While complaints of the decline of manners are constant, evidences frequently recur of the worship of "good form" and the efforts made to keep it up. In 1900 _Punch_ pillories an advertisement which offered coaching to "strangers, colonials, Americans and foreigners on matters of high English etiquette and fashion"; but in the same year it requires a certain amount of reading between the lines to dissociate _Punch_ from the sentiments expressed in the verses on Caste:-- "Kind hearts are more than coronets," I know this must of course be true; It is the same old sun that sets On high and low, that rises too. What matters it for whom you buy The ring of diamonds and pearls, A maid whose birth is none too high, Or daughter of a hundred earls? If you're content that she should be-- Well, not exactly as you are, The trifling difference in degree May only very seldom jar. Intolerance we should suppress, An attribute of fools and churls, Yet I prefer, I must confess, The daughter of a hundred earls. It may, perhaps, be fair to regard this as a piece of impersonation--a point of view--rather than an editorial pronouncement. Anyhow, _Punch_ was perfectly sound in his ridicule of the aristocratic pseudo-Socialist who wished to have it both ways, and of the gullibility or snobbery of reporters who ministered to her vanity. Suburban pretensions to smartness are also chaffed in the picture of the mother rebuking her daughter for relapsing to "Pa" and "Ma" instead of calling her parents "Pater" and "Mater." What _Punch_ could not stand, and to his credit never had stood, was the inverted snobbery of those who professed to despise the privileges and the shibboleths of rank, while all the time they took the utmost pains to let you know that they belonged to the class which claimed those privileges and that they were incapable of violating its shibboleths. This old game, revived with considerable skill by Lady Grove in her treatise on The Social Fetish, in which great stress is laid on the test of pronunciation, was mercilessly exposed in its true colours by _Punch_ in 1907. The article is an extremely workmanlike, polite, but damaging criticism of an odious but ancient habit--that of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. Another old custom--the mutual abuse in public of politicians who were bosom friends in private--was revived with such gusto in these years as to elicit _Punch's_ comment of "Pals before Party." [Illustration: PALS BEFORE PARTY M.P.'S WIFE: "I say, Archie, it's a shame to abuse poor Roddy as you did in your speech last night. After all, he's your best pal, although he _is_ on the other side." M.P.: "My dear girl, that's nothing to what he's going to say about me to-morrow. He's shown me his speech, and I'm jotting down a few additional epithets for him to stick in."]