_Punch_ had no sympathy with the "passive resistance" movement, and when Mr. Lloyd George in 1904 advocated the closing of all the elementary schools in Wales as a protest against the Education Act, he regarded him as more desirous to serve party ends than to save the souls of the young. In 1906 it was the turn of the Liberals to redeem _their_ pledges, and Mr. Birrell was in charge of the measure. _Punch_ accordingly depicted him as a schoolmaster saying to the Act of 1902, "My boy, this [the cane he is holding] can't hurt you more than it's going to hurt me." _Punch_ evidently had no love for the new Bill, but his satire is impartially levelled at the irreconcilable sectarian differences of the supporters and antagonists of the measure. All this wrangling had nothing to do with the education of children. The gradual and inevitable transformation of the measure by the end of the year is happily hit off in an adaptation from "Alice in Wonderland," with Mr. Balfour as the Cheshire Cat and Mr. Birrell as Alice carrying what _had_ been a baby, but was now a pig, as the Cheshire Cat expected. [Illustration: "I am glad to see you come so regularly to our evening services, Mrs. Brown." "Yus. Yer see, me 'usband 'ates me goin' hout of a hevening, so I does it to spite 'im."] The Education Office in these years was the great jumping-off ground for aspirants to higher Ministerial office, and was occupied by a succession of "transient and (sometimes) embarrassed phantoms." Mr. Birrell quitted Whitehall to govern Ireland from Overstrand, and in 1908 _Punch_, in his cartoon on the tardy compromise achieved by the Church and Nonconformity, showed "Master Runciman," with his Bill, being carried safely through the waters of strife by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Dr. Clifford. [Illustration: MOTHER (visiting son at preparatory school): "Well, my darling!" SON: "I say, Mother, don't look so ghastly pleased before all these fellows."] In 1905, according to the _Scotsman_ (quoted by _Punch_), the prospective Unionist candidate for Berwick maintained before a meeting of electors that "the only way to deal with the religious question was to allow each denomination to provide religious teaching in school hours _for the parents of such children as desired it_." The italics are provided by _Punch_, who threw further light on the need for this "vicarious religion" in an illustrated dialogue published in 1911:-- SCHOOLMISTRESS: "And am I to give the child religious instruction?" MOTHER: "I don't care wot yer do so long as yer don't bash 'er abaht the 'ead." [Sidenote: _John Bull, Junior_]