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

Old Age Pensions are shown in 1908 as having already become a millstone round the neck of the Government; and in that form Mr. Asquith is seen tying them to the person of Mr. Lloyd George as a presentation to be worn by all Chancellors of the Exchequer in perpetuity. "Several of our contemporaries," Punch observes, "are devoting their columns to an explanation of the best way to obtain an Old Age Pension. Mr. Punch's advice is: Don't save."

Mr. Asquith: "He wouldn't have stood this kind of thing. I wonder whether I ought."

On the much-vexed question of Chinese Labour, Punch sided against its critics, and his cartoons in 1906 represent Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman forcing unwelcome freedom on the Chinese coolie. Ignorance of Imperial questions on the part of the Labour Party is a frequent theme of comment. In the same year we find an article describing an imaginary tour in the Colonies by Mr. Keir Hardie and Mr. Philip Snowden. Mr. Keir Hardie spent two months in India in 1907, and the reports of his speeches, which he declared to be gross exaggerations and fabrications, led to vehement protests in the British Press. His biographer states that "for a full fortnight Keir Hardie was the most violently detested man throughout the English-speaking world. Even Punch joined in the vituperation with a cartoon by Linley Sambourne, which showed Britannia gripping the agitator by the scruff of the neck and apostrophizing him: 'Here, you'd better come home. We know all about you there, and you'll do less harm.'" Punch's adverse comments were not merely pictorial, and though Mr. Keir Hardie laid himself open to criticism by his angularity, his vanity and such remarks as "India to-day is governed by a huge military oligarchy," his courage and sincerity passed unrecognized.

Strikes and trade depression furnish themes for comment in 1908. In one cartoon Trade is shown as a lean and ill-favoured goose that has lost confidence in herself; in another, an engineer going back to work after seven months' stoppage, meets a cotton-spinning girl just coming out, and is credited with the admission that his action has done no good to himself or anyone else.

In 1909-1910 the conflict between Lords and Commons over the Budget proposals overshadowed all other home issues. It even became a subject of debate at preparatory schools, and Punch quotes a bonâ fide letter from a boy of nine: "We had two debates yesterday about the Budget being rejected. I was against the Budget, but the ones who were for it won, because just about half the ones who were against it had to go away for their prayers." Mr. Lloyd George was now the champion and hero of the democracy, for this was the year of the famous Limehouse speech and its sequel at Newcastle, where he referred to the House of Lords as "500 ordinary men, chosen accidentally from the unemployed." Dukes were handled almost as roughly as by Punch in the 'forties, and "robber-barons" were held up to obloquy. Punch resented this wholesale vituperation, and indulged in some effective reprisals in his criticism of trade union indiscipline, notably the growing tendency towards unofficial and lightning strikes. Thus, in 1910, he published a cartoon showing a trade union official lying prostrate in the road, overthrown and left behind by a crowd marching under a banner inscribed "Down with Authority." The comments on the payment of Members in the same year imply that trade unions were hostile to a change which impaired their control. The State might pay M.P.s, but the trade unions must call the tune. Nor was Punch favourably impressed by the Government's scheme of Insurance against Unemployment, which, in his forecast, would only encourage the existing reluctance to work.

Claims for "Recognition"

Throughout 1911 and 1912 the claims of the new Trade Unionism met with little sympathy. "Look here, my friend," says John Bull of the "New Volunteer Police" to a Trade Union leader: "I've been hearing a good deal of talk of 'recognition.' Well, I represent the public, and it's about time my interests were 'recognized.'" A month later, in October, 1911, an "imported agitator" is shown talking to his comrade as they watch the President of the Board of Trade (Mr. Sydney Buxton) nailing up a notice of the new Government Conciliation Scheme, with Sir George Askwith as chairman of the Industrial Council. "Don't be down-hearted," he observes. "Let's hope we shall be able to make as much trouble as before." This was apportioning the responsibility for failure in advance; but unfortunately failure there was. Punch's frontispiece to 1912 is the "tug of war" of Labour and Capital. The coal crisis was again acute in February, but in its opening stages Punch's hostility was chiefly displayed against the coal merchant, who was against strikes, but the more they were threatened the better it suited his book. Punch derived a certain malicious satisfaction from the spectacle of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald's exclusion from the coal conference; but recognized that the final arbiter was not this or that leader or statesman but Famine. The thorny question of "blackleg" labour having again emerged, Punch asserted the right of the community in no uncertain terms. John Bull declares that he can't make the striker work, if he won't; but if others want to, he can and will make the striker let them. This strike introduced a new figure into Punch's portrait gallery; "Prince Petroleo" being introduced for the first time as a possible "second string" and rival of the hitherto indispensable King Coal. But such light-hearted treatment is henceforth rarely found in the treatment of industrial troubles. By the summer John Bull is seen on the edge of the crater of Labour unrest, listening vainly for any reassuring voices from its depths. The methods of the Trade Unionist are contrasted with those of Justice: he is all for striking first and arguing afterwards. The threat of a general strike was heard in June, but Punch remained sceptical as to the response. Agitators might call spirits from the vasty deep; but there would be no answer. In 1913 Dublin, for the first time in its long and chequered career, became the chief focus of industrial unrest in the British Isles, for this was the year of the strike of the Dublin transport workers, and the emergence, in the person of the notorious Jim Larkin, of a super-agitator of the most strenuous type. Strange things were done in the name of Liberty Hall – his headquarters – Mr. Birrell's absenteeism having become chronic, not to say conspicuous. Larkin was arrested and imprisoned, but released with a rapidity which reduced the penalty to a farce; and the assaults on the Dublin police during the strike riots in the winter were sufficiently severe to excuse Mr. Punch for calling their assailants the "be-labouring classes."

Labour Members in Transition

Mr. John Burns's political evolution, since the days when Punch savagely attacked him at the time of the Trafalgar Square riots in 1884, had long removed him from the range of attack on the score of his revolutionary views. His former associates regarded him as a renegade; independent observers found in him an energetic and arbitrary bureaucrat. Punch appreciated his manliness, but could not resist having an occasional dig at his complacent egotism, and when the Cabinet was reconstructed early in 1914, there is a picture of him praising the four new appointments as "excellent choices – with perhaps the exception of Samuel, Hobhouse and Masterman" – in other words, all but his own.

Towards Labour members of the House of Commons, Punch, as we have seen, had of recent years been none too friendly: least of all to Mr. Keir Hardie. But on the occasion of the debate in the House over the resignations at the Curragh in March, 1914, Punch's Parliamentary representative credits them with intervening effectually as representatives of the vast social and political weight behind them. In particular he praises Mr. John Ward and Mr. J. H. Thomas for their warning against militarism. "General Gough may feel keenly the Ulster situation. Tommy Atkins will feel not less keenly the industrial situation." For Mr. Thomas went on to point out that in the following November four hundred thousand railwaymen would come to grips with their employers, and if they did not attain satisfactory terms they might simultaneously strike. And if the Opposition doctrine in regard to Ulster were sound, added Mr. Thomas, "it will be my duty to tell the railwaymen to prepare for the worst by organizing their forces, the half-million capital possessed by the Union to be used to provide arms and ammunition for them." Mr. Thomas still occasionally utters blood-curdling warnings, but is now the special bête noire, to put it mildly, of the Labour extremists. General Gough's views on Ulster and Ireland have undergone considerable modifications, and Mr. John Ward, who denounced military juntas, is Colonel John Ward, D.S.O., the gallant soldier, fearlessly candid friend of Labour and uncompromising foe of Bolshevism.

The Rector: "Now, Molly, would you rather be beautiful or good?"

Molly: "I'd rather be beautiful and repent."

Uncle George: "What! Hate all your lessons? Come, now, you don't mean to say you hate history?"

Niece: "Yes, I do. To tell you the truth, Uncle, I don't care a bit what anybody ever did."

Miss Smith: "Now, Madge, tell me, which would you rather be – pretty or good?"

Madge (promptly): "I would rather be pretty, Miss Smith; I can easily be good whenever I like to try."

EDUCATION AND THE CHURCHES

The passing of the old order in Education had for its chief landmark the Act of 1871, but the change admits of endless illustrations. Many of these lie outside the scope of our survey; but no treatise on the Modern Child would be complete which did not take account of Punch's contributions to this engrossing problem. To take one example, the precocious representatives of the "younger generation" in Leech's pictures are almost invariably shown as the "sedulous apes" of their elders as men of the world. In the period under review in this volume imitation gives place to independence. The precocious child of both sexes – Leech's precocious children were almost without exception boys – is sometimes pedantic, but the distinctive note is one of scepticism and revolt. The young iconoclast has "found out all about Santa Claus and is now going to look into this Robinson Crusoe business." When the Rector asks Molly would she rather be beautiful or good, Molly audaciously replies: "I'd rather be beautiful and repent." Another version of the same retort is illustrated in Mr. Shepperson's charming picture. And when Uncle George, shocked by his little niece's declaration that she hated all her lessons, asks appealingly, "Come, now, you don't mean to say you hate history?" he receives the blunt answer: "Yes, I do. To tell you the truth, Uncle, I don't care a bit what anybody ever did." In this magnificent declaration of independence Punch sought to reduce to an absurdity the new doctrine of "self-expression" as adopted by the nursery. Punch's love of children was beyond question, but he remained in substantial accord with the Greek sage who said that the roots of education were bitter but the fruit sweet; that to avoid or evade the discipline of parents and teachers was to forgo learning and virtue. The modern and already fashionable inversion of the old method, by which education was to be "brightened" and sweetened at the outset, and every study turned into a game, seemed to Punch subversive of what was not merely an old but an inevitable order, and the new science of psychological "Pædology" found in him an invariably hostile critic. Passing over a burlesque article on the "Scientific Investigation of Infancy" based on a paper in the Fortnightly in 1895, I may note the first of his rejoinders to those austere educationists who have made war on Wonderland. In that year Mr. Holman, an inspector of schools, in an address delivered before the College of Preceptors, declared that "the race has outgrown fairy-tales, and to use them for early education is practically to bring about a reversion to type. They express the ideas of a profoundly ignorant primitive man. The hero has more often than not to lie, steal and cheat and to be an ingrate to accomplish his ends." A mass meeting of fairy-tale heroes and heroines, convoked by Punch, carried by acclamation a resolution of protest against this heresy, which, by the way, has of late years been espoused by the redoubtable Madame Montessori. Punch carried the war into the enemy's camp in a revised version of Cinderella, rewritten so as to combine instruction with amusement, and based on the latest scientific, ethnological, and psychological discoveries and theories; while in "New Lamps for Old" he retold other nursery tales so as to meet the supposed requirements of the modern child. I am afraid it must be taken as a confession of the failure of his efforts that in 1911 Punch described an "advanced child" replying to his grandmother's offer to tell him a story, "Oh, no, Granny, not a story, please! They're so stodgy and unconvincing and as out-of-date as tunes in music. We should much prefer an impressionist word-picture or a subtle character-sketch."

Mrs. H.: "No, certainly not."

Tommy: "I'm so glad you're candid about it. There's such a pose among grown-ups nowadays to pretend they do."

The War on Wonderland

The attempt to teach gardening at certain schools in the 'nineties was "guyed" in the account of a disastrous imaginary experiment – the encouragement of Small Holdings for Small Boys at a fashionable Preparatory School. Here Punch is irresponsible and reactionary; but there is point in his criticism of the new-fangled cult of "nature study," on the ground that even playtime was now made a burden and toil for children by object lessons. In the same year (1900) the doctrine of self-expression was proclaimed in strident tones by Mr. Bernard Shaw in a lecture to the members of the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain. "Any grown-up person," said the prophet, "guilty of the crime of trying to form the character of children ought to be drowned. If there is to be any progress at all, it must be recognized that the children know better than their teachers." This was almost beyond the reach of comment or parody, but Punch did his best. Cranks, whether official or unofficial, he treated with impartial disrespect, and shortly before falling upon Mr. Shaw he had gibbeted a school inspector who had been alleged in his report to have penned this immortal sentence: —

The lower babies' mental arithmetic leaves much to be desired.

In the verses on "Spoilt Parents" in 1901 Punch expresses an obviously ironical approval of filial insubordination as encouraged in America, and a year later took for his text a passage quoted from an essay written by an Australian girl of thirteen, in which she had referred to "The Lady of Shalott" as "a fairy tale I remember in my childhood." In 1903 the activities of the "Pædologist" furnished Punch with abundant material. He celebrates, again with ironical applause, the expulsion of Euclid; he refers to an American lady who, in discussing suitable literature for children, had found a "moral squint" in Jack and the Beanstalk and Bluebeard; and he founds an excellent set of verses on an article in the Contemporary by Dr. Woods Hutchinson. The child, according to this eminent writer, passes through all the stages of evolution; "he is born not an Anglo-Saxon, but a Cave-dweller," and Punch proceeds to expound the "recapitulation theory" as follows: —

When Edward, crawling on the floor,Invades the eight-day clock,Pray do not spank him any moreFor dirtying his frock.He is a little troglodyte,As were our sires before us,Who vanished when there hove in sightThe grim ichthyosaurus.When, ætat. four, with savage joyThe hunter's art he pliesUpon the panes, don't scold the boyFor torturing the flies.He has but reached the second sceneWhen men were all the scionsOf mighty Nimrod, and were keenOn slaying bears and lions.At six, ambitious Edward yearnsA pirate king to be;The tables into ships he turns,And sails the fireside sea.Then if the things are smashed to bits,Don't give the boy a licking;He's reached a further phase, and itsThe æon of the Viking.A little, and the pirate boldA patriot becomes;He fights the rascal imps who holdIn force the neighbouring slums.Pray don't repress his noble rage,E'en though his nose be gory;He is but passing through the ageOf good Queen Bess's glory.Last scene of all that ends this slightBut most eventful playIs symbol of the lofty heightAchieved by man to-day.At ten can Edward understandWhat money means: he's willingTo be a saint for sixpence, andAn angel for a shilling.

Evolution and Self-Expression

As a rule, the most clamorous apostles of the new doctrines hailed from the New World. In 1904 Mr. G. Archibald, a "Child Specialist" of Montreal, gave utterance to the now familiar view that "Whenever you say 'Don't' to a child you crush the creative instinct within him which is the richest and most precious thing he has." Punch, it is hardly necessary to remind the reader, was not likely to subscribe to this view. Had not the Daily Telegraph referred to his advice to those about to marry —Don't– as "the memorable monosyllabic monition of the Democritus of Fleet Street"? So we are not surprised to find him enlarging ironically on the precept of Montreal: —

Should the genius of Marmaduke lead him to rear,From the dining-room floor to the ceiling,A palace of crystal and china, oh! fearTo exhibit an atom of feeling.But your Satsuma bowl you will cheerfully bring,And, where others would threaten to skin him,You will beg him to do as he likes with the thing,Lest you crush the creative within him.If Lucy refuses potatoes and bread,And calls for méringues and for trifle,Or anything else that may enter her head,Such yearnings another would stifle.You will hand her a menu-card, beg her to stateWhat she happens to fancy for dinner,And pray that you never may find it your fateTo crush the creative within her.

Advancing years failed to reconcile Punch to the non-repressive method. As late as 1912 one of his artists depicted the chaotic results in an elementary school of realizing the ideals of one of the pamphlets of a Teachers' Association, viz., to place a child "in an atmosphere where there are no restraints, where he can move freely about in the schoolroom, where the teacher is essentially a passive agent and where there is no punishment."

The Sompting Experiment

In this context I may note that about this time Punch frequently dwells on the unsuitability and extravagant cost of the amusements provided for children. In "How to Befriend the Gilded Babes" he castigates without mercy a gentleman who had been writing on entertainments for titled juveniles, and outlines a children's party the cost of which is estimated at the modest figure of £250. Punch's repeated protests against the perversion of pantomimes to suit grown-ups are too familiar to call for detailed mention, but in connexion with youthful precocity I may mention a curious anticipation dating from the autumn of 1905. This is a "domestic drama, composed by an infant of ten summers who, after reaching mature years, retrieved it from a box containing his toy theatre and copied it out," exactly as it stood. The drama, which is entitled "The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing," bears all the stigmata of a bonâ fide child's essay in dramatic authorship, and foreshadows the exploits of "Daisy Ashford" without being either so funny or so vulgar as The Young Visiters. Punch had always been alive to the educative value of the theatre, and it speaks well for his vigilance that the remarkable experiment carried out in the little village of Sompting in Sussex did not escape his notice. The children were taught by making them act their lessons, and Punch in some whimsical verses anticipates the extension of the method to the public schools. It is true that he does not take the experiment quite seriously, but he does not "crab" it. It was reserved in later years for a brilliant and enthusiastic educational reformer, Mr. E. G. A. Holmes, to hail in the Sompting schoolmistress the "Egeria" of the new régime of elementary instruction. In less benevolent mood Punch quoted in 1907 an apparently genuine letter which had appeared in the Children's Realm, a paper which aimed at teaching "the higher way of living to the young." The letter describes a small boy who was "a very earnest vegetarian" and a super-prig into the bargain. Punch was exasperated by prigs in all walks of life, and it rejoiced his heart when Mr. Roosevelt compared President Wilson to a "Byzantine logothete." The high-browed infant filled him with dismay, and in 1910 he illustrated the "advance in elementary culture" by a highly imaginative account of the reply given by a very small boy who had been asked by a lady visitor whether he enjoyed his recent birthday party: —

Henry: "In the impression retained by the memory, shades have ceased to count: it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. I cut the silhouette, in a word, out of the curious confusion of it all, I save and fix the outline, and it is with my eye on this profiled distinction that as a critic I speak. It is the function of the critic to assert with assurance when once his impression has become final; and it is in noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occasion upon the merits or attractiveness of the entertainment so generously provided for the diversion of myself and friends."

(Lady visitor before swooning has sufficient presence of mind to ring the bell for assistance.)

Brother: "What did you say to that old chap just now?"

Sister: "I only thanked him for picking up my bag."

Brother: "My dear girl, you must learn not to be so beastly grateful. It's not done nowadays."

Punch's "Universal Hymn"

This is an instance of the danger of trying to kill two birds with one stone, for the parody of Henry James's later manner distracts our attention from the main aim of the satire. Punch was more sorry for than annoyed at the children of Chelsea, of ages from five to sixteen, who were said in 1908 never to ask for Dickens or the Jungle Book at the Free Library, but to devour works on "science, sociology, fine arts and religion." In the same year the Sociological Society held an exhibition of charts and plans, to show parents how to select their children's toys "as a profound educational agency," but Punch saw in it nothing but an exhibition of the profoundest Prigmatism – to use a word which he coined in later years. His bitterest comment on the new spirit of the young belongs to the year 1913, when a boy of seventeen rebukes his sister of twelve for thanking an old man for picking up her bag. The best antidote to this spirit was furnished by the Boy Scout movement, which grafted on to the public-school code of "playing the game" the larger ideals of altruism and mutual-as opposed to self-help. I have already spoken of the origin and development of what was the greatest non-official and informal contribution to national education of our times. Logically perhaps it ought to have been discussed in this chapter, but in its wider implications it belongs to the social and political history of the last twenty years.

To turn from general tendencies to the controversies which arose out of the working of the Education Act of 1871, we find that Punch was, as usual, impartially critical of all extremists, whether clerical or secularist. Against the latter he inveighed in 1894 in his "Universal Hymn for School Board Hymnals, adapted to modern Educational requirements": —

Arise my soul – if soul I've got —And, vaguely vocal, thankFor all the blessings of my lotThe – Unknown Eternal Blank!I thank the – Streak of Azure HazeThat on my birth has smiled,And made me, in post-Christian days,A happy School-Board child.I was not born, as myriads were,In ages dark and dim,And taught to pray a pious prayer,Or sing a holy hymn.I was not born a little slaveTo formula and creed,Or taught that Heaven must light the Grave,Or God-love banish greed.I was not born when priests might roamAnd teach the childish bandTo sing about Our Heavenly Home,Or of that Happy Land!Mere dogma muddles up the mind,And leaves it in a mess.Religion surely was designedTo make our freedom less.The Conscience-Clause? It may secureSome freedom to the slave.But Where's the sense – unless we're sureThat we a conscience have?We've lots of "Standards" which we treasure,There's one superfluous, quite,A Standard human wit can't measure(In Board Schools) – that of Right!Secular matters make our joys,And facts are our sole food.Do we turn out good girls and boys?Good heavens! What is "Good"?Through all the periods of my lifeOne goodness I'll pursue;With rare "good things" this world is rife;I'll try to get a few.

At the close of the same year, however, Punch castigates sectarian bigots with equal vigour. He took for his text a letter by Dr. James Martineau to The Times, in which that "wise and gentle teacher" had appealed to the conflicting parties of School Board electors and members to reconcile themselves to a peaceful co-existence on the basis of our common Christianity. Punch does not spare "secular spleen" and "shortsighted super-thrift," but his severest criticisms are reserved for the sectarian zealots, Anglican and Nonconformist, who had broken up the compromise of 1871, and he concludes: —