It is true that Mr. Applegarth, the working man's candidate, retired before the final struggle, finding--according to his own statement--"that he was too late in the field to make headway against the popular feeling in Sir John Lubbock's favour!" He had better have said, "Finding that he had no business ever to have come forward." What right, _Punch_ asks him, had he, or any man who wishes to see the best wisdom of England in the House of Commons, in the field which Sir John Lubbock had occupied in advance of him? All working men who are worth their salt must admit that no claims that could be set up on behalf of their order could stand a moment's comparison with those of Sir John Lubbock on the support of the best and broadest Liberalism. Let them choose constituencies where they will have to fight pseudo-Liberalism and genuine Toryism, and welcome. But in the name of their cause and ours, don't let them put stumbling blocks in the Parliamentary path of such men as Sir John Lubbock, or they will only do what they have more than once done already--make way for the fox, while the lion and the bear are worrying each other. The underlying assumption that "the best and broadest Liberalism" sufficed for the needs of the working classes has long since gone by the board. Here at any rate _Punch_ failed to foresee the inevitable march in representation summed up in the three stages: Liberal, "Lib.-Lab.," Labour. There is, however, a considerable advance on the views expressed in his letter to Tom Hughes in his welcome to Messrs. Burt and Macdonald on their election in 1874:-- Earliest among the early birds, _Punch_ was glad to hail his friends, Messrs. Burt and Macdonald, representatives of Underground Britain, Members for the Mine, sample black diamonds, "picked Wallsends." They have sought and found the fairest audience in the world. _Punch_ will take his Davy that any light theirs can throw on dark places will be gladly received; that all they have to say to the purpose will be attentively--nay, respectfully--listened to, and weighed as carefully as was ever corve at pit-bank. And really these pioneers of the pick--hewers, we presume, of a way for other Working-men Representatives, equally stout and worthy--are about the only novelty, as far as _Punch_ can presage, of the new Parliament, always except the Parliament itself, with its sudden swap of sides and strangely altered balances of Power. [Sidenote: _Truckling to the Working Classes_]