The opinions of Englishmen are rarely disinterested, and it should never be forgotten that Henry Labouchere was, in fact, a Frenchman. French by birth, he remained, to the day of his death, French in his method of formation of opinion, in his outlook on life, in the peculiar quality of his wit. It was this that enabled, or rather obliged, him to take that curiously detached view of English ideals which was at times so disconcerting even to those who thought that they understood him. Ideals, he held, were only entitled to respect when translated into material currency. "How much £ s. d. does he believe in what he says?" he would ask concerning some fervid prophet. And if convinced that the requisite materialisation had occurred, he would accept the prophet as one more strange and amusing phenomenon in a strange and amusing universe. It would have never occurred to him that because the prophet was sincere he was right. That was a matter for reason. He once observed to me, in his whimsical way, of a colleague, that the mere denial of the existence of God did not entitle a man's opinion to be taken without scrutiny on matters of greater importance. No "mere" Englishman could have said that. That essential foreignness rendered him hard of comprehension even to those who sympathised with his aims. For instance, he was a Radical, as sincere and convinced a Radical as the late Mr. Stead, but in a very different way. His Radicalism was based on Reason. It represented Reason applied to that particular department of human affairs called Politics, and so applied, one may add, in spite of the irrationality of most of the men called Radical politicians. English Radicalism, on the other hand, rests mainly on humanitarian sentimentalism. The _religion du clocher_ of feudal England has been largely replaced by a rival cult, the {vii} hysterical excesses of which found in him a scathing critic. He did not resent the hereditary principle in government because it was unjust, but because it was absurd, and when he fought some concrete instance of injustice, as he was constantly doing, the emotional aspect of the case made little, if any, appeal to him. He disliked injustice on rational and, as it were, æsthetic grounds. He had no passionate love of virtue, public or private; he thought it, on the whole, a sound investment, but then even sound investments sometimes go wrong. In his personal outlook on things he was as completely non-religious as a man could be. He was not anti-religious. He fully recognised the utility of religious belief in others, perhaps even in society at large, and he based this recognition not so much on the hardness of men's hearts as on the thickness of their heads. But personally he, Henry Labouchere, took no interest whatever in the matter. In philosophy he was a strict agnostic, owning Hume, for whom he had the greatest admiration, and the Kant of the _Critique of Pure Reason_, as his masters.