Commercialism in high places offended _Punch's_ notion of _noblesse oblige_. Much the same sentiment inspired his vehement protest against our selling the house in which Napoleon died at St. Helena for 180,000 francs: "We have an especial dislike to this traffic in a great man's grave. It is turning the funeral urn into a money-box with a vengeance--the vengeance of a miserly shopkeeper." On the other hand, complaints of extravagance and waste, though not so strident as of late years, are freely uttered in connexion with official dinners or loyal demonstrations--for example, when the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Chester in 1869, the Mayor's subscription alone amounted to £500. In the domain of Commerce and Economics no movement in the Victorian age was more fruitful of results than that of co-operation. But a history of the system which began with Owen, took concrete shape in the famous venture of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844--twenty-eight working men with a capital of £38--and led to the multiplication of Workmen's Co-operative Societies all over the country, is outside the limits of this survey. The movement came from below; _Punch_ was mainly if not entirely interested in its development as it affected the well-to-do classes by the establishment of "the Stores," and their competition with retail shops, and in the grievances of purchasers and their servants who had to carry their parcels home--grievances which reach their climax in the year 1868. In other words, he approaches the subject as an irresponsible social satirist, not as a student of economics. His pages only show the froth of the movement, not its deep underlying current. So, too, with the cult of Social Science. The periodic Congresses furnished him in the main with matter for chaff, though in 1858 he appeals to the moral engineers of the Social Science Association to devise some means of utilizing "social sewage"--swindlers, fraudulent bankers and trustees. The shortcomings of British cookery always found in _Punch_ a candid critic, but he had no sympathy for those journalists who sought to remedy the deficiency by the publication of elaborate and expensive daily _menus_. Such instruction was a mockery to the poor who had not enough to eat, and did not know how to cook the little they had. [Sidenote: _Banting and "Hydros"_]