Food, Farmer and Future

Abstract

“Considering Punch as the expression of the popular voice … is it not also surely some overruling power in the nature of things, quite other than the desire of his readers, which compels him, when the squire, the colonel and the admiral are to be at once expressed, together with all that they legislate or fight for, in the symbolic figure of the nation, to represent the incarnate John Bull always as a farmernever as a manufacturer or shopkeeper and to conceive and exhibit him rather as paymaster for the faults of his neighbours, than as watching for opportunity to gain out of their follies.” John Ruskin. Lecture at Oxford. Nov. 1883. (Cook and Wedderburn ed. VoL 33, p. 365.)