dominated the scene during the latter half of the Beaconsfield administration. As early as 1876 Punch had dealt faithfully with the plea advanced on behalf of political prisoners in the following caustic argument:
Killing is no murder if complicated with treason. That renders it a mere misdemeanour. A military offence, simply capital, becomes a minor offence when treasonable besides. Treason is an extenuating circumstance of mutiny and murder, and its commission in committing those crimes reduces murderers and mutineers to political offenders. Therefore, instead of being hanged or shot, they ought, if punished at all, and not, on the contrary, rewarded, to be condemned to nothing worse than temporary seclusion, and should, all of them, after a merely nominal imprisonment, be respectfully released.reductio ad absurdum Punch Punch PunchObstruction and the Remedy
Four Chairmen Raikes, Childers, Sir H. Selwin-Ibbetson, and W. H. Smith were used up in the night-watches, and the House was kept, by relays, against the "Dauntless Three" for Gray, Callan, Nolan and Kirk are but recruits to the banner of Biggar, Parnell and O'Donnell, the standard-bearers of Obstruction. All pretence of argument was early abandoned; and it became a mere contest of endurance, varied by episodes of more or less generally less lively squabbling and chaff if such a word may be used of anything that passes in the august Temple of Legislation. All this while the new Standing Orders seemed, by tacit consent, set aside; and Parnell, Biggar and O'Donnell moved the Chairman out of the Chair, or report of progress, again and again. And yet the Leader of the House had the rod of suspension in his hand, though he forbore to use it, preferring the reductio ad absurdum of such a night's match between the toughness of the House and the tenacity of its Obstructives. Once only he went so far as to threaten more summary proceedings, on which, they say, O'Donnell collapsed. Of course, the great O denies it.But why, Punch must again ask, allow debates to be degraded to a farce, and the House to a bear-garden? Go to his Cartoon, ye squeamish, and be wise. With the rod in the Speaker's hands, it is not the Obstructives' words that Punch would have taken down. The House sat from four o'clock on Tuesday till six on Wednesday.
announcement of Mr. Gladstone's visit to Ireland later on in the year prompted a burlesque account of what his omniscience and omnivorous thirst for information would enable him to achieve. Nor could Punch be moved to treat seriously O'Donovan Rossa's threat to introduce osmic acid a forerunner of tear-shells into the House of Commons. But it was beginning to be difficult to joke about Ireland, and there was grim point in Keene's picture of the native reassuring the English angler who hadn't a licence for salmon: "Sure ye might kill a man or two about here an' nobody'd say a word t'ye."
Saxon Angler: "Oh, but I can't try for a salmon, I haven't got a licence."
Native: "Is it a licence ye want to kill a fish? Sure ye might kill a man or two about here an' nobody'd say a word t'ye."
The death of Isaac Butt in the spring of 1879 marked the final close of the moderate stage of Parliamentary agitation; the reins of leadership had already passed into the hands of a bolder, more masterful and uncompromising chief the "uncrowned King," as he was called, till the days of Committee Room 15. Moreover, discontent was aggravated by genuine distress in the South and West of Ireland, and here, unfortunately, benevolence was hampered by party politics, for the violent speeches made by Parnell in America at the close of 1879 were not exactly designed to assist the Duchess of Marlborough's Relief Fund. According to Punch , however, in his comments on "Irish Obstructives to Irish Aid," these speeches failed to influence the American public:
The Zulu Warcould
Ireland was only one of many embarrassments to the Beaconsfield administration in its closing years. Early in that year Punch published a cartoon on "Bull and his burdens" John Bull as a patient ox carrying Russia; the Ameer; the Turk; a Glasgow Bank Director (commemorating a recent discreditable financial disaster); a striker; and last of all a Zulu jumping on behind. For this was the year of the unhappy Zulu war, which Punch described as "one of the costliest blunders of modern times" it cost ten millions and again as "alike unnecessary, costly, and disastrous." He saw in Isandhlwana not merely a tragedy but a lesson, and enforced it in a cartoon showing a Zulu warrior writing on a slate, "Despise not your enemy." The accompanying verses, while deprecating rashness, assert that the dead must be honoured and avenged. The heroes of Rorke's Drift, Chard and Bromhead, are duly acclaimed, but Punch , true to an old and honourable tradition, prints a letter on behalf of the non-combatant officers who gallantly took part in the defence. As the only rampart which they had was made of meal-bags, Punch ingeniously applies to them the phrase, "Couvert de gloire et de farine ," which Voltaire had used of Frederick the Great, who spent his first battle sheltering in a mill behind sacks of flour. Cetewayo, the Zulu chieftain, was subsequently captured, brought to London and lionized, Punch observing that "the great Farini [the impresario who introduced Zazel, the acrobat who was shot from a cannon] suggests that he should be exhibited at the Aquarium."