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Updated: May 1, 2025
Staying power is the rarest of all Parliamentary powers; Labby has plenty of staying power. Another figure which the new House of Commons is gradually beginning to understand is Sir Charles Dilke. He is one of the men who seem to have no interest in life outside politics.
But the very day the House met after the formation of the Government, Labby was in his old place on the front bench below the gangway as if nothing had occurred just as ready as ever to take his share in the proceedings of the House of Commons.
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.
Nothing stood on the paper save one of those harmless, futile motions which are discussed with about as much interest by the House generally, as "abstract love" to use a bold figure of Labby in a recent debate. It was a motion which complained that private members did not get sufficient time.
When the dying man was told this, he said: "Give them my greetings I am grateful. I have forgiven it all, and would have forgotten it, save for this." Here he paused, and was silent. After some moments, he opened his eyes, half-smiled, and motioning to Labouchere to come close, whispered: "But, Labby, the past can not be wiped out by a resolution of Parliament.
His speech on Uganda, for instance, was admirably put together, and chock full of facts, sound in argument, and in its seriousness quite equal to the magnitude of the issues which it raised. But no man is allowed to play "out of his part" as the German phrase goes. Labby has accustomed the House to expect amusement from him, and it will not be satisfied unless he gives it.
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.
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.
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