Great and yet fatal is the power of oratory.  In the course of this same night’s debate, Mr. Chamberlain also made a speech.  During portions of it he delighted the House, and it was extremely effective as a party speech.  In the course of his observations, Mr. Chamberlain, alluding to some jokelet of Labby, declared that a great question like Uganda should not be treated in a spirit of “buffoonery.”  That observation was rude, and scarcely Parliamentary.  But that is not the point—­nobody expects gentlemanly feeling or speech from Mr. Chamberlain.  The point is that the observation could have been applied with much more truth to the speech of Mr. Chamberlain than to that of Labby; for Mr. Chamberlain’s speech consisted, for the most part, of nothing better than the merest party hits—­the kind of thing that almost anybody could say—­that hundreds of journalists nightly write in their party effusions, and for very modest salaries.  But the heart and soul of the question of Uganda were not even touched by Mr. Chamberlain.  Labby may have been right or wrong; but Labby’s was a serious speech with a serious purpose.  Mr. Chamberlain’s speech was just a smart bit of party debating.  The buffoonery—­in the sense of shallowness and emptiness—­was really in the speech that everybody took to be grave.  The seriousness was in the speech which, amid the delighted applause of the Tories, Mr. Chamberlain denounced as buffoonery.

[Sidenote:  The grip of Labby.]

In some respects Mr. Labouchere reminds me of the late Mr. Biggar.  Underneath all his exterior of carelessness, callousness, and flippancy, there lies a very strong, a very tenacious, and a very clear-sighted man.  There are times—­especially when the small hours of the morning are breaking, and Labby is in his most genial mood—­when he is ready to declare that, after all, he is only a Conservative in disguise, and that his Radicalism is merely put on for the purpose of amusing and catching the groundlings.  As a matter of fact, Labby is by instinct one of the most thorough Radicals that ever breathed.  His Radicalism, it is true, is of the antique pattern.  He is an individualist without compromise or concession.  Life to him is to the strongest; he has no faith save in the gospel of the survival of the fittest.  Equable and even cheery, he does not take a particularly joyous view of human existence.  I have heard him speak of the emptiness and futilities of human existence in tones, not of gloom, for he is too much of a philosopher to indulge in regrets, but with a hearty sincerity that would do credit to the Trappist monk who found everything vanity of vanities in a sinful world.  Despising honours and dignities, he positively loathes outward show; he is a Radical by instinct and nature.  Though one of the wealthiest men in the House of Commons, nobody has over known him guilty of one act of ostentation.  Probably he loves power.  I have not the smallest doubt that he would enjoy very well being a Cabinet Minister.  But for social distinction, for the frippery and display of life, he has a positive dislike.  He is like Mr. Biggar also in tenacity.