The English cartoons are as different as possible from both the French and the German. We have no separately published prints, our postcards have been few, vulgar, and negligible; our cartoonists are really only offered the pages of newspapers and magazines in which to exert their influence over us. And there cannot be two questions as to that influence—it is the influence of good humour. The French mistake it sometimes for indifference, but the English know better. The Germans say they mistake it for frivolity, but they so foam at the mouth about it that one suspects them of glimpsing the spirit behind the smile. The grim note of Steinlen and Forain is almost wholly wanting from English cartoons. The Kaiser, who is a devil in France, is merely making an unholy fool of himself in England; the Crown-Prince, a mass of vice in Paris, is "an awful silly blighter" in London. Will Dyson, the young artist of whom Australia has such reason to be proud, is our grimmest product, and even he lets the Prussian off more easily than do the French artists. Because, after all, don't you know, we're going to thrash the brutes, but there's no need to make a fuss about it, hang it all. Let us have our pipe and our grin, and let us keep to those till the end. For the Lord's sake don't let us have any heroics—those are for doing, not for showing. That is the attitude which one finds over and over again in English drawings; not contempt of danger, so much as a serene determination to grin at it and have no fuss. _Punch_ has come out brilliantly in this particular. Allowed by tradition to have two heroic cartoons a week, the rest of his pages are dedicated to the god of laughter. Germany reads _Punch_ with stupefaction. What, we not only laugh at the Germans, we laugh more at the English! Extraordinary, sinister, effete, degenerate race! It is true, we laugh at ourselves far more than at anybody else—and very often it is for that painful but cogent reason, that we may not weep. Perhaps at the front they laugh wholeheartedly at _Punch_; at home it is a different laugh that greets Tommy in his imperturbable good-humour. In the midst of a hell of fire, Tommy says that what with the beastly Belgian tobacco and the blooming French matches, this'll be the death of him. Sitting on the edge of a trench which consists of nothing but mud and water, in a fearful downpour, he remarks that he pities the poor fellows at home—the London streets must be something awful! And on a dozen other occasions he has expressed that cheery soul of his, in a way as charming as it is moving. As for the Germans, perhaps Mr. Punch reached his happiest moment when he gave us the German family "enjoying its morning hate." A French paper copied that with enjoyment tinged with bewilderment, since the idiomatic "morning hate" was beyond the French editor, who published it merely as "a study of a German family at breakfast time". The Germans have not published it at all.