Before dealing further with the part played by Labouchere in Irish legislation, it will be necessary to consider his view of English politics as a whole. He had not at first been an enthusiastic partisan of Home Rule. He had even gone the length at Northampton of saying that he himself was no Home Ruler. Yet, in point of fact, no English member was a more zealous advocate of Irish claims than he. Why was this? His motives, as I have been able to gather them from many conversations with him on the subject, were twofold: His Radical soul was disgusted by what, in the face of the Irish attitude, was the only alternative to Home Rule, namely coercion, and he realised that the only effective way to "dish the Whigs," whom he hated even more than the Conservatives, was to use the Irish vote. The second motive was by far the stronger. He had a definite conception of Radical government to which he would undoubtedly have sacrificed hecatombs of Irish patriots if necessary. As a matter of fact, the Irish patriots happened to be a useful means towards his end, the establishment of such a government. Hence his alliance with them. When Mr. Gladstone and his Whig-Radical Government were faced in 1880 with the Irish question in so acute a form, Labouchere saw a real possibility ahead of establishing a Radical as distinguished from a merely Liberal {226} Government. The protagonist of his scheme was Mr. Chamberlain, already a member of the Cabinet, and, in the natural course of events, the almost certain successor of the already venerable statesman whose name had become the war-cry of English Liberalism.