Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 4 of 4.—1892-1914

The Kiel Canal

The retirement of Mr. Peel from the Speakership afforded Punch a fitting opportunity for recognizing his great qualities in maintaining the dignity of his position, his "awesome mien and terrible voice" in administering rebukes, and for joining in the chorus of congratulation to the new Conductor of the Parliamentary Orchestra, Mr. Gully. As for the protest of Lord Curzon, Lord Wolmer and Mr. St. John Brodrick against the exclusion of peers from the House of Commons, Punch dealt faithfully with the movement in his comments on the "Pirate Peers." Better still is the cartoon in which a bathing woman addresses a little boy wearing a coronet, and battering with his toy spade at the door of a bathing-machine labelled House of Commons. "Come along, Master Selborne," she says, "and take your dip like a little nobleman." This incident of May, 1895, is hardly worth mentioning save as an example of self-protective insurance against future legislation aimed at the power of the Upper House. For years to come Punch's political preoccupations were almost exclusively with questions of Imperial policy and international relations. The opening of the Kiel Canal practically coincided with the return to power of Lord Salisbury, and is celebrated by Punch in the same number in which he ironically adapts Shakespeare's Coriolanus to illustrate the alliance of Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain. Punch's representative went out on the Tantallon Castle with Mr. Gladstone, and gives a lively account of the junketings on board and on shore, and the entertainment of sovereigns and local magnates. In more serious vein Punch editorially hails the canal as a "Path of Peace," banishing misgivings and remembrances of Denmark and France: —

Not war alone, but trade, will take the trackThat shuns the wild and stormy Skager-Rak;And may Brunsbüttel's now familiar nameBe little linked with Empire's big war-game;May battle-echoes in the Baltic cease;And the Canal be a new Path of Peace.

A couple of months later our friendly relations with Italy inspired a cartoon in which Britannia congratulates Italy, but advises her to be less visionary and more practical. Italy's finances were causing her trouble; otherwise the advice showed an inability to sound the springs of Italian policy. Punch's pacific dreams were dispelled in the autumn by the renewed troubles in Ashanti. Britannia, as he put it, expected more than an umbrella this time; King Coffee's umbrella had cost us £900,000 in 1874. Happily the expedition was well organized and its immediate purpose executed, though a further expedition became necessary in 1900. Far graver anxieties threatened us from Africa at the close of the year, and since Punch's criticisms of and comments on the successive phases of controversy and conflict betray a certain amount of variation and even inconsistency, it is as well to point out that the unfriendly tone he had shown towards "Joe" in previous years had largely abated upon Mr. Chamberlain's accession to office as Colonial Secretary. In the account of a dinner held in the late autumn of 1895 to celebrate the opening of railway communication between Natal and the Cape, Mr. Chamberlain's speech is extolled as "splendidly pitched, admirably phrased, and full of the Palmerstonian ring." Simultaneously in "The Imperial Federalists' Vade Mecum" Punch discourses on the difficulties, no longer insuperable, which attended on the translation into reality of that dream of Imperial Federation which had once been regarded as a nightmare.

Dr. Jameson's Popularity

The abortive Jameson Raid at the close of December, 1895, came as a bombshell; and Punch, in his "Tug of War" cartoon, shows the Uitlander trying to pull the British Lion into the Transvaal, while Mr. Chamberlain is pulling him back. Canning's well-known lines on "The Pilot that weathered the Storm" are rewritten in honour of Mr. Chamberlain's handling of the crisis. A few months earlier Punch had ridiculed the Kaiser for his arbitrary absolutism in sending to prison a private University teacher "for writing in praise of a certain kind of soap." The famous telegram to President Krüger was dealt with more audaciously in an apocryphal letter purporting to have been sent by the Queen to her grandson: —

Mein lieber Willy, – Dies ist aber über alle Berge. Solch eine confounded Impertinenz have ich nie gesehen. The fact of the matter is that Du ein furchtbarer Schwaggerer bist. Warum kannst Du nie ruhig bleiben, why can't you hold your blessed row? Musst Du deinen Finger in jeder Torte haben? Was it for this that I made you an Admiral meiner Flotte and allowed you to rig yourself out in einer wunderschönen Uniform mit einem gekokten Hut? If you meant mir any of your blooming cheek zu geben why did you make your grandmamma Colonel eines Deutschen Cavallerie Regiments? Du auch bist Colonel of a British Cavallerie Regiment, desto mehr die Schade, the more's the pity. Als Du ein ganz kleiner Bube warst have ich Dich oft tüchtig gespankt, and now that you've grown up you ought to be spanked too… Du weist nicht wo Du bist, you dunno where you are, and somebody must teach you. Is Bismarck quite well? Das ist ein kolossaler Kerl, nicht wahr? So lange. Don't be foolish any more.

Deine Dich liebende,

Grandmamma.

This was followed up by the picture of the Kaiser as "Fidgety Phil." But Punch was already alive to the widespread hostility to England which prevailed on the Continent, and did not shrink from suggesting that we were ready at need to take up the challenge. He admitted the popularity of "Dr. Jim," but irony underlies his dialogue between the dubious Londoner, who asks: —

"How will they treat this Doctor Jim,Who doesn't return a winner?" —

and the Hearty Citizen who replies: —

"There's only one way of treating him." —"And that is?" – "Give him a dinner."

Punch is ironically sympathetic, again, in his comment on the statement that "About 130 letters awaited Dr. Jameson … many of them containing offers of marriage." A few months later, however, Punch supported the demand for his release on account of ill-health. The cartoon based on Mr. Rhodes's resignation in May is headed, "The Pity of it." South Africa (as Othello) says to him: "Cassio, I love thee; but never more be officer of mine." Punch adds as his authority a statement in The Times: "Mr. Rhodes has no longer any power of assailing or menacing the Transvaal. The military authority in the Company's territory is in the hands of Sir Richard Martin. The administration is in the hands of Lord Grey." It was about the same time that Punch published a design for a statue of Krüger, in which the British Lion is shown in chains while Chamberlain kneels obsequiously to the President.

South Africa was not our only source of anxiety in 1896. Indeed, it may be said to have temporarily receded into the background as a storm centre. For our strained relations with the United States over the Venezuelan arbitration had been brought to a critical stage by President Cleveland's message. The conciliatory speeches of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour in January led Punch to represent them in the act of placating the American Eagle with caresses and sugar. He was better inspired in his open letter to Mr. W. D. Howells, the distinguished American writer, recognizing his generous and courageous efforts to create a better mutual understanding between the two countries. In particular he saluted the "Golden words" in which Mr. Howells criticized his own countrymen: —

Letter to Mr. Howells

"What I chiefly object to in our patriotic emotion, however, was not that it was so selfish but that it was so insensate, so stupid. It took no account of things infinitely more precious than national honour, such as humanity, civilization, and which must suffer in a conflict between peoples like the English and the Americans. For the sake of having our ships beat their ships, our poor fellows slaughter their poor fellows, we were all willing, for one detestable instant at least, to have the rising hopes of mankind dashed, and the sense of human brotherhood blunted in the hearts of the foremost people of the world."

'the long result of time'

But is there, as you say, "in the American heart a hatred of England, which glutted itself in her imagined disaster and disgrace when we all read the President's swaggering proclamation, in which he would not yield to the enemy so far as even to write good English"? Is there to be no forgiveness, are we never to cancel old scores and begin our international book-keeping, if I may so term it, on a clean page? I do not think our people hate yours. Your dash, your pluck, your humour, your keen common sense, your breezy and inexhaustible energy, your strength and broad capacity for government, all these qualities command and obtain from us a sincere tribute of admiration. If you hate us, we must submit to that melancholy condition, but never submit in such a fashion as to cease from honest effort to abate and in the end to remove all hatred. Blood, as one of your naval captains1 said on a memorable occasion, is thicker than water. So saying, he dashed in to the help of our sorely pressed ships. Let us then call a truce to petty and malignant carping, and join hands in an alliance dependent not upon written treaties, but upon the noble sympathy of two great nations engaged in the same work of civilization and progress. You, Sir, speaking for others, I trust, as well as for yourself, have set us an example.

Believe me, yours in all cordial friendship,

Punch.

It was in the same spirit that Punch welcomed a remark in the New York Morning Press: "After all the English people are our people, and we are theirs," and deprecated as suicidal any efforts to forsake a common heritage and rend asunder a family tree. The tension passed, thanks to diplomacy and arbitration, and towards the close of the year we find Punch welcoming Mr. McKinley on his election as President, the Shade of Washington (with a somewhat bulbous nose) congratulating Columbia: "'Sound Money' is the best policy." Meanwhile the expedition to Khartum had been decided on; the House of Commons, reassured by a confident speech from Mr. Chamberlain, having approved of the forward policy by a two to one vote, in spite of the misgivings of Mr. Morley, Sir William Harcourt and Sir Charles Dilke. Punch, mindful of 1884, registered his approval in the cartoon in which the Shade of Gordon in the desert utters the one word, "Remember!" Wars and rumours of wars did not distract Punch's attention from the peaceful rivalry of commerce. He was still much concerned by Germany's competition, which he typified in his cartoon of British Trade as the old woman whose petticoats were "cut all round about," while she was asleep, by a German pedlar. And the commercial significance of Li Hung Chang's visit is not overlooked in the generally farcical handling of that extremely astute Oriental. In the cartoon "China in the Bull Shop," rival Continental shopkeepers, who had got no orders out of him, are consumed with envy and curiosity. If Punch is to be believed, their envy was ill-founded. Li Hung Chang displayed a boundless inquisitiveness, but there was "nothing doing" in the way of business between him and his hosts. Punch drew mainly on his imagination for the events of the visit, and ascribed to Li Hung Chang a number of topical Chinese proverbs. The best of them – "Half an official welcome is better than an ill-bred mobbing" – refers to his arrival in the "dead" season.

Two Modern Hamlets

Lord Rosebery resigned the leadership of the Liberal Party in June. While still in office he had estranged the Radical stalwarts by his Imperialist foreign policy and his heretical view of the necessity of converting the "predominant partner," England, before attempting to revive Home Rule. His Government, as one of his colleagues put it, were condemned to the task of "ploughing the sands." In the intervening year the gulf that severed him from the stalwarts and the Nonconformist conscience had been widened by his refusal to join in Mr. Gladstone's Armenian crusade, and henceforth he decided to "plough a lonely furrow." In later years he made occasional dramatic interventions, but his official career, like that of his contemporary at Eton, Lord Randolph Churchill, closed before he was fifty.

Lord R-s-b-ry (in leading rôle):"The 'Party's' out of joint; – O, cursèd spite,That ever I was 'asked' to set it right!"Act i, scene 5, Mr. Punch's edition.

Our relations with the United States were bettered at the opening of 1897 by the signing of the Arbitration Treaty adjusting the Venezuelan question. In Europe events did not conduce to diminish our unpopularity. It was the year of the brief Greco-Turkish war, which revived old divisions of opinion at home. Punch was no lover of the Turk; he realized the difficulties of King George, whom he depicted as Hamlet at Athens, recognizing (like Lord Rosebery) that the "time was out of joint" and deploring "the cursed spite that he was ever born to set it right"; but he supported Lord Salisbury in severely rebuking the hundred M.P.'s who had sent the King a message of encouragement. The verses, modelled on Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," disparaged the message as mere gaseous talk, which did not mean business, and was bound to end in smoke. Criticism of the Kaiser becomes more animated than moderate; the frequent prosecutions for lèse-majesté, and the famous pamphlet, in which Professor Quidde of Munich ingeniously satirized the Kaiser's megalomania in an historical essay on the aberrations of Caligula, inspire a caustic open letter to Wilhelm II, the gist of which is that, though old enough to know better, he was still the victim of the capricious extravagance of youth: —

Formerly I imagined that throughout Germany, and from time to time in Russia, Austria, or in Italy, an imperial but soaringly human boy was lifting his glass and crying, "Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!" amid the clatter of swords and the admiring shouts of a profusely-decorated soldiery. Now I know that a stout gentleman is doing these things, and reducing his hearers to an abyss of melancholy at his dismal failure in dignity. A boy who played fantastic tricks with the telegraph-wires incurred but a mild censure. What shall be said of a middle-aged and pompous party whose pleasure it is to play practical jokes that set two nations by the ears?

The "Raid" and its Aftermath

Yours is a great inheritance, greatly won by heroic deeds. Your people are by nature the mildest and most loyal, and by tradition and education the most thoughtful, in Europe. But mild and loyal as they are their minds must rise in revolt against a sovereign who reproduces in the crudest form the stale theories of divine right and arbitrary government, whose one notion of administration is to increase his stupendous military forces by taxation while diminishing the number of his reasonable critics by imprisonment. You have travelled, cocked hat in hand, to capital after capital, you have dismissed Bismarck, you have made yourself into the tin god of a great monarchy, you have shouted, reviewed, toasted, speechified, you have donned a thousand different uniforms, you have dabbled in the drama, you have been assisted in the design of allegorical cartoons, you have composed hymns to Ægir, and Heaven knows how many others – and to-day the result of all your restless and misdirected energies is that you have added not only to your army but also to the foreign ill-wishers of your country and to her internal distractions. And at this moment, in spite of the millions of men and money that go to form her army, Germany is weaker than she has been at any moment since the Empire was proclaimed at Versailles. This feat, Sir, you have accomplished, and such credit as attaches to it is yours alone. Where and how do you propose to end?

In lighter vein but with equal disrespect Punch satirizes the instructions to Prince Henry on starting with the naval expedition to Kiao-Chow. In particular Punch dwells, not unfairly, on the Kaiser's insistence on the sanctity of his mission. It was to be a Holy war: —

To preach abroad in each distinct localityThe gospel of my hallowed personality.

Another was added to the long list of Indian Frontier wars in the Tirah campaign. Punch did well to recognize the loyalty of native officers, N.C.O.s and men, while saluting the achievements of the Gordon Highlanders in his verses to their Commander, Colonel Mathias. The men were "doing splendidly," but as Colonel Punch says in one cartoon, "Yes, they always do; but is this 'forward policy' worth all this?" And a similar misgiving is revealed in an article implying that so-called "peaceful missions" to barbarian kings were too often closely followed up by punitive expeditions. The "repercussions" of the Jameson Raid were not overlooked. Punch made merry over President Krüger's famous claim for "moral and intellectual damages"; but his criticisms are not confined to the Boers. The proceedings of the South African Committee of Inquiry prompted a parallel between Warren Hastings and Cecil Rhodes, in which the Indian proconsul remarks to the new Empire-builder: "I succeeded and was impeached; you fail – and are called as a witness."

Of the second or Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, the last great State pageant of her reign, one may say that it was more than a great act of veneration and loyalty; it was a celebration of Imperial expansion and solidarity which formed a reassuring interlude on the eve of events that were destined to test that solidarity to the utmost. For 1898 was the year of Fashoda, of the conflict over the "open door" in China, and of the Spanish-American war. I put Fashoda first, because the incident came perilously near embroiling us in war with France. It was not an isolated expression of French resentment, since the general attitude of British public opinion over the Dreyfus affair had greatly inflamed Anglophobia in France. Punch, like the majority of Englishmen, was strongly Dreyfusard. Early in the year he published his cartoon, based on Holman Hunt's picture, in which Zola figures as the "Dreyfus Scapegoat" – a reference to the famous "J'accuse" article – and a similar spirit is shown in the "Dreyfus Dictionary," in which strong hostility is shown to all the leading actors on the anti-Dreyfus side. On a large and sincerely patriotic section of the French public, exasperated by what they considered to be a gratuitous interference in a domestic affair, Punch's comments on the occupation of Fashoda in the Sudan by Colonel Marchand operated like vitriol on a raw wound. They certainly were not flattering to one, who if not a very discreet was a very gallant soldier. Beginning with a farcical burlesque of the stealthy invasion of the French, they go on from ridicule to contempt. "Marchez, Marchand," says John Bull to the Colonel, ironically congratulating him on having had a "nice little scientific trip." The last straw was the cartoon in which John Bull says: "Go away, go away," to a French organ-grinder with a little monkey in uniform perched on his instrument, which is labelled Fashoda. The organ-grinder says, "Eh? What you give me if I go?" and John Bull retorts: "I'll give you something if you don't." A "furious Gaul" broke Mr. Punch's windows, and now we can understand and forgive the retaliation. It may have been an added sting to say, as Punch did on the best authority, that Colonel Marchand had been really saved from the Dervishes by Kitchener's success at Omdurman. Anyhow, it was fortunate that Lord Kitchener, who had served with the French in 1870 in Chanzy's army, was in charge of the negotiations with Colonel Marchand on the spot. The French Government did not give way until six weeks had passed, during which Irish members had avowed their sympathy with France, and Punch addressed her with serious warnings and even bellicose threats. For the peaceful adjustment of what looked like a casus belli, we certainly owe more to Lord Kitchener than to Punch. The battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, was the culminating point of a carefully planned campaign which had lasted more than two years, and was duly celebrated in Punch's cartoon of the re-occupation of Khartum, with the statue of Gordon, avenged after thirteen years, in the background. Lord Kitchener lost no time in issuing his appeal for funds to erect the Gordon Memorial College in Khartum, to which Punch dedicated his cartoon of "Dreaming True." The agreement delimiting the respective spheres of England and France in North Africa was not signed till January 19, 1899, but Punch had foreshadowed the issue in his cartoon of John Bull as a "Fixture" in Egypt, his features replacing the battered countenance of the Sphinx.

It cannot be said that Punch was any more conciliatory to the United States over the Spanish-American war than he had been to France over Fashoda. He is sympathetic to the young King of Spain, shown as a small boy on the throne threatened by Bellona and Revolution. Both in prose and verse he is distinctly hostile to the U.S.A., ironically crediting them with no desire to annex Cuba, but talking almost in the same breath of "filibustering" and "spread-eagling." And when Cuba was acquired Punch professes to regard it as anything but an unmixed blessing. Spain is shown saying to Uncle Sam: "Well, you wanted him! You've got him! And I wish you joy of him!" – Cuba being represented as an ill-conditioned little coloured boy. Punch's reading of the Treaty of Peace was that Uncle Sam would agree to anything if Spain would take Cuba back; while in another cartoon European resentment of American intrusion into European politics is typified by a very "sniffy" Europa asking Uncle Sam if he is "any relation of the late Colonel Monroe." All this did not make for good blood, or the promotion of that friendly understanding applauded in Punch's letter to Mr. Howells, but it may be pleaded in extenuation that some of the sanest and wisest and noblest Americans were not at all happy about the Spanish war, and that Charles Eliot Norton openly denounced the mixture of hypocrisy and thoughtlessness with which his countrymen had plunged into it.

The "Open Door" in China

The conflicting commercial interests of various Powers in China are also the subject of a good deal of frank comment at the expense of Russia and Germany. In one cartoon the British Lion is shown with a barrow-load of goods denied entrance by the Bear at the "free port" of Talienwan. In another, the "Open Door" is reduced to a farce, being occupied by the Bear armed to the teeth and a German entrenched in tariffs. A third, entitled "The Sentinels," is based on the view that the occupation of Port Arthur left us no alternative but to occupy Wei-hai-wei in order to restore the equilibrium upset by Russia. The powerlessness of the young Emperor, who had proposed a scheme of reforms, is clearly indicated in the dialogue in which the "Son of Heaven" discusses his Aunt – the formidable Dowager-Empress. Punch had a friendly greeting for the young Queen of Holland on the attainment of her majority, referring to the House of Orange as a link with our Royal family; but for the most part wherever he saw a crowned head he hit it. The lèse-majesté campaign in Germany had led to the prosecution of Herr Trojan, the editor of the Kladderadatsch, to whom Punch offered his "Prosit," regretting that there was not also the companion offence of Humanitätsbeleidigung for which punishment could be awarded to "the Imperial buffoon." This was the year in which the young Tsar Nicholas put forward his proposal for general disarmament, but Punch's comments are very much on the lines of his satirical report of an imaginary meeting of the Nations summoned by the Arbitration League in 1894. Everybody was anxious to disarm so long as somebody else set the example. This scepticism now finds vent in the cartoon in which Peace suggests disarmament to Vulcan, understanding that the Tsar's proposal had already seriously interfered with his trade. Vulcan promptly undeceives her. He never was busier – and on orders for Russia.