Mr. Rhodes's historic bequest to Oxford is discussed in an imaginary letter from a Cambridge to an Oxford don. The Cambridge don ridicules the notion that it would revolutionize Oxford, convert it into the University of the Empire, or transform the hoary old home of lost causes into a realization of the ideals of young barbarians from the bounding prairie or of the pipe-sucking beer-nurtured students of the Fatherland. The new-comers would find their level and, if really decent fellows, would do well enough. "Oxford will still remain Oxford, and that, at any rate, we may be thankful for." Nor did the Cambridge man anticipate any serious change in inter-'Varsity relations: —

As to ourselves at Cambridge, why, I fancy we shall be able to rub along quite comfortably, thank you. If I may use a commercial expression, we've got our own line of Australians and Canadians and Americans, and even of Afrikanders, and I think we shall be able to continue business at the old shop in the old style without any of the new-fangled additions that Mr. Rhodes has conferred upon Oxford. I'll wager that when fifty years are past we shall still be able to meet you on the river, at cricket, at football, nay, even at chess and billiards, on the same terms of average equality. And in after life we shall still manage to compete.

This letter, by the way, was virtually a rejoinder to a set of verses, published a few weeks earlier, in which Punch indulged in a fantastic forecast of the results of the invasion of the Rhodes scholars – including an entire revision of the system of examinations in accordance with the terms of Mr. Rhodes's will. The Craven would be awarded for manliness and the Ireland for muscle: —

Then at last shall Oxford Greats men
Really be Imperial statesmen.

The sequel has shown that the views ascribed to the Cambridge don were much nearer the mark.

The Sleeping Beauty Oxford University.

The Fairy Prince Lord Curzon.

The Chancellor (after reading aloud his "Memorandum"): "Awake, adorable dreamer!"

The Awakening of Oxford

In 1904 Punch ranged himself unfalteringly on the side of compulsory Greek. Oxford had decided to retain it, and Punch, garbed as a Hellenic sage, appeals to Cambridge not to be outdone in loyalty to the old faith by her sister. It is hard to avoid reading into the cartoon "Breaking the Charm" in 1909 more than Punch meant to express. Lord Curzon, as the Fairy Prince, is seen, with his Memorandum on University Reform, appealing to the Sleeping Beauty in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "Awake, adorable dreamer!" Of course, the "adorable dreamer" was bound to be pictorially represented by a woman, but recent concessions have lent a special significance to the awakening. Strange to say, the most powerful and eloquent impeachment of the intrusion of women into Oxford comes from the New World; from the pen of the most brilliant of American essayists – Mr. Paul Elmer More. "With petticoats," he writes of Oxford, "came the world and the conventions of the world; manners were softened, the tongue was filed, angles of originality were ironed out; the drawing-room conquered the cloister."

Punch's practical abandonment of the rôle of religious controversialist was noticed in the previous volume. In the period under review references to the churches are for the most part confined to the part they played in connexion with the Education Bills already mentioned. The echoes of the "No Popery" campaign had so far died down that, on the publication in 1898 of Mr. Wilfrid Ward's review of Cardinal Wiseman's life, Punch's notice was not merely sympathetic but laudatory. "The storm that arose in England on his return from Rome to England with the rank of Cardinal was sufficient to have blown a punier man clean off the island. The Cardinal stood four square to it and lived it down." This is a notable tribute from Punch, who had blown and stormed with the best of the Cardinal's assailants. As for the now forgotten but once notorious "Kensitite" demonstrations, Punch's attitude is seen in his advertisement printed in the same year: —

To Prize-Fighters and others.– Wanted, MUSCULAR CHRISTIANS to act as sidesmen; used to mêlées and capable of using their fists. Liberal terms. Free doctor. Pensions in case of personal injury. Apply, stating qualifications, to High Church Clerical Agency, Kensiton, W.

A propos of muscular Christians, in 1900 Punch mentions that a country curate had recently received notice to quit because though unexceptionable in other respects, his vicar declared that "what this parish really needs is a good fast bowler with a break from the off." Modern clerical methods of acquiring popularity were satirized in 1905. A Congregational minister had taken part in a theatrical performance, and Punch gave a burlesque account of a bishop appearing at a music-hall in a travesty of Hamlet for the benefit of a Decayed Curates' Fund.

Anti-Clericalism in France

Bishops and deans have done wonderful things of late years, but this particular forecast remains fortunately unfulfilled hitherto. To 1906 belongs one of the few cartoons in this period in which the relations of Church and State are directly referred to. For this was the year in which the French Government cancelled the Concordat and laid an interdict on the Religious Orders. The policy found no favour from Punch. In "The Triumph of Democracy" he showed a French priest, a dignified figure, standing outside a doorway guarded by a French soldier, and bearing the notice: "République Française. Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. Entrée interdite au Clergé."

Hostess: "And do you really believe in Christian Science?"

Visitor: "Well, you see, I've been getting rather stouter lately, and it's such a comfort to know that I really have no body!"

Sabbatarianism gave Punch little or no chance, save for a mild protest against the action of the L.C.C. with regard to the Queen's Hall Concerts in 1898. The change is accurately reflected in the opening lines: —

Ah! County C., why stop our glee?
For bigotry is dead;
The broader mind can nowhere find
Remotest cause to dread
An instant fall of scruples all
If Sunday's gloom should flee;
We're all agreed in word and deed,
Except the County C.

Punch's occupation as an anti-Sabbatarian was practically gone by the end of the last century. Bishops had ceased to provoke his satire by their opulence, though the balance-sheet, issued by the Bishop of London in 1905 to prove how hard it was to make both ends meet, excited some good-humoured raillery. Christian Science Punch left severely alone, save for an occasional negligible or oblique reference. His last and most forcible intervention in religious controversy was provoked by the action of the Bishop of Zanzibar in protesting against the administration of the Holy Communion to non-Anglican members. In the cartoon "The Black Man's Burden" in January, 1914, Punch drew two negroes singing as a duet "Why do de Christians rage?" and this scathing comment undoubtedly reflected the views of the great majority of moderate Churchmen at home as well as missionaries and colonial administrators abroad.

I have spoken elsewhere of Punch's share in the Dreyfus controversy, and may add that while laudably free from anti-Semitic partisanship, he did not refrain from satirizing the ostrich-like attitude of the Jews in transition who thought that the signs of race could be obliterated by a change of name.

Reverence and admiration in full measure inspire the tribute to the wise and sagacious Leo XIII, when he died in 1903: —

The long day closes and the strife is dumb,
Thither he goes where temporal loss is gain,
Where he that asks to enter must become
A little child again.

And since in perfect humbleness of heart
He sought his Church's honour, not his own,
All faiths are one to share the mourner's part
Beside the empty throne.

Refrain by natives of South Africa and Kikuyu

The amende to Cardinal Wiseman has been already noted, and I like to end this section with an even more striking palinode – the most notable that had appeared in Punch since his posthumous tribute to Lincoln. Punch had assailed the Salvation Army and its founder with all the weapons at his command in the early days of that movement. Happily he did not wait till General Booth's death to acknowledge his error. In the autumn of 1908 General Booth and Mr. John Burns had both been subjected to severe criticism at the Trade Union Congress, and are shown in a cartoon standing outside the door of the meeting saying to Mr. Punch: "You see before you two condemned criminals." Punch replies: "Well, I shouldn't worry about that," and they rejoin in unison: "We don't." This was indirect commendation; there were no reserves in the memorial verses on General Booth's death in August, 1912. Punch compares him with the warrior saints of old time and continues: —

Nay, his the nobler warfare, since his hands
Set free the thralls of misery and her brood —
Hunger and haunting shame and sin that brands —
And gave them hope renewed.

Bruised souls, and bodies broken by despair,
He healed their heartache, and their wounds he dressed,
And drew them, so redeemed, his task to share,
Sworn to the same high quest.

Armed with the Spirit's wisdom for his sword,
His feet with tidings of salvation shod,
He knew no foes save only such as warred
Against the peace of God.

Scorned or acclaimed, he kept his harness bright,
Still, through the darkest hour, untaught to yield,
And at the last, his face toward the light,
Fell on the victor's field.

No laurelled blazon rests above his bier,
Yet a great people bows its stricken head
Where he, who fought without reproach or fear,
Soldier of Christ, lies dead.

THE ADVANCE OF WOMEN

In the early 'nineties there was a penny weekly paper called Woman, of a mildly "feministic" type, which took for its motto "Forward, but not too fast." There was no reason to suspect its founders of deliberately choosing two adjectives, each of which bore an ambiguous meaning; taken in their literal sense they aptly epitomize the spirit of Feminism in the early years of a phase which began with "emancipation novels" and ended in a resort to physical force. Yet even at the outset the more sober representatives of the movement were being forced into the background to make way for the more strident spokeswomen of the doctrine of equal rights. The prim spinster and the apostles of culture were replaced by the women who were frankly "out" to shock public opinion and flout decorum, who rode bicycles in knickerbockers and wrote "problem" novels. The "New Woman," so constantly referred to in these years, had many variations – athletic, literary, worldly, but was always bent on "self-expression." The fashionable type was caricatured in Dodo; the rebellious daughter was glorified in Grant Allen's story, now only remembered in its title —The Woman who Did. Ibsen was very much in the air, and his remark that the modern daughter felt the need for "a mild kind of Wanderjahr" impelled Punch to discourse on "Rosamund and the Wanderjahr" (a good deal "after" Miss Edgeworth's story of Rosamund and the Purple Jar). His views are non-committal but apparently unsympathetic. On the other hand, he welcomed somewhat prematurely the admission of women to the Fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society, recognized their skill and endurance as Alpine climbers, applauded their adoption of the calling of gardeners, hailed the appearance of a Women's Eight on the Thames – coached, it should be added, by a distinguished member of his staff – and duly chronicled the first inter-'Varsity Women's hockey match in 1894. The first illustration of a woman bicycling in knickerbockers occurs in the same year. Under the heading "The 'Arden-ing Process," Orlando addresses his companion: "Tired, Rosalind?" and she replies with quite unfeminine brevity: "Pneumatically." No attempt is made to represent the new garb as unbecoming, as in the days of "Bloomerism," but rather the reverse.Orlando: "Tired, Rosalind?"

Rosalind: "Pneumatically."

Towards the "New Woman" on her intellectual side, Punch was decidedly hostile. One could not find a better expression of his views than in the large illustration, "Donna Quixote," in April, 1894. The central figure, wearing pince-nez and waving a latchkey, is formidable rather than repellent. Around her on the floor lie books by Ibsen, Tolstoi and Mona Caird, and in the decorative border (which embodies her visions) she is seen tilting at the dragon of Decorum, and smiting down the triple Cerberus of Mrs. Grundy, "Mamma" and Chaperon. Du Maurier's "Passionate Female Literary Types" in the same year are unlovely to the verge of hideousness, and the legends are frankly satirical. When "Sarah Grand" declared that Man, morally, was "in his infancy" and that "now Woman holds out a strong hand to the Child-man," and insisted on helping him up by "spanking proper principles into him in the nursery," Punch quoted back at her "Ouida's" statement that "the New Woman was an unmitigated bore," and went on: —

There is a New Woman, and what do you think?
She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink!
But, though Foolscap and Ink form the whole of her diet,
This nagging New Woman can never be quiet!

The New Womanhood

The ironical protest registered by Punch against ladies who insisted on travelling in smoking carriages and then objected to smoking, only serves to show how far we have travelled in the last thirty years. Another passing phase in the history of sex-antagonism is to be found in the record of the first of many dinners at which only literary ladies were allowed to be present. Punch printed a letter signed "A Daughter of Eve who remembers Adam," who observed that "the Literary Ladies' Dinner of the 1st of June only needed one feature to be absolutely perfect – the presence of Gentlemen." Whether the letter was bonâ fide or not, it probably expressed the view of the majority of those present. The more violent the manifestations of the New Womanhood, the more reactionary became Punch's attitude. His reaction reached a culminating point in 1894, when he painted the following sketch of "A Modern Madame": —

She has aspirations after the impossible, and is herself far from probable; she regards her husband as an unnecessary evil, and her children as disturbances without compensating advantages.

She writes more than she reads and seldom scribbles anything.

She has no feelings, and yet has a yearning after the intense.

She is the antithesis of her grandmother, and has made further development in generations to come quite impossible.

She thinks without the thoughts of a male, and yet has lost the comprehension of a female.

To sum up, she is hardly up to the standard of a man, and yet has sunk several fathoms below the level of a woman.

So again he reverts to his older views on Education à propos of the "Pioneers": —

Ah, learn whate'er you will, yet spare our hearts
A home-grown, feminine Baboo of Arts.
Believe it, envious maids, the men you spurn
Think little of the honours that they earn.
Too well they're taught in common sense's rules
To dwell upon their triumphs in the Schools,
And chiefly prize the Baccalaureate fur
Because, in love's young days, it pleases Her.
But you, in purpose tyrannously strong,
Get, in each effort, your perspective wrong.
Learn all you wish to learn, exult in learning,
For Hymen's torch keep midnight oil a-burning,
Bulge your fair foreheads with those threatening bumps,
Ungraceful as an intellectual mumps,
Be blatant, rude, self-conscious as you can,
Be all you feign – and imitate – in Man,
Spurn all the fine traditions of the past,
Be New or nothing – what's the gain at last?

You know as much, with hard-eyed, harsh-voiced joy,
As the shock-headed, shambling fifth-form boy;
Adding, what his sound mind would never please,
An Asiatic hunger for degrees.
True learning's that alone whereon are based
Clear insight, reason, sympathy, and taste.
Not relic-worshipping of bones long dry,
Not giving puppet-life to x and y,
And walking haughtily a fair world through
Because some girls can't do the sums you do.
Still less, the little, little world of cliques,
Where Mutual Admiration dons the breeks,
And then proceeds kind tolerant man to flout —
A petulant, unresented Barring-out.

Meanwhile our faith looks on, devoid of fear,
Facing the hatchet of the Pioneer.
Still will the storm, in Nature's potent plan,
Be temper'd to the shorn, or bearded, man.
Your sex will still be perfect in its place,
With voice of melody and soul of grace.
Pose, lecture, worry, copy as you will,
Man will be man, and woman woman still!

The Real New Woman

By way of reducing the "misanthropic" attitude of some of the "New Women" to absurdity, Punch reported a probably apocryphal dialogue between two men: "I say, old man, is it true that your wife has been asked to resign at the Omphale Club?" "Well, yes; you see, the Committee found out that she'd been guilty of ungentlemanly conduct." But what exasperated Punch most of all was the decadent preciosity of the irregulars who espoused the cause of the New Womanhood. One need only mention "The Woman who Wouldn't Do," illustrated à la Beardsley, where "Yellow Book" morality is burlesqued in the phrase "marriage is a degrading system, nurtured under the purple hangings of the tents of iniquity." These moods of disgust seldom lasted long. Punch was no wholesale hater of modernity, and in his verses on "The Real New Woman" frankly admitted that there was much in her to admire. One notes a change of ideal in the absence of any mention of her cooking qualifications; and in the admission that "she's splendid at seeing a joke," Punch acknowledges a great advance on the buxom but humourless damsels of Leech. The first mention of a Ladies' Football Club in 1895 brings home to us the fact that what passed for prejudice in 1895 with enthusiastic advocates of sex equality has been confirmed by the judgment of those best qualified to judge down to 1921.

Punch's epigram on woman's "Asiatic hunger for degrees" represents a passing mood rather than his general attitude to the demand. "The lady students of the Universities," wrote The Times on March 13, 1896, "have received a cruel series of rebuffs in the last few days. On Tuesday week the Congregation of the University of Oxford refused to admit them to the B.A. degree. On Tuesday last it followed up this blow by rejecting all the resolutions proposed as alternatives. Yesterday the Cambridge Senate inflicted the unkindest cut of all by practically imitating the ungallant example of Oxford." Yet, instead of exulting over their defeat, Punch was decidedly sympathetic in his cartoon of Minerva, with her owl in a cage, met at the gates of the Oxford Schools by a corpulent bespectacled Don, who observes, "Very sorry, Miss Minerva, but perhaps you are not aware that this is a monastic establishment." One notes a certain inconsistency in Punch's condemning women for their disregard of the fine art of gastronomy, preferring "a tray on a rickety side-table" or the haphazard arrangements of a picnic to regularity and comfort at meals, and almost in the same breath rebuking them for flouting the sweet domesticities of home and indulging in extravagant pleasures in public. Another interesting sign of the times is recorded a couple of years later in "The Modern Woman's Vade Mecum" – showing a reaction against the old notion that the blue stocking must be above any regard for appearances. Here the governing idea is that cleverness need not be divorced from fascination; that fine heads should be covered with pretty toques; that pince-nez are more becoming than spectacles; and that literary women should not neglect fashion journals or sacrifice toilet to intellect. The allusion in the same year (1898) to a Women's Club consisting exclusively of women who would not marry because they could not find husbands intellectual enough to suit them, was probably an exaggeration. But there were Feminist stalwarts who virtually expressed that view; just as there were enthusiasts of "mixed hockey," then beginning to come into fashion, who may not have been entirely uninfluenced by a matrimonial motive.

The proposal to allow women to hold municipal office, included in the Local Government Bill, was vetoed in 1899, but not before Punch had issued a pictorial forecast of a procession, headed by the Right Worshipful the Lady Mayor, with female mace-bearer, sword-bearer, Town Clerk and "she-rives." The Cecil family have been of late years active in support of the Woman Suffrage Movement, but Lord Salisbury was no feminist. In 1899 Colonel Denny introduced a Bill making the provision of seats for shop assistants compulsory. Punch describes how this modest measure was "turned down" in the Lords on the initiative of the Prime Minister, who scented in the concession possibilities of a revolt of domestic servants. In 1900 the "New Woman," i.e. the heroine of the "Woman who Did" type, is described as moribund if not defunct. The fashion of knickerbockers went out with the century. Women chauffeurs, however, make their appearance in 1900, and the correct designation for them is discussed. But for a couple of years women's claims and pretensions were largely submerged by the War. There was a strange product much in evidence at the Mount Nelson Hotel, Cape Town, but Punch overlooked the vagaries which were admirably satirized in a once famous Limerick: —

There was a young lady of Berwick,
Whose conduct was highly hysteric.
She followed the guns
And distributed buns
To the men who were down with enteric.

The Housewife's Burden

The Club movement was spreading rapidly, and the founding of the "Ladies' Army and Navy Club" in 1902 prompts a burlesque on the qualifications insisted on for membership in the Ladies' Athenæum, Conservative, Travellers' and Bachelors' Clubs. Punch again sounds the plea for the revival of domesticity in the "Prayer of a Lady Principal" addressed to Oxford Women Students, with apologies to Mr. Kipling: —

Take up the housewife's burden —
All ye whose schools are done,
Who let your foolish fancy dwell
On thoughts of coming fun.
Put Games for Girls upon the shelf
With Jowett, Jebb, and Gow;
Be Mrs. Beeton's Homely Hints
Your vade mecum now.

Take up the housewife's burden —
No lofty rule of queens,
But long and sordid service —
The slave to ways and means.
Have done with flighty folly!
Throw off your infant past!
'Tis yours to cope with butcher's bills,
To make the mutton last.

Take up the housewife's burden —
The truceless wars of peace;
Go, humour whimsy housemaids,
And wait your cook's caprice.
And when your hopes are highest
(When both ends nearly meet),
Your lord's untimely lavishness
Shall all your thrift defeat.

Take up the housewife's burden —
Ye shall not shun the call;
Nor cry too loud on Culture,
When darns and dusting pall.
Go, face the test of wifehood —
To wield the adoring rod,
And treat a Man as merely
Half baby and half god.

The then fashionable alternative is ironically extolled in an irreverent parody of Kingsley's lines, as adapted for a Young Lady's album: —

Be smart, dear girl, and let who will be other;
Break from the fold, not stick there like a lamb;
So shall your lot, as maid and wife and mother,
Be one Grand Slam.

An article by Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick in the Cornhill, on English and Teuton domestic ideals, served Punch in 1904 as the text for a ballad comparing the thrifty German Hausfrau with the extravagant English wife. The infatuated writer sums up entirely in favour of the dainty, decorative Dolly as against the patient, industrious, but dowdy Grisel. Yet in the same year Punch was much exercised with the inevitable decline of chivalry: —

Doubtless the better sort would gladly nourish
Those notions which occur in Arthur's tale;
Doubtless Romance might still contrive to flourish,
Changing its knightly for its Daily Mail,
If Woman would but give our modern gallants
A livelier chance to ventilate their talents.

Men ride abroad in rubbered automobiles,
Naked of armour, bar the nauseous smell,
Not bound on any ransom save to owe bills
Contracted by some errant damosel,
So that in Carlton's Halls, superbly gowned,
She may adorn their Dinner-table Round:

But here their service ends. They fain would wrestle
With horrid dragons or a heathen crew;
Ride ventre à terre to help the weaker vessel,
Behaving just as Lancelot used to do;
Only you cannot keep it up much longer
When once the weaker sex becomes the stronger.

Matrons and Militants

An equally interesting feature of the times was what might be alternatively called the Revolt or the Apotheosis of Middle Age. Perhaps the first mention of what threatened to be an unfair competition of the matron with the maid is to be found in the verses in 1896, where we read of the modern woman: —

If married and mother she yet plays her part,
With six charming children she still must look "smart,"
For, judging by facts, what Society likes
Is a maid who is bold, and a matron who bikes.

Golf and dancing, however, were the great opportunities of the young middle-aged women who refused to retire to the shelf as in early Victorian days. In 1904 Punch printed a story about golf, in which a maiden aunt "scores" overwhelmingly and turns out to be a champion player, to the confounding of her nephew and niece, a dénoûment beyond imagination's widest stretch twenty years earlier.

With 1905 we plunge into the new phase of the Suffrage question. At the outset Punch was decidedly sympathetic. Note, for example, the cartoon in which a beery working man – a "qualified voter" – addresses a well-dressed, refined-looking woman: "Ah, you may pay rates an' taxes, and you may 'ave responserbilities an' all; but when it comes to votin', you must leave it to us men!" In a brief year Punch was thoroughly estranged by the methods of the militants and their harrying of Ministers. His "Sensible Woman" retorts on her "Shrieking Sister": "You help our cause? Why, you're its worst enemy." Raids on the House of Commons and scenes in the Lobbies and the Ladies' Gallery drove him in the Epilogue to 1906 to take a new line. Since in the course of the Crusade women had descended to man's brutal level, put off their dignity and womanliness, and become "the complete elector" – "why, then, Madam, when you get the franchise, as you will eventually, I shall say to myself —Serve 'em right." The name "suffragette" had been coined, and came to stay for about fifteen years, at any rate; Punch tried his hand at a new variant – "the Insuffrabelles." It was still possible to laugh at a movement which intermittently ministered to mirth; as, for example, when a New York correspondent of a London paper wrote as follows: —

"In the course of a sympathetic discussion on the good work done for the cause by the Suffragettes in London at a meeting of a woman's society for political study, Mrs. Cory, a prominent advocate of female equality, gave a definition of a Utopian dream which woman must not rest until she has realized. 'Knowing as I do our ideals,' said Mrs. Cory, 'confident as I am that we shall attain them, I fix my gaze upon the brightening future, hopefully awaiting the time when a woman on trial for her life will be defended by a female lawyer, convicted by a female jury' (the natural result, we presume), 'sentenced by a female judge, consoled by a female chaplain, and executed by a female executioner. Then, and not till then, will she have attained her proper place in the world.'"

Punch, with commendable reticence, contents himself with observing, "nothing, however, was said as to which world." In 1907 we encounter a picture describing the embarrassment of an unfortunate man invited to tea at a ladies' club by a lady who had forgotten that the afternoon was consecrated to a "Down with Men" Meeting. In "Cross-examining a Suffragist" Punch dexterously manoeuvres a witness into the admissions (1) that nothing could cause Miss Pankhurst greater suffering than to stay idly at home while other women were demonstrating and going cheerfully to martyrdom; (2) that the greater the suffering, the greater the proof of faith in the Cause. Whereupon his Lordship then delivered judgment as follows: —

Argument and Ridicule

That Miss Pankhurst and her family should show their faith in the cause by suffering in the way suggested by Mr. Punch. That they should stay quietly at home for a while – keep out of the newspapers – arrange no demonstrations – go to no prison; seeing that this would be a much truer and more effective martyrdom than anything they had done as yet.

"And," continued his Lordship, waxing eloquent, "if time hangs heavy on their hands —

"Are there no beggars at the gate,
Nor any poor about the lands?
Oh! teach the orphan boy to read,
Or teach the orphan girl to sew,
Pray Heaven for a Woman's heart,
And let the Woman's Suffrage go."

Budding Suffragette: "I say, Pussy" (with intensity), "are you a Peth or a Pank?"

From argument Punch turned to burlesque in his imaginary forecast "The Fight for Childhood Suffrage in 1927." One cannot blame him for making capital out of a misprint in which the various suffrage societies were credited with "tactics that differ, but whose aims lead to the same gaol." But argument and ridicule were powerless to influence the extremists. The moderates did not always disavow the methods of lawlessness. A highly respected and elderly peeress actually advocated the withdrawal of all subscriptions to charitable objects until women should be given the vote. A steady crescendo in violence marks the progress of the campaign in 1908. "How long," asks Punch à propos of "domiciliary" visits and raids, "are our Cabinet Ministers to be made the sport of clamorous women? Cattle-driving in Ireland, deplorable as a form of popular pastime, is a trifle compared with this new sport of Cabinet Minister-hunting?" This new sport, however, was only in its infancy. Meanwhile the merry game of martyrdom went on. One day, so ran the recital of her prison experiences given by a released Suffragette, "we organized a grand lark. We all agreed to roar like hungry animals at dinner-time. We made a fearful noise." After this, remarks the sardonic Punch, "we hope we shall hear no more of women being devoid of a sense of humour." But even at this early stage of the campaign Punch seems to have realized that, apart from the merits of the case, the victory would rest with the side which made itself the greater public nuisance until its wish was granted. Mr. Asquith is shown in the summer of 1908 with a Suffragette playing the Beggar-maid to his Cophetua, and saying, "'This beggar-maid shall be my Queen' – that is, if there's a general feeling in the country to that effect." A couple of weeks later Mr. Haldane, "thinking Territorially" as he watches a procession of Suffragettes, enviously observes, "If I could only get the men to come forward like this!" On the whole, Punch jibes impartially and genially at Suffragists and anti-Suffragists alike. There is an ominous reference in the summer of 1908 to the remark of a stone-thrower: "It will be bombs next time," but pictorially, at any rate, Punch was inclined to make light of the persecution of Ministers and M.P.s.