Life — June 28, 1923 — page 13: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

This satirical cartoon compares three moments in Canadian military history through a recurring joke structure: successive groups being "driven out." **1650**: French forces expel Indigenous peoples using violence (tomahawks, trumpet). **1750**: English soldiers with muskets drive out the French, reversing the previous expulsion. **1920**: Bootleggers with trucks drive out "the Scotch"—a pun on Scottish whisky. During Prohibition (1920-1933), bootleggers illegally transported alcohol across borders. The humor works by treating each historical displacement identically, then deflating it in the final panel by making the "expelled group" literally liquor rather than people. The joke mocks both Canadian history's colonial violence and contemporary Prohibition-era smuggling as equally inevitable "national progress."