Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 2 of 4.—1857-1874. Graves Charles Larcom

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СКАЧАТЬ to be waged against habit, prejudice, greed, ridicule; but the victory was won. James Montgomery,1 the poet, with one ghastly but damaging volume, The Chimney Sweep's Magazine and Climbing Boy's Album, gave thousands a nightmare that lasted for years, but he carried the Act. There was a poem in the book, too, by Blake, the painter, that did yeoman's service. We got the Act, and believed that the system of atrocious cruelty was at an end. But the above paragraph wakes painful doubts.

      We should call the sentence on the fellow who killed the child ridiculously mild, could anything ridiculous connect itself with such a theme. We wish that this master chimney-sweeper of Gateshead could have been sentenced to two years' imprisonment, varied by twenty sound lashes with the cat every quarter day, except the last, when he should have had fifty, as a parting testimonial of the public sense of his character.

      A Child Heroine

      This was written in the issue of March 15, 1873. Just a year later, at the close of the Ashanti campaign, an appeal was made, and not in vain, to Punch to recognize the heroism of another working child: —

A TEN-YEAR-OLD MARTYR

      "Dear Mr. Punch,

      "There will be a great deal of war-paint going round soon, in the shape of titles, honours, and decorations, official rewards for 'killing, slaying and burning.' Will you give a decoration to the little motherless girl of ten, Louisa Row,2 who 'undertook the cooking' for her father, 'a labourer,' and his family, and died in the execution of her duty?

      "She has not killed anyone, black or white, except herself; she has not burned anyone's huts, or anyone's villages – she has only burned herself. She will get no glory, unless you, with a stroke of your pen, will put one little star of honour upon her unknown grave.

"The Author of Olive Varcoe."

      Will our correspondent accept this inscription for her poor little martyr's tombstone?

      Duty's small Servant, without prize or praise,

      How soon on thy hard life hath death come down!

      Take this brief record of thy childish days —

      Gold, tried with fire, makes the best Martyr's Crown.

      Punch's record as the champion of the working children leaves little room for criticism. And we have seen in several of the extracts given above that his severest censures are directed against the employers of labour, the greed of gain, the worship of Mammon. But if he cannot be convicted of partiality to capital, he was not always fair to labour. Even in his most democratic days he showed a distrust of "delegates." The working man's grievances were admitted, but his salaried spokesmen, when they were drawn from his own order, were condemned, with very few exceptions, as untrustworthy mischief-makers. How acute this distrust had now become may be gathered from the acrimonious article which appears in 1861 under the heading "A Dig at the Delegates": —

      A Delegate is generally a lazy, idle lout, who likes to sit and talk much better than to work; and who, considering himself as being "gifted with the gab," tries to foster small dissensions and causes of dispute, that he may have the pleasure of hearing himself prate about them. In other words, he is a drone that goes buzzing about the beer-shops, and living upon the honey that the working bees have toiled for. His business is to set a man against his master, and to keep afloat the Unions that tend to nurture Strikes, by giving men a false idea of their own strength, and underrating the resources and resistance of employers. Having duped the shallow-pated to elect him as their mouthpiece and being paid by them to lead a lazy life in looking to what he is pleased to call their interests, the Delegate grows fat on their starvation and their Strikes, and what is death to them becomes to him the means of life. Fancied grievances and most unreasonable demands the Delegate endeavours to encourage and support, for squabbling brings him into notice and his tongue into full play, and raises his importance in the pothouse-haunting world. A claim for ten hours' pay for only nine hours' work is just the sort of trade demand that a Delegate delights in; for he knows that its injustice must prevent its being listened to, and he will have the chance of swigging nightly, gratis, pots of beer while denouncing the iniquity of rapacious masters, in all the frothy eloquence of a public-house harangue.

      As nobody but a fool would submit to have his earnings eaten into by a sloth, it is the business of the Delegate to clap a stop on cleverness, and keep the brains of working men down to the muddle-pated level of those who are his tools. He, of course, fears the quick sight of any workman of intelligence, lest it may see through his iniquitous designs. He, therefore, gets the best hands marked on the Black List, and does the utmost in his power to reduce the active, skilful and industrious working man to the standard of the stupid, slothful, sluggish sot.

      Mrs. North: "You see, Mr. Lincoln, we have failed utterly in our course of action; I want peace, and so, if you cannot effect an amicable arrangement, I must put the case into other hands."

      There have always been people who trade on discontent, and would find their occupation gone were it removed. But to represent such motives as animating the majority of Trade Union delegates was a gross exaggeration; and it was both unfair and unjust to draw so hard and fast a distinction between the rank and file of the working classes and those whom they chose to represent them. The weakness of Punch's position was severely tested during the war of North and South in America and the Lancashire cotton famine, of which that war was the cause. Just as Punch failed to recognize the existence of idealism in the leaders of the North, and consistently maligned and misrepresented Lincoln until his death, so he failed to render justice to the idealism of the cotton operatives, who espoused a cause which was not only unpopular and unfashionable, but the promotion of which entailed the maintenance of that blockade which caused widespread distress and misery in Lancashire. Punch's attitude towards America in the earlier stages of the conflict showed a complete inability to comprehend the great issues involved, and an impartial dislike of both sides tempered by a sentimental leaning towards the South. It must be remembered that at this time the cause of the South was favoured by nearly all classes, that it appealed to Mr. Gladstone; that the Duke of Argyll and John Bright were almost the only statesmen who backed the North; and that amongst London newspapers of any weight the Spectator stood almost alone on that side. Punch's reading of the war at the close of 1861 is shown in the cartoon which represents King Cotton as Prometheus, bound with the chains of Blockade, and with the American Eagle preying on his vitals. The verses which accompany the picture emphasize the suicidal folly of the eagle, but the question of slavery or the Union is not even mentioned. A fortnight later the point of the "other [Cotton] Kings" is explained by another cartoon in which John Bull, addressing the combatants, says, "If you like fighting better than business, I shall deal at the other shop."

      Here the verses drive home the argumentum ad pocketum in the crudest way. Cousin Jonathan is told not to be an ass, or "bid Mrs. Britannia stop ruling the wave": —

      We'll break your blockade, Cousin Jonathan, yet,

      Yes, darn our old stockings, C. J., but we will.

      And the cotton we'll have, and to work we will set

      Every Lancashire hand, every Manchester mill.

      We're recruiting to do it – we'll make no mistakes:

      There's a place they call India just over the way;

      There we're raising a force which, Jerusalem, snakes!

      Will clean catawampus your cruisers, C. J.

      "Distressed Millionaires"

      Events entirely failed to justify these truculent words. A year later the cotton famine was at its height, and an appeal for funds is headed "Welly Clamming," with the explanation, "Everywhere we hear this, the Lancashire Doric for 'nearly starving.'" Punch applauds the zeal of the СКАЧАТЬ