Punch: Punch (76.1879)

102 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [March 8, 1879.

ETYMOLOGICAL.

"What lots of Pets you've got, Lady Circe ! Happy Kweechaws ! "
"Not half enough, Captain Jinks! I'm going to start an Apiary !"
"An Apiary! You don't mean to say you're fond of Monkeys—aw!''

AN ECHO OF THE TIME.

{Being the right sort of Leader to balance any number of columns of
Peace gossip, set forth icith any amount of large-type sensation
headings.)

It is indeed a hideous satire on the boasted civilisation of our time,
a strange trophy of the victory claimed for it in the Cultur-kampf,
—for which if Germany has found a name, we claim our own battle-
fields, and our own glory-roll,—that this abandoned and reckless ruffian
should be made the hero of the hour, the nine days' wonder of that
pachydermatous curiosity which can be reached by no stimulant less
potent than the basest, coarsest, and most realistic sensationalism.

From the columns of our contemporaries for some weeks past it
might have seemed that England boasted of but one hero, that the
Empire supplied but one subject of interest, that Society had but
one topic of conversation—the career of a conspicuously villanous
burglar and specially reckless taker of human life.

For the moment, Home politics and Imperial interests are alike
thrust into the background, the debates of the House of Commons
dropped for the highly-wrought descriptions of the press-room—
more appropriately than ever so named, now that the reporter is the
only one besides the prison-officials and the hangman admitted to
its high and holy mysteries.

We may be told that this morbid craving of the "many-headed
monster" must be catered for; that this prurient taste for the
criminal and the vicious, the harrowing and the horrible, must be
pandered to. If even business-like John Bull for awhile for-
gets the counting-house for the condemned cell, and Britannia
lays down her trident to help in the adjustment of the hangman's
hemp—if MarwooDj for the moment, becomes the man of the hour,
in co-partnership with the wretch over whose ashy face he draws
the white cap,—what right, it may be asked, has the public organ to
refuse to the same topic its "faculty of eyes and ears" and the
service of its busy and ubiquitous hands ?

We boldly put in our demurrer to this plea in confession and avoid-

ance, and while we blush to have even to maintain our obligation
to a nobler view of the duty of the Public Instructor, we loudly pro-
claim that this unwholesome interest in the life and death of a
criminal, fed as it has been by all the channels of publicity, is a
disgrace to the boasted civilisation of the nineteenth century.

Our space will not allow us to dilate further on this disgusting
topic.

In our second, third, and fourth pages will be found a full and
graphically descriptive account of the birth, boyhood, manhood,
crimes, accomplishments, amours, adventures, hair-breadth 'scapes,
incredible disguises, apprehension, trial, conviction, prison-conversa-
tion, conduct, and confession, last hours and execution of the con-
temptible miscreant whose career has served as a text for this much
needed protest. _

" Fas est et ab Hoste Doceri."

"Certain Eussian journalists," we are informed by the Times, "have
formulated the project of a literary 'Council of Honour,' with the view of
placing a restraint on the excesses of newspaper controversy."

We recommend the example to our own anti-Russian organs.
Perhaps, on application, and presentation of their credentials of
excess in the shape of articles, they might be taken into the
Council.

A Necessity of the Times.

The Standard says that 50,000 copies have been issued since 1875
of the Archbishop of Canterbury's authorised form of Prayers in
Stormy Weather. They are said to be for the use of those at sea.
Does this mean Her Majesty's blue-jackets, or Her Majesty's
Government f

the khedive to his creditors.

Wriggle me, wriggle me, wriggle me free—

If my hands were but loose, I would soon let you see !