Dr. Punch: "My dear young friends, you have done next to nothing this half. Therefore, a little task during the vacation will be good for you. You, Master Benjamin, must get up a 'definite policy.' You, Lowe, will write a paper on the 'Application of the Screw .' Ayrton, you will have to get by heart the whole 'Book of Etiquette.' Miall, you must attend Church regularly. Whalley, you're going to America stay there! Plimsoll, you must learn to ahem moderate your transports . And as for you, William Ewart, the idler you are the better!"
England 2,000 Years Hencerégime Vanitas Vanitatum
THE ROAD TO REFORM
régimeThe Reform Bill of 1867, the chief constructive achievement of Disraeli's first Premiership, was a great advance on that of 1832, but the boon was robbed of much of its grace by the party strategy which was summed up in Lord Derby's famous phrase about "dishing the Whigs." Meanwhile Ireland had been forced into prominence by the outbreak of Fenianism, the Liberals had been reunited under Gladstone by his Irish Church policy and on his accession to power in 1868, we enter on the golden age of Gladstonian finance, with a low income tax it dropped to 3d. in the year 1873 high wages and industrial prosperity.
Labour and Intervention
One of the deputation, Mr. Cremer, a joiner, after Pam had given the deputation the requisite sympathetic and evasive answer, jovially observed, in plain English:Punch's"We are men of action, my Lord, and have come to the conclusion that the only way to aid the Poles is to call on Russia to desist from her present conduct, and if she will not attend to that call, thrash her into compliance."
If the honest working men were so thoroughly well represented as to command a majority in the House of Commons, they would not, of course, want to thrash foreign powers into compliance with their demands, and tax others to pay the expense of their own war. Would they subject their wages, one and all, to Schedule D, then, in order to thrash Russia into liberating Poland? If so, they are fine fellows. If not, the parts performed by the handicraftsmen who joined in the deputation to Lord Palmerston are about on a par with those of Quince, the carpenter; Snug, the joiner; Bottom, the weaver; Flute, the bellows mender; Snout, the tinker; and Starveling, the tailor, in A Midsummer Night's Dream ; our British carpenters, joiners, and other working men partake in a very delusive dream in the expectation that England is going to fight for the Poles. The income-tax makes cowards of us all, except the working men who do not pay it.
of the abuses and evils at which Punch had tilted so vigorously had been removed and remedied. The Corn Laws had been repealed; the Factory Acts had improved the conditions of labour. Obsolete and barbarous laws had been removed from the Statute Book. The Game Laws had been modified, and the administration of justice was marked by a humaner spirit. The principle that property had its duties as well as its rights was being steadily enforced, and, at the close of the period under review, class privilege was curtailed by the institution of open competition in the Civil Service and the abolition of purchase in the Army.
This brief and imperfect list may help to explain the conversion of Punch , the strenuous and impassioned advocate of the masses during the 'forties and 'fifties into the champion of the middle classes, and the very candid friend of the working man and Trade Unions as revealed in the later 'sixties and early 'seventies.
The Gang SystemPunch's Punch Punch
The incubus of Sabbatarianism, so far as it affected farmers and labourers, was at any rate much lightened in these years. But a far more serious evil was the gang system, under which a gang, chiefly of children, some as young as five, but mostly boys and girls under fourteen, were hired by a gang-master, who made as much as he could by taking them about the country and letting out their labour to farmers. It was not until 1867 that the good Lord Shaftesbury carried the Agricultural Gangs Act by the provisions of which no child under eight might be employed in an agricultural gang, and girls were placed under the protection of a licensed female gang-master. It was a modest instalment of reform, long since extended by our Elementary Education Acts; it is to the credit of Punch that he hailed it as placing a check on "a system so abominable that nothing but the intensest hypocrisy can call this a Christian nation while it exists." Against those who deliberately perpetuated ignorance by enslaving the young he carried on a truceless war. He was slower to condemn the ignorance of rural superstition when it could be paralleled by the credulity of the educated, and his observations on the sentence passed on a Devonshire shoemaker may be taken to heart fifty years later: