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

_Punch's_ record as the champion of the working children leaves little room for criticism. And we have seen in several of the extracts given above that his severest censures are directed against the employers of labour, the greed of gain, the worship of Mammon. But if he cannot be convicted of partiality to capital, he was not always fair to labour. Even in his most democratic days he showed a distrust of "delegates." The working man's grievances were admitted, but his salaried spokesmen, when they were drawn from his own order, were condemned, with very few exceptions, as untrustworthy mischief-makers. How acute this distrust had now become may be gathered from the acrimonious article which appears in 1861 under the heading "A Dig at the Delegates":--

A Delegate is generally a lazy, idle lout, who likes to sit and
talk much better than to work; and who, considering himself as
being "gifted with the gab," tries to foster small dissensions and
causes of dispute, that he may have the pleasure of hearing himself
prate about them. In other words, he is a drone that goes buzzing
about the beer-shops, and living upon the honey that the working
bees have toiled for. His business is to set a man against his
master, and to keep afloat the Unions that tend to nurture Strikes,
by giving men a false idea of their own strength, and underrating
the resources and resistance of employers. Having duped the
shallow-pated to elect him as their mouthpiece and being paid by
them to lead a lazy life in looking to what he is pleased to call
their interests, the Delegate grows fat on their starvation and
their Strikes, and what is death to them becomes to him the means
of life. Fancied grievances and most unreasonable demands the
Delegate endeavours to encourage and support, for squabbling brings
him into notice and his tongue into full play, and raises his
importance in the pothouse-haunting world. A claim for ten hours'
pay for only nine hours' work is just the sort of trade demand that
a Delegate delights in; for he knows that its injustice must
prevent its being listened to, and he will have the chance of
swigging nightly, gratis, pots of beer while denouncing the
iniquity of rapacious masters, in all the frothy eloquence of a
public-house harangue.

As nobody but a fool would submit to have his earnings eaten into by
a sloth, it is the business of the Delegate to clap a stop on
cleverness, and keep the brains of working men down to the
muddle-pated level of those who are his tools. He, of course, fears
the quick sight of any workman of intelligence, lest it may see
through his iniquitous designs. He, therefore, gets the best hands
marked on the Black List, and does the utmost in his power to reduce
the active, skilful and industrious working man to the standard of
the stupid, slothful, sluggish sot.

MRS. NORTH: "You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course of action; I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable arrangement, I must put the case into other hands."]

There have always been people who trade on discontent, and would find their occupation gone were it removed. But to represent such motives as animating the majority of Trade Union delegates was a gross exaggeration; and it was both unfair and unjust to draw so hard and fast a distinction between the rank and file of the working classes and those whom they chose to represent them. The weakness of _Punch's_ position was severely tested during the war of North and South in America and the Lancashire cotton famine, of which that war was the cause. Just as _Punch_ failed to recognize the existence of idealism in the leaders of the North, and consistently maligned and misrepresented Lincoln until his death, so he failed to render justice to the idealism of the cotton operatives, who espoused a cause which was not only unpopular and unfashionable, but the promotion of which entailed the maintenance of that blockade which caused widespread distress and misery in Lancashire. _Punch's_ attitude towards America in the earlier stages of the conflict showed a complete inability to comprehend the great issues involved, and an impartial dislike of both sides tempered by a sentimental leaning towards the South. It must be remembered that at this time the cause of the South was favoured by nearly all classes, that it appealed to Mr. Gladstone; that the Duke of Argyll and John Bright were almost the only statesmen who backed the North; and that amongst London newspapers of any weight the _Spectator_ stood almost alone on that side. _Punch's_ reading of the war at the close of 1861 is shown in the cartoon which represents King Cotton as Prometheus, bound with the chains of Blockade, and with the American Eagle preying on his vitals. The verses which accompany the picture emphasize the suicidal folly of the eagle, but the question of slavery or the Union is not even mentioned. A fortnight later the point of the "other [Cotton] Kings" is explained by another cartoon in which John Bull, addressing the combatants, says, "If you like fighting better than business, I shall deal at the other shop."

Here the verses drive home the _argumentum ad pocketum_ in the crudest way. Cousin Jonathan is told not to be an ass, or "bid Mrs. Britannia stop ruling the wave":--

We'll break your blockade, Cousin Jonathan, yet,
Yes, darn our old stockings, C. J., but we will.
And the cotton we'll have, and to work we will set
Every Lancashire hand, every Manchester mill.

We're recruiting to do it--we'll make no mistakes:
There's a place they call India just over the way;
There we're raising a force which, Jerusalem, snakes!
Will clean catawampus your cruisers, C. J.

[Sidenote: "_Distressed Millionaires_"]

Events entirely failed to justify these truculent words. A year later the cotton famine was at its height, and an appeal for funds is headed "Welly Clamming," with the explanation, "Everywhere we hear this, the Lancashire Doric for 'nearly starving.'" _Punch_ applauds the zeal of the Quakers in relieving the distress caused by famine, fever and frost, and simultaneously reproduces this extraordinary advertisement from the _Manchester Guardian_:--

_Travel_: A gentleman, whose son, aged 17, is thrown out of
occupation by the Cotton Famine, would be glad to meet with one or
two other young gentlemen to accompany his son on a Tour, for five
or six months, in the Mediterranean or elsewhere.

Address F. 127 at the Printers.

The advertiser, according to _Punch_, appears to be "one of those distressed millionaires who, because their mills have ceased working, declare themselves destitute mill-owners, and devolve on the squires and farmers and the British public the duty of rescuing their unemployed workpeople from starvation."

When a ship was sent to Liverpool bearing the contributions of the United States to the relief of Lancashire in February, 1863, _Punch_ welcomed the gift without reserve, as linking the two worlds anew by the chain of fraternal goodwill. But a very different spirit is shown in his acid comments on the debate in the House of Commons initiated by W. E. Forster, who attacked the Government for not interfering to prevent ships of war being supplied by our builders to the Confederates, and said that we incurred great danger of war. The facts and the sequel fully justified Forster's protest, but _Punch_ was not content with backing up Palmerston's defence of the Government, and treated with contempt and ridicule Bright's insistence on the sympathy of the working classes with the North:--

Here it may be mentioned that Mr. Bright[3] alluded in his speech
to a meeting held the day before at the St. James's Hall, where he
had been in the chair, and a crowded assembly of workmen testified
the utmost sympathy with the North. This meeting is grandiloquently
described by the Yankee organ here, but shall describe itself for
_Mr. Punch's_ readers. It was chiefly composed of Trade Union men,
and when a person who had chosen to be free and act for himself
ventured to speak, although on the same side as the other orators,
these lovers of liberty interrupted him with cries of "He's not a
Society man!" Mr. Bright made a fervid and eloquent speech in
favour of the North, and a shoemaker came next, who abused _Mr.
Punch_, said "that a monster in human shape had been guest of the
Lord Mayor," and that "the Devil, in the shape of _The Times_
newspaper, was carrying out an infernal purpose." A joiner then
called Lord Palmerston a liar, and a Professor Beestley, or some
such name, attacked the "wicked press," meaning the respectable
journals. An address to Mr. Lincoln was agreed to, assailing the
"infamous _Times_," the "arrogant aristocracy," the "diabolical"
South, our "unscrupulous moneyocracy," and the "infamous
rebellion," and terminating with some gushing bosh about the
vivifying Sun of Liberty. This document is penned in _New York
Herald_ style, and probably owes its origin to Yankee inspiration.
To this kind of meeting, and this kind of language, Mr. Bright
referred, complacently, in the House of Commons. The North must be
in a bad way when such allies are coveted.

[Footnote 3: The variations of view in _Punch's_ estimate of John Bright form an interesting study. In the main, while admiring his courage, _Punch_ found him too fond of asserting an impracticable independence. The masses distrusted him as a cottonocrat; the middle-classes as an out-and-out democrat and therefore an advocate of mob-rule. Punch himself had described _Bright_ as an inciter to class-hatred in 1860.]

[Sidenote: _Libelling Lincoln_]

The South was in a much worse way when a "respectable journal" was reduced to explaining away the undoubted and disinterested support of the North by Lancashire cotton spinners and other British working men as Trade Union tyranny, to say nothing of that worst infirmity of political controversy--the vulgar perversion of an opponent's name. _Punch_ was on stronger ground in criticizing the spread-eagling of the northern Press, as when the _New York Herald_ declared that:--

They (the American people) know that when this rebellion began the
aristocrats of England took advantage of the chance to destroy us,
and joined heart and hand with the slaveholding rebels. They know
that this rebellion was born in Exeter Hall, nurtured by the
English aristocracy, armed from English arsenals, and supported by
English sympathy and assistance.

_Punch_, though no lover of Exeter Hall, could not refrain from ironically vindicating its innocence, and makes for the rest some good debating points against the _Herald_. But there is little "neutrality" in his statement that Southern loyalty was as staunch as that of the North, "though not so truculent or atrocious"; and when he falls foul of the Yankees--a word invariably used in a disparaging sense--for calling the confederates "rebels," he did not know that the magnanimous Lincoln would never allow them to be called by that name in his presence. He is made to do so, however, in _Punch's_ parody of one of Lincoln's speeches--a truly lamentable performance, in which the President claims dictatorial powers, calls for whipcord to whip the rebels, abuses the "rotten old world," talks with the utmost cynicism of the blacks, and in general behaves like a vulgar buffoon. The true Lincoln is to be found in the immortal Second Inaugural delivered on March 4, 1865.

As for the British working men, though _Punch_ had undoubtedly endeavoured to discount the strength of the tide of feeling which continued to run strongly against the slave power, in spite of the terrible suffering brought about by the blockade, he quoted with approval Lord Palmerston's formidable and damaging indictment of the manufacturers in the House of Commons on July 30:--

"We know," he said, "that in the county most fortunes have been
made by the manufacturers. I do not agree with the Hon.
Member for Stockport that it has all been invested in the mills. On
the contrary they have accumulated much more than their mills could
have cost. There are enormous capitalists in the county, some of
whom, I am sorry to say, though they have starving populations at
their gates, and anticipate worse distress as coming, have
actually, for the sake of profit, sold and sent out of the country
the cotton which they ought to have used for the employment of the
people. I say, why are these people to be exempt, and not to be
made to contribute to the distress which they see around them?"

This speech, _Punch_ observes, enraged Cobden, who was furious with Palmerston for his unjust, reckless and incorrect charge; but his reply was inconclusive, as he could only say that a large proportion of Lancashire mill-owners had _not_ sold their stocks of unsold cotton to foreigners for the sake of the high prices which the fibre commanded. Cobden returned to the charge a couple of days later in a speech which is a most extraordinary prospective plagiarism of the election address of any anti-waste Independent Liberal candidate in the year 1921, as may be judged from _Punch's_ summary:--

The present is the most extravagant government that ever existed in
peace time.

This is all Lord Palmerston's fault.

He is always interfering and getting up sensations.

If the Liberals do not disentangle themselves from this system they
will "rot out of existence."

The Tories keep Lord Palmerston in Office and have more confidence
in him than in their own chief.

He is puffed by a clever and noisy _claque_.

All the questions dear to Radicals and Dissenters have gone back
under his leadership.

This sort of thing must not go on next year.

[Sidenote: _Our Noble Selves_]

The honours of the debate, which did not enhance Cobden's reputation, rested with Palmerston, but apart from his extreme frankness in dealing with the Lancashire mill-owners, he owed his triumph to his unrivalled Parliamentary opportunism. The Governments of neutral states cannot play heroic _rôles_ in a great war. More scope is left to opposition leaders. Lord Derby distinguished himself by his liberality and energy in organizing relief measures, but the Lancashire working man was the most heroic figure in English public life from 1861 to 1865, though _Punch_ had only a glimmering of the truth. The note of complacent satisfaction over the tranquillity and prosperity of England as compared with the disturbed state of Europe is frequently sounded, and the Exhibition of 1862 is taken as the occasion to blow the national trumpet in "Our Noble Selves":--

All the world we invite to behold a grand sight
Of not only goods, chattels, and treasures,
But of law that's obeyed because mended or made
By men who bring forward good measures.
Let them come then, and see what a people are we,
Steady-going, not headlong and skittish.
What a world this of ours would be, O foreign Powers,
If all nations behaved like the British!

* * * * *

This is Liberty Hall; no restriction at all
On the freedom of speaking and writing;
The result is that, say any fool what he may,
Foolish language occasions no fighting.
'Tis the easiest job to disperse any mob,
Without being so much as pumped on
By a fire-engine hose, off the multitude goes,
Mind, Order reigns bloodless at Brompton.

This mood is, however, tempered by moments of self-criticism. The social millennium had not arrived when in 1862 a statue was erected in Bolton to its benefactor Crompton, the inventor of the spinning-mule, while his descendants were living in destitution:--

The spinning mule made Bolton. Samuel Crompton made the spinning
mule.... He died in 1827, at the age of 74, and now Bolton, whose
master-manufacturers cheated him living, honours him dead with a
statue.... But Samuel Crompton left more behind him than the great
invention and the memory of his wrongs and struggles. He begat sons
and daughters as well as invented mules. He died a pauper, and they
have fared as the children of those who die paupers are apt to
do.... One of his sons is living dependent on charity, as his
father died. Somebody bought him a suit of clothes that he might
make a decent appearance at the inauguration of his father's
statue. Besides this son, there are living some half a dozen
grandchildren, some dozen great-grandchildren, of the
inventor--all, with one exception, in poverty of the meanest, most
pinching kind. Not one of them, son, grandchildren, or
great-grandchildren, was invited to the inauguration of Samuel
Crompton's statue.

LONDON ARAB: "Please, sir, can't I have a shill'n's 'orth?]

A sum of £2,000 had been collected for the statue: a few weeks after its inauguration Lord Palmerston sent £50 to the surviving son. Assuredly there have been few more remarkable examples of asking for bread and being given a stone. And mill-owners were not the only masters whose methods exposed them to criticism. When in 1863 the engine-driver and fireman of a luggage train were fined 15s. each at the Oxford City Court for being found drunk and incapable on their engine, _Punch_ admits the moderation of the punishment, but asks his readers to ponder the story told by the delinquents, and put the saddle on the right horse:--

They declared in the presence of the Company's Officers and without
contradiction, that their day was fourteen hours, and that owing to
extra pressure, they had only had seventeen hours sleep the whole
of last week.... On whom should fall the blame and punishment? On
the men, outworn, and driven to stimulants as a substitute for
sleep or a support under exhaustion, or on the managers of the
Company, who thus overwork, or, in other words, underpay their
servants?

OVERWORKED POINTSMAN (puzzled): "Let's see! There's the 'scursion' were due at 4.45, and it ain't in; then, afore that were the 'mineral'--no! that must ha' been the 'goods,' or the 'cattle.' No! that were after--cattle's shunting now. Let's see. Fast train came through at--con-found!--and here comes 'the express' afore its time, and blest if I know which line she's on!]

The cartoon published nine years later, in 1872, showed that _Punch_ was still dissatisfied with the conditions of railway servants. _A propos_ of the railways, it is worth recording that in 1860 there were cheap excursions to Brighton and back for 3s. Also that in 1868 _Punch_ commits himself to the view that an increase in railway fares means less revenue--an interesting parallel to the recent controversy.

In 1865 the cattle plague led to a sharp rise in the price of meat; but the attempt to introduce and popularize cheap jerked (or charqued) beef from South America--sold at threepence a pound--was not successful, though _Punch_ appealed to the public to give it a fair chance in a set of verses with the refrain:--

Oh, the jerked beef of La Plata,
A platter give me of jerked beef.

"Progress at high prices," in _Punch's_ opinion, was dearly bought. When two demonstrations were held by working men at Worcester this summer to protest against the high price of meat which was attributed to a monopoly amongst the farmers and butchers, and a resolution was adopted to abstain from the consumption of meat for a certain time, _Punch_ saw in this move a tacit acknowledgment that the high price was owing to demand, and cordially endorsed the comments of _The Times_:--

There can be no doubt that the present high price of meat is mainly
to be traced to the fact that the consumption on the part of the
working classes has of late years enormously increased, owing to
their prosperous condition, good wages, and cheap bread. A general
resolution on their part to limit the consumption would soon bring
down the price.

[Sidenote: _Honest Fault-finding_]

The strike against the butchers was one in which the working classes might safely combine to turn out. "They will not injure themselves, nor hurt their wives and families: on the contrary, all the while the strike lasts they will be putting by money. The public will support instead of discouraging them." But it is impossible to take the commendation seriously in view of the last sentence; "whilst others, I trust, are endeavouring, by total abstinence from butchers' meat, to reduce the butchers to reason, I remain medicinally, of course, always 'A Beefeater.'" Much more effective, because untainted by irony, are the plain-spoken verses on the British workman as painted by his flatterers, his detractors and his candid friends:--

While Democrat orators praise him and puff him
As the land's bone and sinew, and Nature's own nob:
Aristocrat talkers calumniously cuff him,
As shiftless, and soulless, sot, spendthrift, and snob.

'Twixt the daub of his bully, the daub of his backer,
The true British Workman's been able to stand,
And at once to disclaim both the brighter and blacker,
As alike wide of truth, from the right and left hand.

The success of "Tom Brown" (Tom Hughes), who was elected for Lambeth in 1865, encouraged the enthusiastic friends of the British workman in the hope that he would now be painted without fear or favour, but Tom Brown's honest unvarnished portraiture was more than his sitter could stand:--

While a fact is a fact 'twill do no good to blink it,
Put up with the shadows Tom Brown dares to show,
Your face may be darker than you like to think it,
If the shadows ain't fast, wash, and let's see them go.

While your Union pickets still waylay and "ratten"
The knob-sticks, who work on their own honest hook,
While on your hard earnings strike-delegates batten,
And machines and machine-work are in your black book;

While men who earn more by the week than their curate
Are content in one room of a hovel to pig;
While shop-drinks and Saint Monday their old rate endure at,
And the wife and the young 'uns come after the swig;

While limb's rest and soul's light to your infants begrudging,
You drive them to workshop, to mine, loom or wheel,
To drag through long years of unnatural drudging
As though minds could die out, and yet bodies not feel;

While such are the shadows your features that darken,
Needs must that the blacks in your picture appear;
And they're no friends who bid you your own praises hearken,
When an honest fault-finder is craving your ear!

Later on, however, Tom Brown was himself taken to task for flattering the working man.

On the question of housing and sanitation _Punch_ refused to believe that landlords were altogether to blame. Social reformers and legislators found themselves up against stubborn facts, and none were more stubborn than the Briton's prejudices in favour of vested rights and a man's house being his own castle, wherein he is free to do what he likes with his own:--

These stubborn facts are, no doubt, at the bottom of much that is
worthy of respect in John Bull's character. They have not a little
to do with his Magna Charta and his Habeas Corpus. But they
occasionally stop the way all the same; obstruct the efforts of the
Local Board or Nuisance Removal Committee, crouch like lions in the
path of the Officer of Health, trip up the heels of the Inspector
of Nuisances, and crop out in back slums, by-lanes, and blind
alleys for district visitors and zealous clergymen to break their
shins over.

[Sidenote: _Village Sanitation in 1865_]

These remarks form the preface to a series of extracts from the verbatim report of a Visiting Committee appointed in 1865 to inspect a little seaside village. The name of the place is withheld, but _Punch_ pledges his word for the absolute veracity of the reporter, adding that what the Committee found in the way of stinks, putrid wells, foul accumulations, and purblind or pig-headed people was to be found in nineteen out of every twenty English villages, seaside or inland, rural or suburban. The houses in a sample street were occupied by an old gardener, a small pork butcher, three pilots, three sailors' wives, and two coast-guardsmen. The description of the well in the pork butcher's house is enough, in Dickens's phrase, to sicken a scavenger. But the complacent fatalism which marked all these householders rises to a pitch of sublimity in the immortal phrase of the first coast-guardsman:-

"Had the cholera in '44: ain't afeared of it. _Considers as it's a
natural went for the overplush of mankind._ When his time comes,
knows as he 'as got to go. Considers as his time wasn't come in
'44. Always keeps his house very clean: does all the scrubbing
himself, and paints his bedsteads and chests of drawers with red
lead and turps twice a year."

According to the local doctor, all the inhabitants of these houses were drinking water strongly impregnated with lead, but "they appear to like it so I can't help it, especially as the landlord refuses to alter the pumps." The first pilot considered that he had a right to drink his own sewage if he liked it. The second coast-guardsman "couldn't abear chloride of lime," and, in general, disinfectants were dreaded more than bad drains. An optimistic speaker on Social Science in October, 1859, had declared that the advance of education was certainly very marked. "Classes once illiterate now show a love of literature, the taste for which has even reached our cabmen, who in demeanour and civility are not the men they were." _Punch_ was sceptical about the cabman and printed an ironical poem on his progress modelled on "She wore a wreath of roses." The passages we have quoted show that six years later pork butchers, pilots and coast-guardsmen left a good deal to be desired in their knowledge of practical hygiene. But _Punch_ does not acquit the landlords or Government officials, and, though no lover of despotism abroad or at home, there were moments when he felt that a little more "paternal government" would not be a bad thing. As he put it a little later: "when _Mr. Punch_ is reminded of tanks, cisterns, bins and butts for miles along a tainted shore being overlooked by a mythical Inspector of Nuisances instead of being looked into, in his utter bewilderment he is tempted to exclaim, Wanted a Bismarck."

* * * * *

With the death of Palmerston the question of organic reform re-emerged, but the Russell administration, hampered by the disaffected Adullamite Liberals--brilliantly led by Lowe--and restrained by Whig caution, handled their Bill in a half-hearted spirit which courted defeat. Russell resigned at the end of June, 1866, and was succeeded by Lord Derby with Disraeli again as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is on record that Gladstone, shortly after Palmerston's death, agreed with Denison, the Speaker, that there was no strong feeling for reform in the country. Yet within a few months the diagnosis was completely falsified. Immediately after the fall of the Russell administration came the historic Hyde Park riots and a vigorous agitation throughout the country. "The artisans, who had seemed apathetic towards the franchise when it was dangled before them, became angry when it was refused." _Punch's_ account of the rioting and its sequel is liberal of censure, but cannot be regarded as either impartial or judicial or as appreciative of the significance of the episode:--

_Monday, July 23._--It did not seem to suit the Fates that our
friends the Conservatives should slide into the recess quite so
quietly as had been anticipated. Sir George Grey, the late Home
Secretary, had ordained that the proposed Reform Demonstration
should not be allowed to take place in Hyde Park, but his Ministry
went out in time to save him any further trouble in the matter. Mr.
Walpole had to vindicate the law, and his gentle soul has been a
good deal perturbed by events. One Beales insisted on holding the
meeting, and Sir Richard Mayne locked the Park Gates. The result
was inevitable. The artisan class attended in large numbers, and of
course behaved perfectly well; but, equally of course, the
processions were supplemented by a vast mass of Roughs, who behaved
perfectly ill. _Mr. Punch_ is unable to compliment the Reform
League, inasmuch as its acts tended to violate order, and its
"experiment of right" could have been tried with a hundred men
instead of with thousands. Nor can we compliment the authorities
who endeavoured to defend an untenable post, inasmuch as law could
have been asserted by the arrest of a few individuals. He does not
make a great noise about the breaking down of some railings, and
the destruction by some roughs of trees and shrubs, nor would he
put London in a state of siege because a good many windows have
been broken, but all this sort of thing is really the fault of one
Beales, who knew that a mob would follow the working man. Rough and
Bludgeon came largely into contact, to the discomfort of the
former, and the Beaks looked to the rest, Mr. Knox having
especially distinguished himself by firmness and moderation, coming
down sternly on ruffians and being lenient to mere fools.

But Mr. Walpole had to defend himself in the House, and also had to
see a Reform deputation, before whom he wept, and some of whom
managed to misunderstand him, or pretended to do so, whereby there
was another meeting summoned, as if with Government sanction, but
after explanations, in and out of the House, the idea was given up.
So ended the campaign, and _Mr. Punch_ is almost ashamed of the
fuss which has been made over an affair of broken heads, while two
great nations are mourning over slaughtered myriads.

WORKING MAN: "Look here, you vagabond! Right or wrong, we won't have your help."]

[Sidenote: "_One Beales_"]

"One Beales," as _Punch_ contemptuously describes him, was a political agitator, but of a very different type from the "delegate" as depicted in a previous page. He was an Etonian, a scholar of his college at Cambridge, a barrister of the Middle Temple, and a revising barrister for Middlesex, who died in the odour of legal sanctity as a County Court Judge. But as a member of the Emancipation Society in the Civil War, a member of Mill's Jamaica Committee in connexion with the case of General Eyre, and above all as President of the Reform League, and advocate of Manhood Suffrage and the right of public meeting, he had incurred _Punch's_ unremitting hostility. "Beales and his Bubbly-jocks" were constantly held up to ridicule. But they were very far from being ridiculous. The League served as a spear-head for the discontent aroused by the failure of Russell's Reform Bill, which it had cordially supported. The meeting in Trafalgar Square on July 2, 1866, had been prohibited, but Sir Richard Mayne, the first Commissioner of Police, withdrew the prohibition, and the meeting, attended by nearly 70,000 persons, passed off quietly. Beales is declared to have shown great courage and coolness on July 23. The meeting assembled near the gates of Hyde Park; the invasion of the Park and the pulling down of the railings occurred as the crowd were returning to Trafalgar Square, but the leaders were in no way responsible. The police were roughly handled and had to be reinforced by the Guards before the crowd was driven out; but an amicable arrangement was reached between Beales and Walpole next day as to the discontinuance of any further meetings except by arrangement with the government. The Reform League had done its work; its mission was virtually ended when Disraeli's Reform Bill passed in 1867 and it was formally dissolved in March, 1869, three days after Beales had resigned the presidency. No amount of belittling of Beales can disguise the fact that he and his League gave a great impetus to the Reform movement--the Lord Mayor of London actually presided over one of its meetings in the sacred precincts of the Guildhall--and forced on the introduction of the Bill of 1867. During its progress through Parliament another great meeting convened by the Reform League was held in Hyde Park in May, 1867. The Home Secretary issued a notice warning all persons against attending it, but was practically over-ruled by the Prime Minister, who announced that nothing would be done to hinder it. The meeting, attended by 200,000 people, passed off without any disturbance or untoward incident, and Walpole soon afterwards retired. As Walpole, in consequence of his Hyde Park associations, had become one of _Punch's_ regular butts, it is only fair to his memory to say that the story of his having broken down and wept before a deputation is denied by the D.N.B. _Punch's_ review of the episode quoted above is thoroughly typical of his temper in this period of transition; of his independence, his readiness to acknowledge the moderation and sanity of British working men, his anxiety to distinguish between them and the hooligan fringe; and at the same time of his distrust of their leaders and of any organization which in his view savoured of extremism. There were "bubbly-jocks" in Beales's following, but he was no bubbly-jock, as Wilkes was no Wilkesite, and in many ways though by different means was working towards the same end as _Punch_ himself. Beales had no gifts as a mob-orator. His real strength lay in his knowledge of the law; and it was on the legal ground that he worsted Lord Derby and Walpole. There are some who think that modern democracy was born on July 23, 1866. Be that as it may, the Hyde Park riot was a great landmark in our political history.

[Sidenote: _The Future of Coal_]

It is pleasant to turn from _Punch's_ not very happy handling of the Hyde Park incident to his wiser, if fanciful comment on the warnings of the philosophical alarmists who predicted the speedy exhaustion of our coal supplies, and asked What, then, would Posterity do for force and for fuel? _Punch_ suggests another conceivable fear to balance that of the coal pessimists. If our population continued to increase at the same rate, not only would the bowels of the land be consumed, but its entire face be covered up with towns and factories. For his part he feared neither the one nor the other event:--

If the coal ever runs out, something equivalent to it will
doubtless turn up, or else turn down. Somebody will discover a
cheap way to set the Thames on fire, or to draw below, and store,
atmospheric electricity. By a system of vertical elevation instead
of lateral extension, our architecture will be adapted to our area,
and our cities, no longer expanding, will continue to ascend. The
higher they rise the less will Posterity be troubled with any
amount of smoke which it may be unable to consume. The future of
England will then be as fresh as a daisy, still as familiar a
flower as ever.

The growth of industrialism was not to be dreaded if it was humanely and wisely controlled and directed. That is the moral which _Punch_ draws from the opening of the new docks at Barrow-in-Furness in September, 1867. The occasion was indeed "worth a crowd and a crow":--

A Barrow that has grown, one may say, from a barrow into a
coach-and-four in ten years! A Barrow that has swelled almost
within the memory of the youngest inhabitant from the quiet
coast-nest of some five score fishermen into the busy, bustling,
blazing, money-making, money-spending, roaring, tearing, swearing,
steaming, sweltering seat of twenty thousand iron workers, and the
crime and culture, the dirt and disease, the hard-working and
hard-drinking, the death and life, the money and misery they bring
along with them!! A Barrow out of which they are tipping 600,000
tons of iron every year!!! A Barrow big enough to hold a
Monster-Iron-Mining-and-Smelting Company, with two Dukes among its
directors, to say nothing of Lord knows who, in the way of Lords,
and Lord knows how many millionaires!!!!

The two Dukes--one of them, Devonshire, a Second Wrangler into the bargain--were both present, and also the first of living orators, Mr. Gladstone. But the person who interested _Mr. Punch_ most was the master-spirit of the great iron company, "one Schneider," and he is not slow to improve the occasion:--

He has hitherto been known to fame among public men chiefly as an
ex-M.P., turned out of his seat at Lancaster for gross and
shameless bribery. He has seen so much done by energy and money
that he probably thought the one as legitimate a lever into
Parliament as the other. But he has been punished for his mistake.
He has now an opportunity to repair it. His name is the same as
that of the President of the French Legislative Assembly, the
energetic, far-sighted M. Schneider, whom _Mr. Punch_ has already
honoured as the head and heart of the admirably-conducted firm
which has made the iron manufacturing district of Le Creusot, a
model as yet to be imitated among the great English industries of
the same kind....

And now for _Mr. Punch's_ proposition. Suppose M. Schneider were to
set himself in real earnest to wipe out the recollection of
Lancaster by the redemption of Barrow? What if he were to prove
himself the ditto of M. Schneider of Le Creusot, not in name only
but in deed, and to make Barrow-in-Furness the Creusot of England,
in morals, manners, civilization, education, domestic comfort and
culture, as well as in industry, energy and money-making? Here is a
work worthy of the noblest ambition, the most determined energy,
the highest intelligence, and certain of the richest reward--a
reward not to be gauged by dividends, it is true, but beyond the
measure of millions. Let there be two Schneiders known in the world
for their noble conception and perfect discharge of the duties of a
great captain of industry, and let one of them be an Englishman.

[Sidenote: _Reform Bill of 1867_]

Henry William Schneider, who started the Barrow Steel Works and was for many years one of the directors, died in 1887. His namesakes of Le Creusot still continue their dynasty. Early in 1870, the year of the Franco-Prussian war, _Punch_ again repeats his comparison of Le Creusot with the greatest and best managed English iron-works to the advantage of the former, on the basis of statistics which had not been contradicted by M. Rochefort or any other of M. Schneider's bitterest enemies.

Divergent contemporary opinions on the Reform Bill of 1867 found vent in a number of famous phrases. Disraeli, who had guided its passage through the House, claimed to have "educated his Party"; while Lord Cranborne (afterwards Lord Salisbury) described the measure as "a political betrayal which has no parallel in our annals." Lord Derby's contributions to political phrase-making were threefold. The Bill was a "great experiment," a "leap in the dark" (commemorated in one of _Punch's_ most-famous cartoons), and he had "dished the Whigs." Lowe's advice that we must now set to work "to educate our future masters" was the weightiest of all. In view of the compromises and manoeuvring by which the passage of the Bill was secured, there is good warrant for the verdict of later historians:--

Even in English politics few great changes have come about with
less evidence of principle or conviction on the part of those
mainly concerned in it, with more appearance of mere opportunism
and concession to the expediencies of the moment. It was difficult
to be enthusiastic over a Reform Bill framed by a ministerial party
which did not want reform, under pressure from an opposition which
did not want the Bill.[4]

[Footnote 4: _The Political History of England_, Vol. xii., by Sidney Low and Lloyd Sanders, p. 207.]

[Sidenote: _Working Men Candidates_]

_Punch_, whose attitude towards Disraeli on his return to power had turned from satirical distrust to reluctant admiration of his commanding ability, welcomed Reform, but his welcome was accompanied by grave misgivings as to the growing strength of the Trade Union movement, and throughout 1867 cartoons and comments in prose and verse abound in condemnation of the intimidation practised at Sheffield by trade union agents. The report of the Royal Commission appointed in January, 1867, proved the existence of terrorism, but exculpated forty-eight out of the sixty trade unions in Sheffield from complicity in outrage, and showed that it had been denounced by the principal trade union leaders. Picketing, even when "peaceful," had been pronounced illegal, and trade unions had no protection against embezzlement by their own officials on the ground that their rules were in restraint of trade. On the other hand Lord Elcho's Master and Servant Act had placed the workman on a level with his employer in regard to breaches of contract, and rendered the remedy mutual. It cannot be said that the successes of the trade unions in the legislative field were greeted with enthusiasm by _Punch_. Nor did he show much sympathy with the efforts to secure direct representation of Labour in Parliament. Mr. George Odger is congratulated on retiring from the contest at Chelsea at the end of 1868, in compliance with the decision of the arbitrators to whom he and his Committee referred the question whether it was better for the Liberal cause in Chelsea that he or Sir H. Hoare should quit the field. The arbitrators were Mr. James Stansfeld, Tom Hughes, and Mr. Peter Taylor. But when the chairman of Mr. Odger's Committee declared that "it was the old story over again, that working men acted with undue faith in those they considered they might trust," _Punch_ felt called upon to address "a serious word to working men." The arbitrators were all men of the most advanced Liberal principles, the highest character, and the strongest fellow feeling with working men. Their impartiality was above suspicion. So _Punch_ proceeds in his most magisterial vein:--

The fault of working men has been, not the putting "undue faith" in
friends of this kind, but the not putting faith enough in them; and
the tone in which the Chairman of Mr. Odger's Committee,
and--_Punch_ is sorry to see--Mr. Odger himself, comment on the
decision of Messrs. Stansfeld, Hughes and Taylor, confessing at the
same time that they are not informed of the grounds of it, is a
striking illustration of this fault. There is nothing so hard in
the practical education of working men as the teaching them to
prefer disagreeable truth to flattering falsehood, and not to turn
from the friends who have the pluck to tell them such truth to the
schemers who mislead them by such falsehood. It is this difficulty
which has wrecked more working men's movements, co-operative,
educational, self-helping, than any other--the difficulty of
getting working men to know their true friends from their sham
ones, and to trust the former, even when their vanity is fretted,
or their wish or whim of the moment thwarted, for any reason,
however weighty, or in any cause, however sacred.

If Mr. Odger, as _Punch_ averred, had marred the grace of his withdrawal by the manner of it, so _Punch_ marred his candour by asperity. Tom Hughes here decided against Mr. Odger. Little more than a year later he supported Mr. Odger as the "working-man candidate" for Southwark, and provoked a vehement protest from _Punch_ against the "mischievous nonsense" he had talked at an election meeting. This open letter begins with a handsome acknowledgment of the services of his old friend, the author of "the truest and manliest book extant on English public-school life"; and of his pluck and straightforwardness and recognition that men, "whether gentle or simple, are, on the whole, made of the same clay, pulled by the same strings, worthy of the same rights, and liable to the same duties"; of "his courage in telling necessary if unpalatable and unpopular truths." None the less "the working-man candidate" sticks in _Punch's_ gizzard.

He had no objection to working men standing for Parliament, but "they should be very careful in their choice of fighting-ground." At Maidstone, in 1870, "they chose it as badly as possible":--

It is true that Mr. Applegarth, the working man's candidate, retired
before the final struggle, finding--according to his own
statement--"that he was too late in the field to make headway
against the popular feeling in Sir John Lubbock's favour!" He had
better have said, "Finding that he had no business ever to have come
forward." What right, _Punch_ asks him, had he, or any man who
wishes to see the best wisdom of England in the House of Commons, in
the field which Sir John Lubbock had occupied in advance of him? All
working men who are worth their salt must admit that no claims that
could be set up on behalf of their order could stand a moment's
comparison with those of Sir John Lubbock on the support of the best
and broadest Liberalism. Let them choose constituencies where they
will have to fight pseudo-Liberalism and genuine Toryism, and
welcome. But in the name of their cause and ours, don't let them put
stumbling blocks in the Parliamentary path of such men as Sir John
Lubbock, or they will only do what they have more than once done
already--make way for the fox, while the lion and the bear are
worrying each other.

The underlying assumption that "the best and broadest Liberalism" sufficed for the needs of the working classes has long since gone by the board. Here at any rate _Punch_ failed to foresee the inevitable march in representation summed up in the three stages: Liberal, "Lib.-Lab.," Labour. There is, however, a considerable advance on the views expressed in his letter to Tom Hughes in his welcome to Messrs. Burt and Macdonald on their election in 1874:--

Earliest among the early birds, _Punch_ was glad to hail his
friends, Messrs. Burt and Macdonald, representatives of Underground
Britain, Members for the Mine, sample black diamonds, "picked
Wallsends." They have sought and found the fairest audience in the
world. _Punch_ will take his Davy that any light theirs can throw
on dark places will be gladly received; that all they have to say
to the purpose will be attentively--nay, respectfully--listened to,
and weighed as carefully as was ever corve at pit-bank. And really
these pioneers of the pick--hewers, we presume, of a way for other
Working-men Representatives, equally stout and worthy--are about
the only novelty, as far as _Punch_ can presage, of the new
Parliament, always except the Parliament itself, with its sudden
swap of sides and strangely altered balances of Power.

[Sidenote: _Truckling to the Working Classes_]

This friendly greeting, anticipating without misgiving the extension of Labour representation, must not blind us to the fact that throughout the period under review _Punch_ was gradually becoming more and more confirmed in his championship of the middle class as the backbone of the country, the real power of the nation. The appeal in support of the funds raised to support the children of Ernest Jones, the Chartist poet, who died in 1868, is generously worded. But Chartism was long extinct, and Jones, a man of good family, had quarrelled with most of the other leaders on his release from gaol in 1850, and his former colleagues had "freely denied both his disinterestedness and his sincerity." Landor had pronounced his verses noble, and _Punch_ appealed to both Conservatives and Liberals on the broad ground that a brave man had died poor.

The well-deserved rebuke administered to "van-demons," "persons whose only notion of enjoyment consists in getting drunk, and then howling songs and playing horns as they drive homeward from their drinking-bout," can be paralleled from the protests repeatedly uttered in 1920 against the char-à-banc nuisance with its attendant "bellowing and braying." But a much more combative note is struck in the verses on the tendency to kow-tow to the working man published in 1872, at a time when the rise in prices, especially in that of coal, and the hardships of the middle classes and the small income-tax payer coincided with unusual prosperity among the working classes and particularly amongst the miners:--

"WHY SHOULD THE POOR BE FLATTERED?"

_Hamlet_, Act v., Sc. 1.

"Why should the Poor be flattered?"
Art foolish, Hamlet, trow?
All else are torn and tattered,
None else are flattered now.

Your Clown, our race accusing,
Declared our wits astray:
We beat him at abusing
Ourselves. Behold our way!

Our Queen mis-spends her income,
Her Court's all fashion's slaves,
The Lords are feeble Ninkum-
Poops, and the Commons, knaves.

Our soldiers are no fighters,
Our sailors cannot sail,
Our bishops shame their mitres,
Our merchants cheat and fail.

* * * * *

Our architects are Vandals,
Unfit to rear a stone;
Our music-writers Handels
To no ears but their own.

Only the so-called Worker,
The Stalwart Son of Toil,
Never from that a shirker,
Never in brawl or broil.

That sober, saving Being,
The nation's "heart and core,"
Him we are all agreeing
To flatter--and much more.

* * * * *

"Why should the poor be flattered?"
You pause for a reply--
But, if our brains are battered,
Dear Hamlet, don't ask why.

When critics complained of the extravagance of the rich in their entertainments and house-decoration and found in the newspaper accounts of this luxury an explanation of industrial discontent and strikes for higher wages, _Punch_ did not hesitate to fall back on the disputable argument that the consumption of luxuries involved the profitable employment of those who produce them:--

Suppose, instead of flowers and dessert at £200, including peaches
at a guinea a-piece; suppose, instead of a house decorated by Mr.
Owen Jones, and a set of aluminium plate, millionaires were to
spend their money in founding schools and scholarships, for
instance, and in educating their poor relations' children, and
sending them to the Universities; even suppose they expended it in
almshouses, and Peabodying the destitute, the mechanical
working-classes would have far less cause to be satisfied with them
than they are now. It may be that there is a wiser and a better use
for riches than lavish expenditure on the productions of
market-gardening and decorative art; but the consumption, at any
rate, benefits producers, and enables employers in those lines of
business to pay the artisans and labourers the higher wages. So the
working-classes, at least, need not grumble.

The complaints of the income-tax payer, when it stood at 3d. or 4d., leave us cold, and envy rather than compassion is excited by the bitter cry of the consumer who had to pay 30s. or even 36s. a ton for coal or 1s. 3d. for meat. Otherwise there is an extraordinary similarity in the comments and protests which fill the pages of _Punch_ in the years 1871-1873 to those which have been so painfully familiar since November, 1918. The prosperity and extravagance of the miners is constantly referred to. They are accused of being overpaid and, in consequence, of not working steadily. The "vicious circle" is neatly summarized in a doggerel verse:--

Strikes follow strikes; the reason why,
High wages rendered prices high;
Then Working-Men for wages higher
Struck, and to still more pay aspire.
Such aspiration what will crown?
It is "Excelsior!" upside down.

When Lord Lyttelton, at a harvest festival at Hagley, compared the conduct of the agricultural labourers with the extravagance of the workmen in the Black Country, _Punch_, disavowing all criticism of the Black Country as dangerous, made bold to ask how it was possible for a Northern pitman to save his means:--

He has only a house found him, rent-free, all the coals he
requires, medical attendance and medicine when he or any member of
his family is ill, and, at the lowest, seven shillings a day. For
this miserable wage, and for these trumpery advantages, the artisan
of the pit is expected to do, actually, six hours' work daily. How,
thus crushed and starved, can he save anything? If a malignant
aristocrat suggests that many an educated gentleman manages on far
less, working, moreover, twice as hard, bringing up a family in the
right way, and even paying for life assurance, _Mr. Punch_ scorns
to argue with a bloated Dives, who would compare a white-handed
swell with Nature's nobleman, the hardy son of toil, and the real
strength and glory of the nation. Heave a coal at the head of the
insolent cynic.

[Sidenote: _Victims of the Income Tax_]

In 1873 the wages in some collieries had gone up to 10s. or 15s. a day:--

To be content with from 10s. to 15s. a day is to be satisfied with,
say, some £234 a year. If that is to be earned by mining here,
there can be no inducement for any skilled miner to betake himself
to gold or diamond diggings. He can live in clover, on enough to
satisfy all his wants, by raising black diamonds at home. For a
miner, an income of the above amount is a salary much more adequate
than £5,000 for a Law Officer of the Crown. The miner has no
appearances to keep up in a mine. He need not incur any expenses
but those which are necessary for his personal wants and pleasures,
including champagne and dog-fighting; which, the former luxury as
well as the latter amusement, he can manage to afford well enough
by a judicious economy above-ground, of lodgings, furniture, and
clothes.

Coals went up to 50s. a ton in London this year and the cry of the middle classes, of whom _Punch_ was now the great champion, was echoed with great fervour in an article on a speech by Sir William, then Mr. Vernon Harcourt:--