The end of the American war came in 1865. Of its magnitude and of the deeper issues involved; of the achievements of the heroes on either side Sherman and Grant and Farragut, Stonewall Jackson and Lee Punch showed himself strangely deficient in appreciation. The amende to Lincoln was handsome and complete, but it was not made until after the assassination of the greatest of Americans:
The toll of great or eminent men taken by 1865 was heavy, and memorial verses abound. Cobden, successively eulogized as a Free-Trader and attacked and even execrated as a Pacificist, died in the spring, and Lord Palmerston, the greatest of the Elder Statesmen, in the autumn. As we have often had occasion to notice in this chronicle, Punch had alternated between admiration of Palmerston's nerve and dislike of his Parliamentary opportunism. But no jarring note is struck in his eulogy; there is nothing elegiac in the cheerful dactyls after the model of Tom Moore in which he pays homage to Palmerston's wisdom, his courage, and his humour, and skates over the thin ice of his masterly inactivity in the cause of Reform:
General EyrePunch
At home the Fenian outbreak in
Ireland was spreading, but Punch refused to treat it as a serious menace, to judge from the burlesque list of its supporters published in the autumn. Much more space is devoted to the negro outbreak in Jamaica and the campaign against General Eyre, which affords a curious parallel to the Amritsar riots and the action of General Dyer. Eyre was much censured for his severity in suppressing the rising; the agitation to bring him to trial was kept up for three years by the Jamaica committee, of which J. S. Mill was a prominent member; but Punch defended Eyre throughout and heaped scorn on the "fanatics" and "noisy quacks" who thought so much of the blacks that they could not think of the whites. He admitted that the vengeance had been terrible; that a great slaughter had been made; but held that it had been justified by the needs of "a small white population, eight times outnumbered by the negroes, and suddenly confronted by the foulest horrors of savage warfare." The Grand Jury of Middlesex threw out the Bill in 1867, confirming the view already expressed by the Shropshire magistrates, but nevertheless Eyre was committed for trial a year later under the Colonial Governors' Act. Punch reprinted Eyre's speech in Court, and never swerved from the firm conviction that he had saved Jamaican society, white and black, by his promptness and resolution. He compared his long martyrdom with that of Warren Hastings, and predicted that Englishmen, who listen too much to noisy and gushing men, would in time make amends. The result was inconclusive, for while Eyre's career was ended by his recall, his legal expenses were paid by Government in 1872. He had undoubtedly saved the situation, but could not be acquitted of excessive severity.
The second of the three wars which consummated the aggrandisement of Prussia was brought to a speedy end in the summer of 1866 by the "twelve days" campaign which culminated in the defeat of Austria at Königgrätz (Sadowa). England, with Lord Russell as Premier, once more stood aloof, but English hostility to Prussia, and, above all, Bismarck already recognized as the most formidable power in Continental politics made itself widely felt. Punch expressed this general resentment in his comments on the rumour that the Queen was to visit Germany in the autumn. As a friend of Italy he could not disapprove of the arrangement by which Venetia was annexed to her dominions; as the unrelenting critic of Louis Napoleon he could not refrain from disparaging his attitude of neutrality tempered by a hope of "picking up the pieces." But England, though not embroiled in Continental disputes, was not without her own troubles. The Russell Cabinet had fallen over Reform, there had been riots in Hyde Park (of which we speak elsewhere), and before the Derby-Disraeli administration came in, the Liberals had been forced to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland in order to deal effectually with what Mr. Gladstone did not hesitate to describe as the wicked conspiracy of Fenianism. Punch's summary of the proceedings in Parliament on Saturday, February 18, and the historic session on Sunday, 19, when the Suspension Bill became law, is not without interest. J. S. Mill supported the Government; Bright's speech in the character of the candid friend was described by Gladstone as "containing what was in part untrue, in part open to question, and generally out of place," a strange inversion of their rôles in 1886. It is noteworthy that the demand for land legislation and the disestablishment of the Irish Church was heard in the debate, and that the trouble in Ireland was largely ascribed by the Government to the presence of Irish-Americans, released by the cessation of the American war, who had come to Ireland to promote Fenianism and were "regularly paid by somebody." They were "wanted," but to make a general capture of these miscreants it was necessary to dispense with the law which forbade arrest without warrant and imprisonment without appeal to the judges. There is a distressingly familiar ring about these arguments, and the reference to the fact that the Fenians had already begun to murder.