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.
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.Punch
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.Truckling to the Working Classes
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.