Labouchere wound up his speech, after pointing out the danger of the Chief Secretary's "hideous doctrine of constructive treason" and animadverting on the idea of making use of secret informers, whom he regarded as "the lowest, vilest, and most contemptible of the human race," by stating that the purpose of the Bill was not to suppress outrages or exclusive dealing, but solely to enable landlords to collect their rents.[2] Mr. Serjeant Simon retorted in his defence of the Bill, not quite unjustly perhaps, that Mr. Labouchere's speech had been more facetious than fair, more humorous than consistent. Certainly the John Lydon mixed outrage was a hardly representative specimen of the statistics before the House. The O'Donoghue, on the other hand, had listened to the speech with great pleasure, and felt sure it would be received with satisfaction by a larger circle outside the constituency of Northampton when public opinion in England and Scotland came to be enlightened on this subject. Labouchere continued to argue against the Bill in Committee in every imaginable way. Much of his argument was mere heckling of Mr. Forster. He was always a little inclined to confuse the floor of the House with the hustings, a state of mind which sometimes deprived his speeches of the persuasive value that their argumentative ability deserved. Every now and then he made a crushing point against the Government. {170} "The Home Secretary (Sir William Harcourt)," he said, "had incited a prejudice against the Land League by quoting what the Fenians had done in America. He had read a speech from a Mr. Devoy, an American Fenian, to the effect that he had contemplated blowing up the entire Government of this country, most of the towns in this country and the capital, and, is this monster, the Home Secretary had asked, to be allowed to say these things without protest? He had pointed out the terrible consequences of this speech: how a certain Patrick Stewart immediately subscribed the sum of one dollar that these intentions might be carried out.... Such men as Redpath (another American Fenian) and Devoy, the Right Honourable gentleman told them, would 'come over to Ireland, and the Bill is intended for those gentlemen.' Surely," pursued Mr. Labouchere blandly, "the Right Honourable gentleman was an eminent authority on international law and must be aware that, if these Americans were to come over to Ireland, and if they were to be taken up on mere suspicion and put in prison for eighteen months without being told, or without their Minister in England being told, for what they were put in prison, we should get, and rightly too, into considerable difficulty with the American Government. (Sir William Harcourt: No!) The Right Honourable gentleman said no. Perhaps he meant that he would get us out of the difficulty. But would it not have been better to have brought in an Aliens Bill than to suspend the Habeas Corpus in Ireland? It was a strange thing to suspend the