The Boston Daily Advertiser - Thursday, May 23, 1895

"THE NOBLE LORD."

[...] nody who is curious to know why feeling in England against the re of lords is so bitter, so contempous, and at times so violent as it is, and why that feeling appears to be growing stronger every day, can get one pretty large section of the complete answer to his question by taking someone such awful example as that furnished by the "noble" house of Queensberry.

There are four points for profitable, if not agreeable, contemplation: First, the "Marquis of Queensberry's rules," for the conduct of the gentlemanly sport of gouging out eyes, spilling blood, and breaking wrist bones; second, the occasion furnished by the junior member of the house for the uncovering of the Oscar Wilde cesspool; third, the precious escapade of a future Marquis of Queensberry, in our own wild West, wherein a barmaid gave some temporary lustre to the young lord's reputation; fourth, the edifying spectacle of a member of the house of peers of the British Empire engaging, without the formality of an adherehce to his own "rules," in a pugilistic encounter with his son in a crowded London thoroughfare.

Now, the people of England, like those of other civilized countries, have learned by long experience to put up philosophically with a great many indecorous things, and to take the world, for good or evil, as they find it; but when it comes to claiming that such men as the Queensberrles, father and sons, and prospective grandsons born of barmaid and concert saloon mothers, have an hereditary divine right to make laws which the people must obey, and to prevent the making of laws that are demanded by elected representatives of the people, the claim arouses a loathing in the average British breast that requires only a very little stirring up to become a fury.

And, it must be remembpred that the house of Queensberry is respectable in comparison with some of the lordly houses, whose stench never has time to get out of the nostrils of the United Kingdom, so frequently is it renewed by fresh exhalations. Once more, take notice that while the people do not like to have imbeciles for their leaders, and do not like to have profligates for their rulers, the condition of more than one, or two, or even three, of the "noble" houses of Britain has been for a long time past, and still is, one in which the prevailing profligacy is of the sort that seldoms fails to be found in close connection with imbecility.