John Bull used to laugh to scorn the idea of a Prussian Navy, and chuckled hugely when Punch christened it for him "The Fleet of the Future." But lo, "the wheel of Time has brought about his revenges," and the Fleet of the Future is the Fleet of the Present! Prussia has a fleet and no chaff! A respectable force of steam ironclads, backed by a serviceable knot of unarmoured sailing-frigates and corvettes, with a first-class naval arsenal and dockyard, on the Jahde, is a very different thing from the solitary "gunboat on the Spree," which we used to poke our fun at twenty years ago.PunchBritannia, through her Punch , rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade Prussian blue; and will be glad, in all fair quarrels, to hail it alongside the true blue of the British man-o'-war's-man.
"It has been imagined that the introduction of steam-power would render naval tactics of extreme importance in any future engagements, but when on one occasion the ships were ordered to go into action, it was found that a few minutes sufficed to envelope the whole fleet in so dense a cloud of smoke that signals were no longer visible, and all that any vessel could do was to fire as rapidly as possible into the darkness around her."Now, those Deutschers are confoundedly clever fellows; particularly at chemistry. Gun-cotton, which was discovered by one of them, is a substance they are at work on perfecting. No doubt they will soon make it available, so as to supersede powder, for naval gunnery. Gun-cotton goes off without smoke. In the happily almost impossible event of a war with them, our ships, enveloped in smoke of our own clumsy making, would blaze away at theirs in the dark, at random, with useless guns of precision, whilst they would fire with unerring aim at the flashes of our guns, and the end of our first sea-fight with them would be, that the British would be sent to the bottom by the German Fleet.
Death of Lord Derby
same month witnessed the passing away of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of Debate," a statesman somewhat out of his element in a period of non-intervention; a great country-gentleman, sportsman, and scholar. Punch , whose memorial verses in these years did not err as a rule on the side of brevity, compressed his tribute within the compass of a sonnet, in which there is a happy reference to Lord Derby's love of Homer and of children, for he was the patron of Edward Lear, the laureate of the best, because the most unalloyed, nonsense:
The fateful year of 1870 opened with the attempt to establish a "Liberal" Empire in France with Ollivier as Prime Minister, a concession which Punch hailed as a "Magna Charta for France"; almost simultaneously Lord Clarendon, our Foreign Minister, with Gladstone's cordial approval, launched his suggestion of a partial simultaneous disarmament, a proposal rendered futile by the attitude of Bismarck. Lord Clarendon died on June 27, and his successor, Lord Granville, was informed by the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office that he "had never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs." Yet war had already been declared by France when Punch , on July 23, issued his somewhat cynical manifesto of neutrality under the heading: "Prussian Pot and French Kettle":
In this unhappy event of a war between France and Prussia, we shall of course do all we can to preserve the most perfect neutrality. We certainly feel it. Our sympathies with the one side and the other are, strong as they are, exactly equal.As regards the Prussians we take a warmly admiring interest in the course of aggrandisement which their King and his Bismarck have been pursuing of late years, but most chiefly do we applaud its first step the attack on Denmark, and the forcible annexation therefrom of the two Duchies. The immense number of Danes slain by the Prussian needle-guns commands our approbation only less than our wonder; but what crowns the sentiments with which we regard the spoliation and destruction of the Danes is the piety wherewith the author of those achievements solemnly expressed his thankfulness for having been permitted to accomplish them. One brother once knelt with Mrs. Fry in Newgate. The other might have knelt with Mrs. Cole.
On the other hand, with respect to France, we cannot but feel how much we owe to the French Imperial Government for the improvement which, by the menacing armaments it has kept up now for so many years, it has occasioned us to make in our national defences. But we have higher reasons for sympathy with France than considerations which are merely insular and selfish. The great principles of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality have been professed by France more enthusiastically and more loudly than by any other European nation; and we behold their standing reduction to practice in the occupation of Rome, and the declaration that the chief of Italian cities shall never belong to Italy.
The foregoing reasons should satisfy any Prussian and any Frenchman of the perfect impartiality with which Englishmen must contemplate hostilities between their respective nations.