ever he catches meanness, avarice, selfishness, force, preying upon the humble and the weak, he is sure to give them hard knocks with his baton, or home-thrusts with his pen and pencil. His practical kindness is charmingly comprehensive, too. He speaks for the dumb beast, pleads for the maltreated brutes of Smithfield Market, craves compassion for skeleton omnibus-horses, with the same ready sympathy that he fights for cheated fellow-mortals. In the court of public opinion, he is volunteer counsel for all in any way defrauded or kept in bondage by pitiless pride, barbarous policy, thoughtless luxury, or wooden-headed prejudice. His sound ethics do not admit that the lower law of man's enactment can, under any circumstances, override or abrogate the higher laws of God. Consequently, he judges with unbiased, instinctive rectitude, when he shows up in black and white the Model Republic's criminal anomaly, by making the African Slave a companion-piece to the Greek Slave, among "Jonathan's" contributions to the great Crystal Palace Exhibition. In this same vein of a wide-ranging application of the Golden Rule, he is ever on the alert to brand inhuman deeds and institutions, wherever found. You cannot very often hit him with the "tu quoque" retort, insinuate that he lives in a house of glass, or charge him with visiting his condemnation upon distant iniquities whilst winking at iniquities of equal magnitude directly under his nose.
Punch is no Mrs. Jellyby, brimful of zeal for Borrio boolas in far-off Africas, and utterly stolid to disorders and distresses under his own roof. Proud of the glory, he feels and confesses the shame of England; and the grinding injustice of her caste-system, aristocracy, and hierarchy does not escape the lash of his rebuke. He is the friend of the threadbare curate, performing the larger half of clerical duty and getting but a tittle of the tithes,—of the weary seamstress, wetting with midnight tears the costly stuff which must be ready to adorn heartless rank and fashion at to-morrow's pageant,—of the pale governess, grudgingly paid her pittance of salary without a kind word to sweeten the bitterness of a lonely lot. He is the friend even of the workhouse juveniles, and, as their champion, castigates with cutting sarcasm and stinging scorn the reverend and honorable guardians, who, just as, full of hope, they had reached the door of the theatre, prohibited a band of these wretched orphans from availing of a kind-hearted manager's invitation to an afternoon performance of "Jack and the Bean-Stalk." Truly, Punch is more than half right, as, in his indignation, he declares, "It will go luckily with some four-faced Christians, if, with the fullest belief in their own right of entry of paradise, they are not 'stopped at the very doors'"; and the parson, in the case, gets but his deserts, when at his lugubrious sham-piety are hurled stanzas like these:—
"Their little faces beamed with joy
Two miles upon their way,
As they supposed, each girl and boy,
About to see the play.
Their little cheeks with tears were wet,
As back again they went,
Balked by a sanctimonious set,
Led by a Reverend Gent.
"And if such Reverend Gents as he
Could get the upperhand,
Ah, what a hateful tyranny
Would override the land!
That we may never see that time,
Down with the canting crew
That would out of their pantomime
Poor little children do!"
Punch is the friend of all who are friendless, and, with a generous spirit of protection, gives credit to whom credit is due, whatever conventionality, precedent, monopoly, or routine may say to the contrary. During the Crimean War, he took care of the fame of the rank-and-file of the army. The dispatches to Downing Street, reporting the gallantry of titled officers, were more than matched by Punch's imitative dispatches from the seat of war, setting forth the exploits of Sergeant O'Brien, Corporal Stout, or Private Gubbins. He saw to it that those who had the hardest of the fight, the
