straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold;And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image
Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old?
Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit,
Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed;
Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit,
When Lies shall fail – the first time, and the last?
Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder —
Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad;
Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder —
"An undevout Astronomer is mad."
THE ROAD TO REFORM
Turning from England's international outlook to home affairs, we are confronted in the earlier stages of the period under review by the powerful negative influence of Lord Palmerston. A great Foreign Minister, a capable and humane administrator when he was at the Home Office, he had little belief in legislative remedies, and his refusal to grapple with Reform became progressively distasteful to his Liberal supporters. The old party system had been confused and shattered by the secession of the Peelites, as the result of the Repeal of the Corn Laws, and Palmerston was maintained in power in fact, if not in name, by a coalition. His death ended the régime of masterly inactivity and cleared the way for the reconstruction of parties and the prolonged duel between the two great protagonists – Disraeli and Gladstone.
The 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
It was also, as we have seen, the age of non-intervention in foreign politics. Strange to say the strongest appeal to the Government to interfere by force of arms in a foreign quarrel was made by a deputation of working men, introduced by Professor Beesly, in May, 1863, with a view to expounding to the Prime Minister the resolutions in favour of Poland voted by a Trade Union Meeting in St. James's Hall: —
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: —
"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."
We append Punch's comments because they are typical of his gradual adoption of a more critical attitude towards the working man. It should be remembered that there was no Labour Party in the House of Commons until 1884. Before that time working men like Mr. Burt and Mr. MacDonald, the two miners returned in 1874, were returned by an arrangement with the Liberals and sat on the Liberal benches: —
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.
Many 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 System
Life on the land showed little signs of progress in the opening years of this period as illustrated by Punch's legal pillory. But the vagaries of clerical and aristocratic magistrates, culled with chapter and verse from provincial newspapers, which excited his wrath in 1858, almost disappear in the 'sixties, no doubt in consequence of a more humane interpretation of the Sunday Observance Act. In 1869, the debate on "The Recreation of the People" at the Church Congress revealed a growth of clerical tolerance and common sense which extorted the high approval of Punch. Still, the "Sunday Question" was far from being solved when it impelled the convivial Punch to print in the same year the companion cartoons contrasting his vision of what might be with the squalid reality of what was.
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: —
A paragraph in a contemporary, headed "Superstition in Devonshire," contains the following defence, addressed by an old shoemaker named Burch to the Barnstaple magistrates, before whom he was charged with assaulting an old woman by scratching her on the arm: – "Gentlemen, I have suffered five years' affliction from her. I have been under her power, and more than a hundred people advised me to fetch blood of that woman to destroy the spell. I have lost fourteen canaries, and from forty to fifty goldfinches; as fast as I got them they died, and I have had five complaints brought upon me at once."
On hearing this declaration: —
"The Mayor said that it was most extraordinary that such ignorance and superstition should prevail in the present enlightened age."
In the present enlightened age persons of position in society and of education believe that they shake hands with spirits at dark séances. His
