socialistic legislation in Australia and elsewhere, and the growing struggle for the good things of life, no one was willing "to do the washing up." Yet prices and taxes were low enough to excite the envy of the harassed post-war householder. Eggs were advertised at 16 for 1s., but even this did not satisfy Phil May's broken-down tragedian in 1900, who exclaims as he reads the announcement in a shop-window: "Cheap! Ha! Ha! Why, in my time they _threw_ them at us." [Sidenote: _Town v. Country_] [Illustration: JOE THE VENTRILOQUIST PROFESSOR CH-MB-RL-N: "You see, ladies and gentlemen, he talks just as well even when I go right away!"] If all was not well with those who lived on or by the land, the town exodus of week-enders and the demand for small country residences had already created a cult of "rural felicity," the artificiality of which did not escape _Punch_ when he satirized in 1904 the platitudinous appreciation of Nature and country life distilled in the halfpenny Press. At the same time the drastic legislation dealing with the land problem introduced by the Liberals on their return to power in 1906 found little or no sympathy from _Punch_. The cross-currents revealed in the Unionist Party by the great Tariff Reform controversy, the resignation of Mr. Chamberlain, the secession of the Free Trade Ministers, and the inability of the plain person to cope with the transcendental fiscal dialectics of Mr. Balfour, had made it difficult for _Punch_, born and bred in the principles of Free Trade, to accord a whole-hearted support to the Unionist administration in its later years. There was, however, no perplexity in his attitude towards the land policy of their successors. At all their stages _Punch_ was hostile to the new "Lloyd Georgics." We may specially single out the cartoon in August, 1910, presenting a "study of a free-born Briton who, within the period usually allotted to his holidays, is required under threat of a penalty of £50 to answer a mass of obscure conundrums relating to land values, to facilitate his future taxation." The miseries of this inquisitorial process are further developed in an imaginary extract from a specimen return showing how some of the questions in the historic "Form IV" were to be answered. The sequel to this laborious and costly preliminary investigation falls outside the scope of this volume. Nor is it necessary to dwell at length on the movement, doubtless animated by a noble sympathy with the rural population, initiated by the _Daily Mail_ in 1911 on behalf of the revival of windmills and standard bread. The new-found interest in the yokel is satirized in the song of the "Merry Hind" (after Masefield's _Daffodil Fields_), and the cartoon "The Return of the Golden Age" in February, 1913, where Mr. Lloyd George is seen emptying a cornucopia of "rare and refreshing fruit" into the lap of the ecstatic farm labourer. Hodge was at last fairly in the limelight,