Mr. Labouchere was also very fierce. Far be it from
him, he said, to compare the House of Lords to thieves ; nevertheless, in -the last fifty years it had done more harm than all the thieves' dens and thieves' kitchens in England. It is difficult to see on what Mr. Labouchere grounds this opinion. We can see no more means of weighing the mischief caused by obstructing wise legislation against the mischief caused by flagrant immorality, than we have means of weighing the benefit of, say, the Ten- Hours Act or the Bank-Holidays Act against the benefit of obey- ing your parents or abstaining from idolatry. We wish the Democratic agitators would refrain from wild words. The House of Lords, as it is, is a barrier against wise popular measures, and like all barriers against the natural course of a stream, it turns a stream into a flood. Is not that mischief enough, without trying to compare it with evils of a totally different class, between which and it there is absolutely no common measure P Has Mr. Labouchere ever discovered a barometer of moral evil, .and, applied it to measure either the degradation caused by dens of thieves on the one hand, or by the votes of the House of Lords on the other
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