Society. He erects triumphal arches, fills up a group of happy tenants, shouts, sings, dances--any mockery or absurdity, to please his master. He has an incurable horror of the Union, and his greatest pride is to starve sooner than to solicit parish relief. His children are taught the same creed. He prefers living with his wife to being separated from her. His only amusement is the Annual Agricultural Fat-and-Tallow Show; his greatest happiness if his master's pig, which he has fattened, gets the prize. He struggles on, existing rather than living, infinitely worse fed than the beasts he gets up for the exhibitions--much less cared about than the soil he cultivates; toiling without hope, spring, summer, autumn and winter, his wages never higher--frequently less--and perhaps after thirty years' unceasing labour, if he has been all that time with the same landlord, he gets the munificent reward of six-and-twopence, accompanied, it is true, with a warm eulogium on his virtues by the President (a real Lord) for having brought up ten children and several pigs upon five shillings a week. This is the MODEL LABOURER, whose end of life is honourably fulfilled if he is able, after a whole life's sowing for another, to reap a coffin for himself to be buried in! This is not an imaginary portrait, though some of the touches are heightened by the artist. As for the vote, a good illustration is to be found in the advertisement of the sale of the Earl of Ducie's domain in 1843, quoted by _Punch_ on page 14 of Vol. v., including "the entire village of Nymphfield, wherein are 66 houses and the Ducie Arms, with political influence extending over 1,200 honest yeomen." As for the exhibitions, with their rewards and prizes for the virtuous and industrious poor, _Punch_ was lavish of sarcasm at the expense of this parsimonious and condescending benevolence, when the prizes represented a miserable percentage on the profits which the recipients had earned for their masters by special zeal. So we find him suggesting a prize of £1 to the labourer who had lived the longest number of years on the shortest commons, and during the same period Leech's cartoon of a show where the prize pig is awarded £3 3s. and the prize peasant £2 2s. When baby shows were introduced in the next decade, Lord Palmerston was drawn with his prize agricultural baby, holding up a wizened old labourer with the label "Prize, 30s. Labourer all his life and never wanted to improve his condition." _Punch's_ democratic distrust of Lords and Ladies Bountiful was no doubt in part the cause of his hostility to the Young England movement. From his account of the matter one might gather that Disraeli identified himself with, if he did not actually originate, the fashion of giving prizes to the working classes. Lord John Manners fell an easy prey to "the Democritus of Fleet Street" (as the _Daily