for their fickleness in heaping insult on their fallen Emperor. The Germans entered Paris, but in the cartoon of March 11, and the accompanying verses "Vae Victis" a warning was addressed to Germany which has turned out to be a true prophecy. The triumph is admitted, but the sequel is clearly foreshadowed:--

Yet listen, conqueror, while the shade,
That should sit near thee in thy car,
Whispers how quickly laurels fade,
How swiftly shift the sands of war;
How, sixty-five years since, there came
A mightier Emperor than thou,
Upon Berlin to put the shame
Which thy hand puts on Paris now.

Even as thy heel is on their head,
That on thy folks' head set their heel,
So, ere threescore more years have sped,
The woe thou work'st thy sons may feel.
"Who smite with sword by sword shall fall,"
Holds for kings as for subjects true;
God's mills grind slow, but they grind small,
And he that grinds gives all their due.

GERMANY: "Farewell, Madame, and if----"

FRANCE: "Ha! We shall meet again!"]

The courtesy of Germany in coming to an amicable settlement over the loss of some British colliers sunk in the Thames is acknowledged; but anxiety as to her further aggressions was not allayed by her desire to possess Heligoland, and was undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of that brilliant realistic romance, _The Battle of Dorking_, while the fratricidal tragedy of the Commune, and the ruthless measures of suppression employed, augured ill for the recovery of France from the abasement of defeat. These events and the lessons they conveyed to England were not overlooked by _Punch_; they served to temper his light-heartedness with moods of misgiving. Yet the wonderful elasticity--due, as even official Republican historians admit, to the industrial prosperity created under the Second Empire--which enabled France to pay off what in those days seemed a crushing war indemnity long before the time fixed, emboldened _Punch_ in the spring of 1873 to indulge once more in a prophecy of the reversal of the verdict of 1870. When the German occupation ended, France is shown undauntedly confronting Germany with the words: "Ha! We shall meet again."

Germany was not the only foreign power that caused anxiety during the Gladstone administration of 1868-1874. Russia availed herself of the troubles of 1870 to revive the Near Eastern question by refusing to recognize her treaty obligations in the Black Sea; but the friction thus created was allayed by the compromise effected by the Black Sea Conference. And Russia's expedition to, and occupation of, Khiva in 1873 gave rise to further uneasiness. But non-intervention remained the order of the day throughout. The Ashanti expedition of 1873, whether in respect of its aim or its scale could not be regarded as forming an exception. But it furnished _Punch_ with occasion for much plain-spoken criticism of War Office red tape and mismanagement. He saw in Sir Garnet Wolseley "the right man in the wrong place":--

In our deep penny wisdom, and horror of waste,
We shipped off the General minus his men,
So that if in a fix he should find himself placed,
He might merely lose time writing home back again.

[Sidenote: _Gladstonian Legislation_]

Happily these misgivings were falsified in the sequel, and early in 1874 _Punch_ was able to record, amongst other evidences of the satisfactory conclusion of the campaign, the arrival in England of King Coffee's State umbrella. The Gladstone administration may not have been efficient in the conduct of military operations, but in the sphere of Army Reform it deserved well of the country for the abolition of purchase, in the teeth of strong opposition from the Horse Guards' element, and the reorganization of the service on lines which substantially endured for a generation or more. For these improvements we have to thank a civilian, Cardwell, whose name is indissolubly associated with the changes brought about in 1870. The second instalment of Gladstone's scheme for the pacification of Ireland--the Land Act of 1870--was supported by _Punch_, but did not achieve its purpose, since it left the vexed question of dual ownership unsettled; and it was another Irish measure--the University Bill--that brought the Government down. The legislative achievements of the Gladstone Administration had been immense and salutary in many directions, but the universality of its activities undoubtedly contributed to its growing unpopularity and lent force to Disraeli's famous electioneering cry of "plundering and blundering." _Punch_, who had in the main supported Gladstone, advised the Cabinet to resign after their defeat, but the Prime Minister resumed office temporarily and did not dissolve till January 1874.

DR. PUNCH: "My dear young friends, you have done next to nothing this half. Therefore, a little task during the vacation will be good for you. You, Master Benjamin, must get up a 'definite policy.' You, Lowe, will write a paper on the 'Application of the _Screw_.' Ayrton, you will have to get by heart the whole 'Book of Etiquette.' Miall, you must attend Church regularly. Whalley, you're going to America--stay there! Plimsoll, you must learn to--ahem--moderate your _transports_. And as for you, William Ewart, the _idler_ you are the better!"]

[Sidenote: _England 2,000 Years Hence_]

Much had been done in this, the central mid-Victorian age, to abate the evils and abuses which kept the "Two Nations" apart in earlier days. Yet at the opening of the new Disraelian _régime_, with its imperial aspirations, it may not be amiss to reproduce the verses, somewhat in the vein of Thackeray's musings on _Vanitas Vanitatum_, in which Punch bade farewell to the Comet of 1858:--

ADIEU TO THE COMET

Dare a bold atom ask, with brain half dizzy,
What you will see two thousand years to come,
This planet still an ant's nest, black and busy,
Or an extinct volcano, white and dumb?

Will you behold, if keeping that appointment,
(Made for you, Sir, by Airy and by Hind)
Men still anointing Kings with holy ointment,
And Priests still leading, as the blind the blind.

Earth's choicest youth fierce rushing to the slaughter
That two crowned Fools may wreak their idiot pet;
Or wiser Christians' blood poured out like water,
That Jews may gamble with a nation's debt.

Will that day's Patriot be a mouthing truckler,
Setting proud Freedom's hymn to Freedom's dirge;
Will Law be still the rich man's shield and buckler,
The good man's terror, and the poor man's scourge?

Will you find Life a hot and blindfold scrimmage,
Men straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold;
And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image
Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old?

Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit,
Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed;
Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit,
When Lies shall fail--the first time, and the last?

Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder--
Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad;
Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder--
"An undevout Astronomer is mad."

THE ROAD TO REFORM

Turning from England's international outlook to home affairs, we are confronted in the earlier stages of the period under review by the powerful negative influence of Lord Palmerston. A great Foreign Minister, a capable and humane administrator when he was at the Home Office, he had little belief in legislative remedies, and his refusal to grapple with Reform became progressively distasteful to his Liberal supporters. The old party system had been confused and shattered by the secession of the Peelites, as the result of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and Palmerston was maintained in power in fact, if not in name, by a coalition. His death ended the _régime_ of masterly inactivity and cleared the way for the reconstruction of parties and the prolonged duel between the two great protagonists--Disraeli and Gladstone.

The Reform Bill of 1867, the chief constructive achievement of Disraeli's first Premiership, was a great advance on that of 1832, but the boon was robbed of much of its grace by the party strategy which was summed up in Lord Derby's famous phrase about "dishing the Whigs." Meanwhile Ireland had been forced into prominence by the outbreak of Fenianism, the Liberals had been reunited under Gladstone by his Irish Church policy and on his accession to power in 1868, we enter on the golden age of Gladstonian finance, with a low income tax--it dropped to 3d. in the year 1873--high wages and industrial prosperity.

[Sidenote: _Labour and Intervention_]

It was also, as we have seen, the age of non-intervention in foreign politics. Strange to say the strongest appeal to the Government to interfere by force of arms in a foreign quarrel was made by a deputation of working men, introduced by Professor Beesly, in May, 1863, with a view to expounding to the Prime Minister the resolutions in favour of Poland voted by a Trade Union Meeting in St. James's Hall:--

One of the deputation, Mr. Cremer, a joiner, after Pam had given
the deputation the requisite sympathetic and evasive answer,
jovially observed, in plain English:--

"We are men of action, my Lord, and have come to the conclusion
that the only way to aid the Poles is to call on Russia to desist
from her present conduct, and if she will not attend to that call,
thrash her into compliance."

We append _Punch's_ comments because they are typical of his gradual adoption of a more critical attitude towards the working man. It should be remembered that there was no Labour Party in the House of Commons until 1884. Before that time working men like Mr. Burt and Mr. MacDonald, the two miners returned in 1874, were returned by an arrangement with the Liberals and sat on the Liberal benches:--

If the honest working men were so thoroughly well represented as to
command a majority in the House of Commons, they would not, of
course, want to thrash foreign powers into compliance with their
demands, and tax others to pay the expense of their own war. Would
they subject their wages, one and all, to Schedule D, then, in
order to thrash Russia into liberating Poland? If so, they are fine
fellows. If not, the parts performed by the handicraftsmen who
joined in the deputation to Lord Palmerston are about on a par with
those of Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Bottom, the
weaver; Flute, the bellows mender; Snout, the tinker; and
Starveling, the tailor, in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_; our British
carpenters, joiners, and other working men partake in a very
delusive dream in the expectation that England is going to fight
for the Poles. The income-tax makes cowards of us all, except the
working men who do not pay it.

Many of the abuses and evils at which _Punch_ had tilted so vigorously had been removed and remedied. The Corn Laws had been repealed; the Factory Acts had improved the conditions of labour. Obsolete and barbarous laws had been removed from the Statute Book. The Game Laws had been modified, and the administration of justice was marked by a humaner spirit. The principle that property had its duties as well as its rights was being steadily enforced, and, at the close of the period under review, class privilege was curtailed by the institution of open competition in the Civil Service and the abolition of purchase in the Army.

This brief and imperfect list may help to explain the conversion of _Punch_, the strenuous and impassioned advocate of the masses during the 'forties and 'fifties into the champion of the middle classes, and the very candid friend of the working man and Trade Unions as revealed in the later 'sixties and early 'seventies.

The Public House]

[Sidenote: _The Gang System_]

Life on the land showed little signs of progress in the opening years of this period as illustrated by _Punch's_ legal pillory. But the vagaries of clerical and aristocratic magistrates, culled with chapter and verse from provincial newspapers, which excited his wrath in 1858, almost disappear in the 'sixties, no doubt in consequence of a more humane interpretation of the Sunday Observance Act. In 1869, the debate on "The Recreation of the People" at the Church Congress revealed a growth of clerical tolerance and common sense which extorted the high approval of _Punch_. Still, the "Sunday Question" was far from being solved when it impelled the convivial _Punch_ to print in the same year the companion cartoons contrasting his vision of what might be with the squalid reality of what was.

The incubus of Sabbatarianism, so far as it affected farmers and labourers, was at any rate much lightened in these years. But a far more serious evil was the gang system, under which a gang, chiefly of children, some as young as five, but mostly boys and girls under fourteen, were hired by a gang-master, who made as much as he could by taking them about the country and letting out their labour to farmers. It was not until 1867 that the good Lord Shaftesbury carried the Agricultural Gangs Act by the provisions of which no child under eight might be employed in an agricultural gang, and girls were placed under the protection of a licensed female gang-master. It was a modest instalment of reform, long since extended by our Elementary Education Acts; it is to the credit of _Punch_ that he hailed it as placing a check on "a system so abominable that nothing but the intensest hypocrisy can call this a Christian nation while it exists." Against those who deliberately perpetuated ignorance by enslaving the young he carried on a truceless war. He was slower to condemn the ignorance of rural superstition when it could be paralleled by the credulity of the educated, and his observations on the sentence passed on a Devonshire shoemaker may be taken to heart fifty years later:--

A paragraph in a contemporary, headed "Superstition in Devonshire,"
contains the following defence, addressed by an old shoemaker named
Burch to the Barnstaple magistrates, before whom he was charged
with assaulting an old woman by scratching her on the
arm:--"Gentlemen, I have suffered five years' affliction from her.
I have been under her power, and more than a hundred people advised
me to fetch blood of that woman to destroy the spell. I have lost
fourteen canaries, and from forty to fifty goldfinches; as fast as
I got them they died, and I have had five complaints brought upon
me at once."

* * * * *

On hearing this declaration:--

"The Mayor said that it was most extraordinary that such ignorance
and superstition should prevail in the present enlightened age."

In the present enlightened age persons of position in society and
of education believe that they shake hands with spirits at dark
_séances_. His Worship the Mayor of Barnstaple cannot have known
that, or he would not have called the belief in witchcraft
ignorance and superstition. If spiritualism is true, sorcery is
possible, and, as there is no legal remedy against it, old Burch
may be considered to have been justified in taking the law into his
own hands for self-protection. Accordingly, since he was fined 2s.
6d. and costs, and, as he couldn't pay the money, sent to prison,
perhaps a subscription to get him out of gaol, and make him amends
for the trouble he has got into, will be raised among affluent and
superior "spirit circles." For if one medium can float about a
room, why may not another ride upon a broomstick?

SUFFOLK FARMER: "Two shill'ns a week more? Never! That'll never do! Out of the question!"

SUFFOLK PLOUGHMAN: "You're right there, Mas'r Wuzzles, sart'n sure! It 'on't dew. Our Sal sahy there'll be eight shillin' and threepence for bread, three and sixpence for rent and coal, and half-a-crown for club, clothes, boots and shoes for the owd 'oman, five kids, and me. No, that 'on't dew--that, that 'on't, b'um by. But it'll be enow to begin with!"]

[Sidenote: _The Old Man and the New Rich_]

Though no friend of feudalism, it is curious to note that in the vehement protest against enclosures, the closing of rights of way, etc., which he published in 1869, _Punch_ is careful to distinguish between the old and the new rich. The closing of Nightingale Wood, between Southampton and Romsey, which "from time immemorial had been open by gracious permission to rural ramblers," was the occasion for an outburst culminating in the statement that "the brutes now fast closing the sylvan scenery of England to Englishmen, are, with the exception of an ignoble duke or two, rich rogues of speculators and financiers, who have ousted the old territorial aristocrats and squires, having bought fields and forests with the reward of their rascality."

In the selfishness of the "profiteer," as we now call him, _Punch_ sees a sure provocative of Communism. He would clearly have applauded the distinguished but eccentric judge who in a later day erected on his country estate boards with the notice "Trespassers will _not_ be prosecuted."

It remains to be added that the grievances of tenants and farm labourers, though far less frequently mentioned than in earlier years, did not altogether escape the vigilance of _Punch_. In 1861 he printed an ironic petition from a tenant to his landlord asking to be as comfortably housed as his horses. In 1868 he alludes to the scandalous housing conditions on the estate of a noble landlord in Essex--an estate which of recent years has been noted for its humane and liberal management.

[Sidenote: _Prison v. Workhouse_]

Far more space, however, is devoted to the administration of the Poor Law, the economics and evils of Industrialism in the manufacturing centres, and the efforts of practical philanthropy. Throughout the 'sixties and right on into the early 'seventies _Punch_ never wearies of insisting on the folly of making life in prison more comfortable than that in the workhouse. His campaign begins with an onslaught on the guardians of the Durham Union, who appeared to think that there "ought to be a correspondence between the spiritual nutriment of paupers and their material diet":--

Under this impression it evidently was that they advertised the
other day for a chaplain, offering the salary of £20 a year. Their
advertisement was answered by a tender from one John Smart, who
turned out to have been a clergyman's footman, and conceived that
he had learned to exercise the functions of a parson from his
master. He had, he said, "had a good deal of private practice, but
not public."

It is painful to find a respectable man-servant reduced to apply
for employment in the capacity of a Workhouse chaplain. Cannot an
inferior class of clergyman be ordained on purpose to administer to
paupers a coarser kind of spiritual food? Deep indeed must be the
humiliation experienced by a footman in exchanging plush and gold
lace for the canonicals of a chaplain whose salary is £20 a year.

It was the time of the garrotting scare. Hence the point of _Punch's_ comment:--

The frying pan as compared with the fire is much less comfortable
than the Model Prison in proportion to the Union-Workhouse.

The former of those two establishments relatively to the latter is
considerably milder than Purgatory may be imagined to be, in
contrast with the other place which the prisoners mentioned. Quod,
in comparison with the Abode of Want, is quite a tolerable sort of
Limbo. What is the moral of this arrangement, in the apprehension
of the classes who have to live by their own exertions? Whatever
you do, keep out of the Workhouse. Garrotte anybody rather than
apply to the Union.

_Punch_ still disapproved of the gallows; the strongest argument in its favour was the manifest truth that the cheapest thing you could do with a worthless rascal was to hang him. But he saw a better way in rendering penal servitude exemplary:--

At any rate, for the prevention of garrotte robberies and all other
crimes, one step might be taken somewhat analogous to the treatment
proverbially recommended for that other complaint, the influenza,
which is just now likewise so prevalent. "Stuff a cold," says the
popular adage, "and starve a cough." At present the moral reverse
of this rule is observed in penal economy. You stuff a convict and
starve a pauper. Wouldn't it probably answer better to allow
paupers sufficient food and put criminals on low diet? Thus you may
be enabled to get on without the gallows.

It was stated, and accepted by _Punch_ in 1860, that since 1856 there had been a decrease in crime of 25 per cent. owing to the establishment of Reformatories. But the series of papers in the _Morning Post_ in 1863 on the Middlesex Industrial School at Feltham--where the boys were subjected to a devotional drill, made to lift and lower their hands in prayer and sing grace "to the sharp order of a master," and mercilessly caned and birched by a tall, muscular drill master for acts of insubordination--gave _Punch_ furiously to think:--

The Middlesex Model School at Feltham is an institution for the
reformation of young thieves, but its arrangements for developing
the religious sentiment in the youthful mind appear to be such as
may be conceived to have been devised for mutual edification by the
inmates of an asylum for idiots.

* * * * *

Flogging is a fine thing; but how strange that its application is
limited to boys and soldiers and sailors: to children of tender
age and members of an honourable profession! Wouldn't it be at
least as suitable to garrotters, and even to cruel swindlers, whose
exemplary torture, in comparison with the misery caused by their
crimes, would be the lesser evil of the two?

The painful disclosures resulting from inquiries into workhouse conditions are repeatedly referred to and make strange reading in a comic journal. At a meeting held in Willis's Rooms by the Earl of Carnarvon and the Archbishop of York early in 1866, the brutalities to which the sick poor were subject in the infirmaries of most of the London workhouses were illustrated in such hideous detail, that _Punch_ declared "it would be cheaper to put paupers out of their misery than it was to let them die in misery, and it would at least be just as moral."

The parsimony, the self-indulgence and the barbarous procrastination of the guardians of St. Pancras are castigated a few months later, when a motion to postpone the consideration of the appointment of an extra paid nurse for three months was carried by six votes to five. There were forty guardians; but most of them were absent at the quarterly dinner of the Burial Board. _Punch_, therefore, had good excuse for saying that "these nine-and-twenty parochial humbugs, instead of minding their business, were engaged in stuffing their most ungodly digestive organs with funeral baked meats."

[Sidenote: _Ignorant Guardians_]

The Derby-Disraeli administration had come into power in the previous month. So when Mr. Gathorne Hardy had succeeded Mr. C. P. Villiers as President of the Poor Law Board, the alteration in the methods of procedure in regard to investigating workhouse abuses provoked a well-timed and damaging attack on the attempt to whitewash Bumbledom. It is a dreary subject, but the principles which ought to govern a Departmental inquiry could not be better expressed. And _Punch_ was happily able to fortify his humanitarian zeal with ridicule when, in quoting from the description of the horrors of Walsall Workhouse given by the _Lancet_, he gives two stories showing that workhouse mismanagement in those days, at any rate, was largely the result of crass ignorance:--

It was suggested in one workhouse board-room that a bath ought
unquestionably to be supplied, when a guardian got up and stated
"he were agin it." He never had one in his house in his life, and
he didn't see why a pauper should enjoy what he didn't want. On
another occasion the absence of a proper light at the entrance door
was dwelt upon, and a gas-lamp was proposed. This was seconded by
another worthy, who, approving of the gas-lamp, said, "and I'd have
it lighted with ile."

Now the first of these gentlemen may be a regular saint. He never
bathed, and he regarded his neighbour as himself. To be sure, if he
was a saint he was also a pig; but swinishness has not seldom been
combined with sanctity. The other guardian, who didn't know better
than that a gas-lamp could be lighted with "ile," was himself so
destitute of all enlightenment that he may be excused as a simply
irresponsible clown.

The euphemisms of Poor Law inspectors, who used colourless words such as "inadequate" and "insufficient" when "barbarous," "brutal" and "horrible" would have been nearer the mark, had been exposed by the _British Medical Journal_ in 1868. If destitution was not a crime, why, asked _Punch_, was the pauper treated worse than the criminal? These abuses, in the exposure of which he joined hands with serious medical journals, explain and justify the intense and even passionate desire of self-respecting poor people to avoid the Union.

Though no lover of Jews, _Punch_ in 1869 contrasts Jewish guardians favourably with their so-called Christian brother officials. Dickens's picture of old Betty in _Our Mutual Friend_ is hardly overdrawn, and a year after Dickens's death _Punch_ was still contrasting the comforts of prison life with the usual conditions of life amongst the submerged poor.

The State had not yet awakened to a sense of its responsibilities to the "legal poor." Much was being done by practical philanthropy, and it may be fairly said that no appeal to _Punch_ for assistance or encouragement was left unanswered. Wholehearted in his support of Ragged Schools, he comes forward in 1858 to plead the cause of their logical corollary--Ragged Playgrounds:--

Deprive a boy of healthy, fair and open games, and you drive him to
resort to unwholesome, foul and sneaking ones. Deny him any
playground but a hole-and-corner court, and you'll find that he'll
betake himself to hole-and-corner games in it. In default of
wholesome cricket, he'll become a dab at chuck-farthing; and will
get from pitch and toss to still worse kinds of time-slaughter.

* * * * *

If we mean then to teach the ragged young idea, we must give heed
somewhat to the ragged body likewise. And the first thing to be
done is to provide it with proper play space.

_Punch_, therefore, may be regarded as one of the pioneers of the admirable "Play Centres" movement. In the same year we find him applauding the conversion of an old thieves' public house in Westminster into the headquarters of the Ragged Schools, and appealing for funds to maintain it. Drinking fountains had been established in Manchester and Liverpool, and Punch expresses a desire to see them introduced into London. Here, at any rate, he was prepared to welcome the saying that what Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.

In the domain of social reform _Punch's_ great bugbears were patronage, condescension and misplaced missionary efforts. Towards Exeter Hall philanthropy the old and rooted hostility remains throughout this period, and in 1865 we find _Punch_ pleading vigorously for a greater interest in social reform at home to supplement the fashionable enthusiasm for foreign missions. For missionaries of the type of Livingstone he had nothing but praise, but that "perfect Christian gentleman," as Sir Bartle Frere described him, had severed his connexion with the London Missionary Society in 1857, and thenceforth had been subjected to "much hostile criticism from narrow-minded people."

LITTLE LONDON ARAB: "Please 'm, ain't we black enough to be cared for?"

(With _Mr. Punch's_ compliments to Lord Stanley.)]

The benefactions of George Peabody roused _Punch's_ interest from the very first. In 1862 and 1863 his pages abound in questions as to what was being done with the Peabody Fund. But in 1864 the first block of "Peabody dwellings" was opened in Spitalfields, soon followed by others in Chelsea, Bermondsey, Islington and Shadwell; and in 1866, on learning that Mr. Peabody had increased his gift to the London poor from £150,000 to a quarter of a million, _Punch_ was ashamed at the lack of public recognition of his generosity. The letter from a "London correspondent" is more than an expression of gratitude--it is a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian sociology.

MR. PEABODY'S GIFT.

"I will confess to you that I indulged myself with the thought that
it would be a graceful conclusion to the reference sure to be made
to American affairs in the Queen's speech, if a few words of
cordial recognition were devoted to the munificence of this great
American citizen. Of course, I was immediately ashamed of myself
for thinking such a thing possible; and I hope you will overlook
the ignorance of etiquette, routine and precedent--the shadowy
creatures that hold us back when we are yearning to obey some noble
impulse--betrayed by such a disordered fancy. When I read the
Speech, all feelings of disappointment about Mr. Peabody
evaporated, for I found that from the beginning to the end of the
Royal oration there was not a line to commemorate the name and the
fame of the Great Minister [Lord Palmerston] lying so near in the
sacred silence of the Abbey. The shadowy creatures were again
appalled by my audacious expectation, and held out menacingly a
noose of ruddy tape.

"I then waited to see whether Mr. Childers, in proposing a public
loan in aid of the erection of houses for the labouring poor, would
introduce Mr. Peabody's name. He did, and handsomely; and I am not
without hope that before the vessel of State gets into the chopping
seas that lie in its track, the captain, or perhaps the first
lieutenant, may say something on this American question which would
give unqualified satisfaction on both sides of the Atlantic. You
will not misunderstand me. You will not suppose that when I speak
of thanking Mr. Peabody, I am thinking of gold boxes, or addresses
beautifully engrossed on vellum and enclosed in polished caskets,
or public banquets, or services of plate. His gift towers above all
ordinary gifts, as St. Paul's rises over all meaner edifices; but
it does seem to me that it should be acknowledged and gratefully
recorded by the voice of the eloquent speaker and the pen of the
eloquent writer, be it in Parliament or in the pulpit, from the
public platform or in the columns of the omnipotent Press. To some
extent this has been done, but not commensurate with the magnitude,
the rarity, and the disinterestedness of the gift.

"When I read the unprofitable proceedings of Convocation, the
discussions about canons and catechisms, rubrics and conscience
clauses, I think to myself that Mr. Peabody may be doing more for
the souls of the poor, by providing for their bodies, than both
Houses of Convocation will do, though they should sit to the end of
the century, and enjoy a fresh gravamen at each sitting.

"If I were the Bishop of London, out of the fund with which his
name will be imperishably associated, in every district containing
a Peabody block of buildings, or dwellings for the poor, such as
Alderman Waterlow understands how to build, I would provide a
working clergyman, sure that he would find eager listeners in men
and women, translated from styes of filth and disease, and
degradation, to homes abounding in cleanliness, and health, and
comfort, through the direct bounty or beneficent example of the man
who has arisen to the rescue and deliverance of the poor of
London--George Peabody.

"Perhaps the best commemoration of their benefactor by the Peabody settlements would be a day's holiday in the country every summer, on his birthday, if it falls in one of the leafy months."

The neglect of which _Punch_ complains cannot be laid to the door of the Queen. When Mr. Peabody was about to return to America in March, 1866, she acknowledged his munificence in an autograph letter, saying how gladly she would have conferred upon him either a baronetcy or the Grand Cross of the Bath (both of which he declined), and asking his acceptance of a miniature portrait of herself.

Peabody's gifts to London amounted in all to £500,000, and set an example which native millionaires have done well to follow. But he was an even more munificent benefactor to his own country, where he gave at least a million to education. When he died in London in 1869 _Punch_, in his memorial verses, contrasted the feelings aroused in the two nations with those of the "mourners" of most rich men:--

No common mourners here such office fill--
A mother and a daughter, grand of frame,
Albeit one in blood, oft twain in will,
And jealous either of the other's fame.

But by this bier they pause from jar and boast,
Urged by no rivalry but that which strives
Him that lies here to love and honour most,
Ranking his life highest among the lives.

Of men that in their tongue and blood claim part:
And well may child and mother mourn for one
Who loved mother and child with equal heart,
Nor left, for either, Love's best works undone.

The beneficent use of great wealth on a great scale seldom evades ultimate acknowledgment. _Punch_ said no more in his tribute to Peabody than that great and humane American deserved. But minor endeavours were not overlooked, even where they led to no immediate results. Such, for example, was the proposal of F. D. Maurice and others to found a Working Women's College in 1864. Classes for women had been held at the Working Men's College from 1855 to 1860. The larger scheme was not realized, but has been revived within the last year by the establishment of the Working Women's College at Beckenham. Such again was the establishment of the London Dressmaking Company in 1865, under the patronage of Lord Shaftesbury and the Bishops of London and Oxford, to which _Punch_ gave a vigorous puff-preliminary in his editorial columns.

In 1858 the fate of Emily Druce had shown that the plea of Hood's "Song of the Shirt" was in danger of being forgotten. But sweated labour was not confined to the cheap clothing trade. In 1863 West-End milliners came under the microscope of Parliament and _Mr. Punch_:--

Public indignation has been excited by the accounts of the death of
Mary Anne Walkley, a girl employed by Madame Elise, of Regent
Street, wife of one Isaacson, and a notorious dressmaker. "Long
hours in an overcrowded room and sleeping in an ill-ventilated
bedroom," said Sir George Grey, "caused the young girl's death."
What is to be done? Lord Shaftesbury in the Lords, and Mr. Bagwell
in the Commons, called attention to the system under which such
girls are killed; and the man Isaacson, who seems to fill a similar
office to that of Mr. Mantalini, and who writes English of which
that gent would be proud, issued a letter full of impertinence and
bad grammar, in defence of Mrs. Isaacson's place. Thereupon the
parish requested other testimony, and Dr. Lankester examined the
premises, and found the dormitories rather better and the workroom
rather worse than had been expected.

MADAME LA MODISTE: "We would not have disappointed your Ladyship, at any sacrifice, and the robe is finished _à merveille_."]

These tragedies and the efforts which they prompted serve as a convenient transition to a more general survey of Labour problems, Labour legislation, and Labour organization and representation as they are revealed and discussed in the pages of _Punch_ from 1857 to 1874. Under the recently established and rapidly extending joint reign of steam and coal, it was only natural that rural life should recede into the background. Railway construction had drawn off many labourers from agriculture, and the influx of labour into the manufacturing districts continued apace. In the prospectus of the Dressmaking Company given above, the work-hours are given as ten. But in 1859 the movement among working-men for a nine-hours' day had already been started. Strikes were common, but _Punch_ discourages them on the ground that the men always lost in the long run, and that the "agitators"--the name "Labour Leaders" had not yet emerged--were the real criminals. The _Examiner_ took the same line in 1861 when it wrote "the submission of workmen to the tyranny of their Unions is at once one of the most curious and lamentable phenomena of our time." Yet the existence of genuine distress is not denied, and in a little parable in verse entitled "Men and Bees," profit-sharing between masters and men is recommended as the true solution.

On what was still, in spite of Factory Acts and other measures, the greatest blot on our industrial system--the employment of child labour--_Punch_ spoke with no uncertain voice. Early in 1860 he gives Lord Brougham a good mark for taking up the question in the Lords:--

Lord Brougham, always true to his humane instincts, brought before
the Lords the case of the young children employed in Bleach Works.
It is a cruel one. Infants of seven and eight years old are at work
for eighteen hours, and are sometimes four nights without sleep.
The brutalities by which the poor little children are kept
sufficiently awake for the purposes of their task-masters are
shocking. Years ago, when the cruelties of the climbing-boy trade
were exposed in the Lords, a noble Lord told a good story, made
their Lordships laugh, and by getting the Bill thrown over for a
year, left a new batch of children to the mercies of the Sweep.
There was nothing of this kind to-night, and Lord Granville
promised information. He will be good enough to remember that Lord
Brougham _has_ tendered information, which proves that our friend
Mammon is, as usual, doing the work of Moloch.

[Sidenote: Climbing Boys and Girls]

Here, at any rate, there is no sympathy for the greedy capitalist, who comes off as badly as the "agitator." The mention of the chimney-sweeps is timely. In 1864 the employment of the climbing boys had been prohibited by Act of Parliament for twenty years. Yet the Act had been so systematically evaded that in that year more than 3,000 children were still kept at labour in that filthy and unhealthy form of slavery. The subject was brought up in the House of Commons in April by Mr. Digby Seymour, and furnished _Punch_ with an excuse for assailing those "sentimental and pious ladies" who "prefer subscribing to societies for converting little Hottentots to using influence to suppress the atrocities committed upon little white children at home." A month later Lord Shaftesbury intervened in the Lords: the details which he brought forward were too shocking for reproduction, but "fine ladies who mew over the sorrows of the Circassians, and devout ladies who send missionaries to the Chinese, had better know what is done in their own houses, and within a few feet of their own beds, with the children of white English folk."

The kidnapping of little boys had been revived, and at a meeting held in York the following agreement was signed by the assembled sweeps:--

"We, the undersigned Master Sweeps of the City of York, mutually
agree, from and after this date, not to employ Climbing Boys and
Girls in our business; that the Act of Parliament on their behalf
made should be strictly complied with; and that we ought no longer
to risk the heavy penalties it prescribes, both against
householders and ourselves."

It thus appears that, in York at least, the employment of climbing girls had become almost or quite as common as that of climbing boys.

Lord Shaftesbury's "Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act" (1864) provided that a chimney sweeper convicted of causing or allowing any person under the age of twenty-one to ascend or descend a chimney or enter a flue for the purpose of sweeping it or extinguishing a fire might be sent to prison for a term not exceeding six months with or without hard labour. But master chimney sweeps still continued to "snap their sooty fingers at the law." In the issue of March 2, 1867, _Punch_ reproduces the following business "card":--

"William Burges, Chimney Sweeper, No. 36 Bolton Street, Chorley,
flatters himself with having boys of the best size for such
branch of business suitable for a Tunnel or Chimney, and that it is
now in his power to render his assistance in a more extensive
manner than he usually has done. He also carries his boys from room
to room occasionally, to prevent them staining or marking any room
floor with their feet."

In short, there was good ground for the complaint that while a great deal had been said about our working men, but little notice had been taken of our working children. A discussion of the "half-time system" at a working men's club in which another enlightened and benevolent peer, Lord Lyttelton, took part, is accordingly welcomed as sensible and opportune:--

"By this system," said Lord Lyttelton, "which compelled every
parent who chose to send his child to work also to send him or her
half the day to school, a very useful compromise had been effected
between the demands of labour and education.... This system, as
carried out in the manufacturing towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire,
had resulted in the increased education, and consequent improved
life and conduct, of their inhabitants, as had been manifested
during the late cotton famine, and in many other ways."

Gentlemen of England who live at home at ease perhaps have little
notion of how hard some children work, and how needful it appears
to make some effort to relieve them. From a Blue-Book he produced
at the meeting we have mentioned, Lord Lyttelton

"Gave an instance of a little girl engaged in a brickyard near
Birmingham from 6 A.M. to 8 P.M., only having fifteen minutes for
breakfast, and thirty minutes for dinner, no time for tea, and
during one day she would have to catch and throw to her neighbour
fifteen tons of bricks."

What a mercy it would be to such poor little working children if
their fathers were compelled to send them every day to school!

[Sidenote: _White Slaves in the Black Country_]

Towards the end of the same year the Town Council of Sheffield met to consider the report of the Children's Employment Commission relative to the overworking of children in the trades of that town:--

According to that Report, a boy, only nine years old, living at
Wadsley, four or five miles from Sheffield, was obliged by his
father to work as cellar-boy in one of the furnaces, on most days
of the week from six in the morning to six or seven in the evening,
and on Saturdays from three in the morning till three in the
afternoon. This enforced labour at a high temperature would, if
only occasional, appear to be equivalent to a somewhat long
compulsory innings in the Turkish bath. Imposed nearly every day,
it may be considered by some who do not consider too deeply, to
constitute a combination of the Turkish bath with Turkish tyranny,
and tyranny about as barbarous as ever was practised in Turkey.

THE "GOOD PARSON" (to applicant for instruction in the Night School): "Have you been confirmed, my boy?"

BOY (hesitating): "Please, sir--I--don't know."

PARSON: "You understand me; has the Bishop laid his hands on you?"

BOY: "Oh, no, sir, but his Keeper have, sir--very often, sir!"]

Naturally, such outspoken comments gave offence, and in 1866 and again in 1868 _Punch_ was very much in the black books of the Black Country for what he said on the state of morals, manners and education among the workers of that region of coal and iron. The controversy began with some lines, "The Queen in the Black Country," which were inspired by the inauguration of Prince Albert's statue at Wolverhampton. These gave pain to certain susceptible inhabitants of that town. _Punch's_ reply was to quote from the report of the Children's Employment Commission of 1864 on the trades in the Wolverhampton district, showing that all the large employers lived far away from the workpeople they employed; that a few ministers of religion were almost the only representatives of the upper class resident in the "Black Country"; that large numbers of children, youths, young persons and women worked the same long hours as the men, from 6 or 7 A.M. to 9, 10 and 11 P.M.; that among them little girls were often kept bellows-blowing fourteen hours a day.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: _Laws to Protect Children_]

In January, 1868, _Punch_ was accused of being a Rip Van Winkle, who had been asleep for half a century, because when Bishop Selwyn was translated from New Zealand to Lichfield he had published some verses ending up with the question, "What's the savage o'er sea to the savage at home?" His answer was to say that he wished he _could_, like Rip Van Winkle, fall asleep not over the Black Country only, but over every manufacturing district of England, to wake in fifty years and find education for ignorance, thrift and comfort for improvidence and squalor, gentleness and refinement for coarseness and brutality among men and women; health and happiness for sickliness and suffering, premature decrepitude and deadening of mind among children. But the facts were too strong for him:--

We never said, or meant to say, that things were as bad in the
Black Country now as they were fifty, forty, or twenty years ago.
We are quite ready to believe, with a more courteous and kindly
Black Country correspondent than Mr. Lawley, that much has been
done, and that much is doing, for religion, education and
civilization in that region as everywhere else.

* * * * *

If _Mr. Punch_ has been unfair to the Black Country, he has, at least, been sinning in good company. Hear what Mr. Justice Keating spoke from the Bench, in a Black Country case, not three weeks ago:--

"I cannot help noticing the most deplorable state of matters shown
by the evidence of these girls. We call ourselves a Christian
people and pride ourselves upon being a civilized nation. These two
girls have said that they could neither read nor write; that they
had never in their lives been at school, church or chapel; that
they had never heard of the Bible; and, as the learned counsel had
suggested, in all probability they had never heard of a Divine
Being. We send out missionaries to the heathen, but what avails all
this when we see such a state of things at home?"

The introduction of the Metalliferous Mines Bill in the Lords in July, 1872, prompted _Punch_ to express his ironic satisfaction:--

Would you be surprised to hear that we already protect women and
children to this extraordinary extent? No children under 15 are
sent down into the mines, and women are not worked more than twelve
hours, and--will you believe it?--not at all on Sundays.

In the same month the Lords read a second time the Bill for protecting children against those who cruelly train them to become acrobats. There is hardly a single mention throughout all these years of efforts to secure humane treatment for working children in which the honoured name of Lord Shaftesbury is not prominent, as it was in this debate. There was, as _Punch_ says, no sentimentality about this interference, and we ought not to leave children to be tortured for the delectation of the lower class of folks, well-dressed or not, who are pleased by unnatural acrobatic feats.

It gave _Punch_ no pleasure to write sermons on Blue Books, least of all when the Blue Books only gave him the blues. He usually abstained from the discussion of merely painful subjects. But just indignation often forced him to make exceptions. Thirty years after the passage of the first, and nine after the passage of the second Chimney Sweepers Regulation Act, a very bad case of evasion occurred in the North of England:--

We take this paragraph from the _Pall Mall Gazette_:--

"Chimney-sweeps, who continue, in defiance of the law, to employ
'climbing boys' may take warning from a case which has been tried
at Durham. A Gateshead chimney-sweeper was sentenced to six months'
imprisonment for the manslaughter of an unhappy little lad who was
suffocated in attempting to carry out his orders in clearing a
flue."

Apart from the individual ruffianism in this case, _Mr. Punch_ asks
whether the Act which was intended to deliver little children from
the most hideous cruelties is becoming a dead letter in any part of
the kingdom. Is there any other place than Gateshead where
little lads are rammed into foul flues to be suffocated? The
present generation may not remember the struggle that had to be
fought out, over and over, before the children could be protected.
It had to be waged against habit, prejudice, greed, ridicule; but
the victory was won. James Montgomery,[1] the poet, with one
ghastly but damaging volume, The _Chimney Sweep's Magazine and
Climbing Boy's Album_, gave thousands a nightmare that lasted for
years, but he carried the Act. There was a poem in the book, too,
by Blake, the painter, that did yeoman's service. We got the Act,
and believed that the system of atrocious cruelty was at an end.
But the above paragraph wakes painful doubts.

We should call the sentence on the fellow who killed the child
ridiculously mild, could anything ridiculous connect itself with
such a theme. We wish that this master chimney-sweeper of Gateshead
could have been sentenced to two years' imprisonment, varied by
twenty sound lashes with the cat every quarter day, except the last,
when he should have had fifty, as a parting testimonial of the
public sense of his character.

[Footnote 1: No mention is made in the otherwise full and sympathetic notice of James Montgomery in the D.N.B. of this, not the least honourable of the services of that Sheffield worthy. Though his verse, especially in the epic vein, was unequal, the D.N.B., differing from Lord Jeffrey who slated it in the _Edinburgh_, agrees with _Punch_ in according James Montgomery the title of poet, reserving that of "Poetaster" to Robert or "Satan" Montgomery, who also dealt in epics, and was the victim of Macaulay's famous and ferocious castigation in the _Quarterly_.]

[Sidenote: _A Child Heroine_]

This was written in the issue of March 15, 1873. Just a year later, at the close of the Ashanti campaign, an appeal was made, and not in vain, to _Punch_ to recognize the heroism of another working child:--

A TEN-YEAR-OLD MARTYR

"DEAR MR. PUNCH,

"There will be a great deal of war-paint going round soon, in the
shape of titles, honours, and decorations, official rewards for
'killing, slaying and burning.' Will you give a decoration to the
little motherless girl of ten, Louisa Row,[2] who 'undertook the
cooking' for her father, 'a labourer,' and his family, and died in
the execution of her duty?

"She has not killed anyone, black or white, except herself; she has
not burned anyone's huts, or anyone's villages--she has only burned
herself. She will get no glory, unless you, with a stroke of your
pen, will put one little star of honour upon her unknown grave.

"THE AUTHOR OF _Olive Varcoe_."

[Footnote 2: "A painful death by burning has happened at Torquay. Louisa Row, aged ten, lost her mother a few weeks ago, and undertook the cooking for her father, a labourer, and the rest of the family. She had well performed the duties devolving upon her since her mother's death, until one day she went too near the grate, her frock was ignited, and she was terribly burned. The poor child lived several days after the accident. At the inquest a verdict of 'Accidental death' was returned."]

Will our correspondent accept this inscription for her poor little martyr's tombstone?

Duty's small Servant, without prize or praise,
How soon on thy hard life hath death come down!
Take this brief record of thy childish days--
Gold, tried with fire, makes the best Martyr's Crown.