The charge that our comic papers have generally opposed the friends
of liberty and progress--that is the most intelligent and
appreciative portion of the public--is quite true, but it does not
go far to account for their failure. _Punch_ has done this steadily
ever since its establishment, without serious injury. No good cause
has ever received much backing from it till it became the cause of
the majority, or indeed has escaped being made the butt of its
ridicule; and we confess we doubt whether "the friends of progress,"
using the term in what we may call its technical sense, were ever a
sufficiently large body, or had ever sufficient love of fun, to make
their disfavor of any great consequence. Most people in the United
States who are very earnestly enlisted in the service of "a cause"
look on all ridicule as "wicked," and regard with great suspicion
anybody who indulges in it, whether he makes them the object of it
or not. They bore with it, when turned against slavery, from one or
two distinguished humorists, because its effectiveness was plain;
but we doubt whether any man who had the knack of seeing the
ludicrous side of things ever really won their confidence, partly
owing to their own natural want of humor, and partly to their
careful cultivation of a habit of solemnity of mind as the only
thing that can make an "advanced" position really tenable, to say
nothing of comfortable. The causes of all successes, as of all
failures, in the literary world are of course various, and no doubt
there is a good deal of truth in all that has been said in solution
of the comic-paper problem. American humorists of the best class can
find something better or more lucrative to do than writing for a
comic paper; while the poor American humorists, like the poor
humorists of all countries, are coarse and vulgar, even where they
are not stupid.