Mr. Labonchere took the chair at a great meeting iu
St. James's Hall on Thursday, to support the Home-rule measure of the Government. His speech was of the kind which we expect from Mr. Labonchere. He was very sarcastic about the titled persons who attended the meeting held last week in Her Majesty's Theatre, and declared that " on the one side are arrayed the aristocracy, the Peers, the courtiers, an august influence which sought once before to ostracise Mr. Gladstone, and all the servile and silly crew that regard it as the summit of human happiness to grovel. On the other side are those whose creed is that this country and every other country ought to be ruled by the people and for the people." Is there no " grovelling," then, to the people, as well as to rank ? Mr. Labouchere -seems to us to express often enough the mind of those who grovel before the majority, and never more than when he uses language so absolutely and vapidly unmeaning as when he describes an English General who did his best in Egypt as a man " who received elide and £30,000 for slaughter- ing Egyptian peasants and boasting of his victory." If the spirit of Mr. Labouchere's speeches could take possession of the English people, the grovelling before the multitude would soon be so abject, that it would be a difficult question which should be the grovellers, and which the people before whom the grovelling was to be done. Such speeches only disgust masculine minds with the cause which they are intended to advance.
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