In short, he was an active and useful member. The speeches which have been most frequently quoted are the ones which he made on May 14, protesting against a vote of £137,524, for the upkeep of the Royal Parks and Pleasure Grounds,[15] and his two speeches on the Public Schools Bill.[16] In the former he asserted that it was unjust and quite illogical to prohibit the entrance of cabs into Hyde Park. Most of his friends, he announced, were not in a position to keep their own carriages, yet they passionately longed to drive about in the haunts of fashion. He himself suffered cruelly under the same longing and disability, and such an exclusion, he explained, was quite incompatible with the spirit of Liberalism. He referred to the regulations concerning the public parks of Vienna and Paris to show that the prejudice against hired vehicles was entirely British and snobbish. On another occasion, Mr. Lowe had moved a clause to the effect that boys educated at public schools should be examined once a year, by an Inspector of Education, in simple reading, writing, and arithmetic, and that a report as to their attainments should be laid before Parliament. On this Labouchere made an excellent speech. In the course of it, he said that he hoped Mr. Lowe's clause would be pressed to a division, because it was evident that most pupils at public schools did not know as much as an average charity boy. Complaint had been made that the whole time of public school boys was taken up by the study of Latin and Greek, but, as a matter of fact, they learned very little of these languages. An ordinarily educated German could converse with a foreigner in Latin, if the two had no other language in common, but how many Englishmen carried from a public school sufficient Latin to do this? He confessed that he himself, although he might be able to translate some half a dozen words of Latin, was wholly unable to translate a sentence of Greek, although he had studied those languages for years at a public school. He complained that this {85} ignorance was the fault of a system, and the misfortune of those who were obliged to undergo it.