CHAPTER IX
FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS
First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch Const.i.tuency
The sketches which I have just given of my purely social experiences may seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production of _The New Republic_, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however, say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have any value or not, n.o.body could in reality have been more industrious than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more coherent lines.
I have already given some account of _The New Republic_, indicating its character, its construction, the mood which gave rise to it, and the moral it was intended to express. This moral--the fruit of my education at Oxford, and also of my experiences of society before I became familiar with the wider world of London--was, as I have said already, that without religion life is reduced to an absurdity, and that all philosophy which aims at eliminating religion and basing human values on some purely natural subst.i.tute is, if judged by the same standards, as absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already, _The New Republic_ by a short satirical romance, _Positivism on an Island_, in the manner of Voltaire"s _Candide_. My next work, _Is Life Worth Living?_ in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of formal logic, was largely due to that wider knowledge of the world with which social life in London and elsewhere had infected me. The bitterest criticism which that work excited was based on the contention that the kind of life there a.n.a.lyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for that very reason--that the book was addressed only to an idle cla.s.s, and that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were deducible which had any meaning for the mult.i.tude of average men. Some such objection had been antic.i.p.ated from the first by myself. I was already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If life without a G.o.d is unsatisfying, even to those for whom this world has done its utmost, how much more unsatisfying must it be to that vast majority for whom a large part of its pleasures are, from the nature of things, impossible." But a closer and wider acquaintance with the kind of life in question, and the sorrows and pa.s.sions masked by it, prompted me to translate the argument of the three books just mentioned into yet another form--namely, that of a tragic novel--_A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_.
This book was attacked by the apostles of non-religious morality with a bitterness even greater than that which had been excited in them by _Is Life Worth Living?_ And with these critics were a.s.sociated many others, who, whether they agreed or disagreed with its purely religious tendencies, denounced it because it dealt plainly with certain corruptions of human nature, the very mention of which, according to them, was in itself corrupting, and was an outrage of the decorums of a respectable Christian home. Since those days the gravest reviews and newspapers have dealt with such matters in language far more plain and obtrusively crude than mine, and often displaying a much more restricted sense of the ultimate problems connected with them. Certain critics, indeed--among whom were many Catholic priests, with the experience of the confessional to guide them--took a very different line, and welcomed the book as a serious and valuable contribution to the psychology of spiritual aspiration as dependent on supernatural faith.
Put briefly, the story of the novel is this. The heroine, who is young, but not in her first girlhood, has in her aspect and her natural disposition everything that is akin to the mystical aspirations of the saint; but, more or less desolated by the diffused skepticism of the day, she has been robbed of innocence by a man, an old family friend, and has never been at peace with herself or wholly escaped from his sinister power since. The hero, who meets her by accident and with whom she is led into a half-reluctant friendship, has at first no suspicion of the actual facts of her history, but believes her troubles, at which she vaguely hints, to be due merely to the loss of religious beliefs which were once her guide and consolation. He accordingly does his best, though deprived of faith himself, to effect in her what Plato calls "a turning round of the soul," and hopes that he may achieve in the process his own conversion also. For aid in his perplexities he betakes himself to a Catholic priest, once a well-known man of the world, and calls her attention to the immortal pa.s.sage in St. Augustine, beginning, "If to any the tumult of the flesh were hushed, hushed the images of earth and air and heaven." But he feels as though he were the blind endeavoring to lead the blind, and the end comes at last in the garden of a Mediterranean villa, behind whose lighted windows a fancy ball is in progress. The hero, whose dress for the occasion is that of a Spanish peddler, encounters the seducer in one of the shadowy walks and is shot dead by the latter, who believes that his life is being threatened by some genuine desperado; and the heroine, draped in white, like a Greek G.o.ddess of purity, witnesses this sudden event, is overcome by the shock, and dies of heart failure on a marble bench close by.
One of the stoutest defenders of this book was Lord Houghton, who, in writing to me with regard to it, mentioned a curious incident. The villain of the piece, Colonel Stapleton, was drawn by me from a certain Lord ----, as to whom I had said to myself the first moment I met him: "This man is the quintessence of selfishness. He is capable of anything that would minister to his own pleasures." "The novel," said Lord Houghton in his letter, "requires no apology. You have made only one mistake in it. The conduct of the colonel in one way would have differed from that which you ascribe to him. For instance," Lord Houghton continued, "I once met Lord X. in Paris, and to my own knowledge what Lord X. would have done on a similar occasion was so-and-so." Lord X.
was the very man from whom my picture of the colonel had been drawn.
Some years later I published another novel, _The Old Order Changes_, of which the affection of a man for a woman is again one of the main subjects, but it is there regarded from a widely different standpoint. I shall speak of this book presently, but I may first mention that in the interval between the two a new cla.s.s of questions, of which at Littlehampton and Oxford I had been but vaguely conscious, took complete possession of my mind, and pushed for a time the interests which had been previously engaging me into the background.
This change was due to the following causes, which partly produced, and were partly produced by, one of the earlier outbreaks in this country of what is now called "social unrest." The doctrines of Karl Marx, which had long been obscurely fermenting in the minds of certain English malcontents, now began for the first time in this country to be adopted by a body of such men as the basis of an organized party--a party which they ambitiously named "The Social Democratic Federation." The main object of these persons was the confiscation of all private capital.
Another agitation had been initiated by Henry George, which in this country was much more widely popular, and which had for its object the confiscation not of private capital, but simply and solely of privately owned land. Meanwhile Bright, who was certainly not a Socialist (for he defended the rights of capital in many of their harshest forms), had been attacking private landlordism on the ground not that it was in itself an economic abuse, as George taught, but that in this country it formed, under existing conditions, the basis of an aristocratic cla.s.s.
Finally there was Ruskin, who had, since the days when I first knew him at Oxford, been attempting to excite sympathy with some vague project of revolution by rewriting economic science in terms of sentiment which sometimes, but only on rare occasions, struck fire by chance contact with the actual facts of life. It is hardly surprising that such ideas as these, jumbled together by a mob in Trafalgar Square, took practical form, on a certain memorable occasion, in a looting of shops in Piccadilly--an enterprise instigated by men one of whom, enlightened by disillusion, has subsequently earned respect as a grave cabinet minister.
As for myself, the most pertinacious conviction which these movements forced on me was that, whatever elements of justice and truth might lurk in them, they were based on wild distortions of historical and statistical facts, or on an ignorance even more remarkable of the actual dynamics of industry, of the powers of the average worker, and of the motives by which he is actuated.
Dominated by this conviction, which for me was verified every time I opened a newspaper, I found myself daily devoting more and more of my time to the task of reducing this chaos of revolutionary thought to order. But what most sharply awakened me to the need for such a work was an incident which, before it took place, would have, so I thought, a tendency to lull my anxieties for a time rather than to maintain or stimulate them.
I had regarded the revolutionary mood as mainly, if not exclusively, an emanation from those hotbeds of urban industry in which the modern industrial system has reached its most complete development, and I pictured to myself the more remote districts of the kingdom--especially the Highlands of Scotland--as still the scenes of an idyllic and almost undisturbed content. As to the rural counties of England, I was, so I think, correct, but, as to the Scottish Highlands, the truth of my ideas in this respect still remained to be tested. To me the Highlands were thus far nothing more than a name. I was therefore delighted when one morning I received an invitation from Lord and Lady Howard of Glossop, to stay with them for some weeks at Dorlin, their remote Highland home.
Dorlin, which had been bought by Lord Howard from his connection, Mr.
Hope Scott, is situated on the borders of a sea loch, Loch Moidart, and of all places in Scotland it then enjoyed the repute of being one of the least accessible. The easiest means of reaching it was by a long day"s journey in a rudely appointed cattle boat, which twice a week left Oban at noon, carrying a few pa.s.sengers, and reached at nightfall the rude pier of Salen, about nine miles from the house. To my unaccustomed eyes the descent from the sleeping car at Oban, with the vision which greeted them of sea and heathery mountain, was like walking into the Waverley Novels. As I followed a barrow of luggage to the pier from which the steamer started, I expected to see Fergus MacIvors everywhere. This expectation was not altogether fulfilled; but at last, when the pier was reached, I knew not which thrilled me most--the smallness and rudeness of the vessel to which I was about to commit myself or the majesty of a kilted being who so bristled with daggers that even Fergus MacIvor might have been afraid of him. Not till later did I learn that the name of this apparition was Jones; but even if I had known it then, no resulting disillusion could have marred the adventurous romance of the voyage which was now awaiting me.
It was a voyage of astonishing and, to me, wholly novel beauty. The islands which we pa.s.sed, or at which we stopped, wore all the colors of all the grape cl.u.s.ters of the world, until these were dimmed by slowly approaching twilight, when we found ourselves at rest in the harbor of Tobermory in Mull. We waited there for more than an hour, while leisurely boats floated out to us, laden with sheep and cattle, which were gradually got on board in exchange for some other cargo. Then, with hardly a ripple, our vessel was again in motion, its bows pointing to the mouth of Loch Salen opposite. By and by, in the dimness of the translucent evening, our vessel stopped once more--I could not tell why or wherefore, till a splash of oars was heard and some bargelike craft was decipherable emerging out of the gloom to meet us. Into this, as though in a dream, a number of sheep were lowered; and we, resuming our course, found ourselves at last approaching a small rocky protrusion, on which a lantern glimmered, and which proved to be Salen pier.
Gallic accents reached us, mixed with some words of English. With the aid of adroit but hardly distinguishable figures, I found myself stumbling over the boulders of which the pier was constructed, and realized that a battered wagonette, called "the machine," was awaiting me. A long drive among ma.s.ses of mountain followed. At last a gleam of waters was once again discernible. The road, rough and sandy, ran close to little breaking waves, and then, in the shadow of woods and overhanging rocks, numerous lights all of a sudden showed themselves.
The machine with a lurch entered something in the nature of a carriage drive, and I found myself on the threshold of Dorlin--a lodge of unusual size, which seemed to be almost wading in the water. When the door opened I was greeted by an odor of peat smoke. An old London butler conducted me up a flight of stairs, and I was presently in a drawing-room filled with familiar figures. Besides my host and hostess and their then unmarried daughters, were Lady Herbert of Lee, Lord Houghton, the Verulams, and the most delightful of priests, Father Charles Macdonald, famous as a fisherman, inimitable as a teller of stories, and great-grandson of fighters who had died for Prince Charlie at Culloden. One guest at Dorlin, who had left just before my arrival, was the then Lord Lorne, and I was told by Lady Howard that the boatmen who had helped him to land--Catholic Macdonalds all of them--had been heard saying to one another that "not so very long ago no Campbell would have dared to set foot in the Macdonald country." Not far away there were still living at that time two old ladies--Macdonalds--whose small house was a museum of Stuart relics, and who still spoke of the Pretender with bated breath as "the King."
Here, indeed, were conditions closely resembling those to which I had looked forward. The past was once more present. The modern spirit of unrest had, so it seemed to me, retreated to some incredible distance.
Lord Houghton, Father Charles, one of the daughters of the house, and I invariably beguiled the evenings with a rubber of modest whist. Lord Houghton was to leave on a Monday morning, and as soon as the dinner of Sunday night was over he hurried us to our places at the card table for another and a concluding game. Much to his surprise and annoyance somebody whispered in his ear that Lord Howard, though an excellent Catholic, had always had an objection to the playing of cards on Sundays. "Well," said Lord Houghton, "we must get Lady Herbert to speak to him about it." Lady Herbert, hearing her name, asked what she was wanted to do. Lord Houghton explained, and she, in tones of caressing deprecation, repeated that, as to this matter, Lord Howard was afflicted with a strong Protestant prejudice. "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, taking both her hands, "what"s the good of belonging to that curious superst.i.tion of yours if one mayn"t play cards on Sunday?" Through her mediation the desired indulgence was granted. The game was played, but Providence nevertheless chastened Lord Houghton, using me as its humble instrument, for I won three or four pounds from him--the largest, if not the only, sum that I ever won at cards in my life.
Such episodes, imported as they were from the social world of England, were not altogether in keeping with the visionary world of Waverley, but they could not dissipate its atmosphere, charged with bygone romance.
And yet it was among these "distant dreams of dreams" that my ears became first awake to the nearer sounds of some vague social disturbance of which Ruskin"s gospel of Labor, as I heard it at Oxford without any clear comprehension of it, had been a harbinger.
I had been asked, when I left Dorlin, to pay one or two other visits in the Highlands farther north--to the Sutherlands at Dunrobin, the Munro Fergusons at Novar, and the Lovats at Beaufort. My route to these places was by the Caledonian Ca.n.a.l, and in listening to the conversation of various groups on the steamer I several times heard the opinion expressed that, sooner or later, the Highlands were bound to be the scene of some great agrarian revolution. I was well aware that the a.s.sailants of landed property, from Marx and George down to the semiconservative Bright, to whose voices had now been joined that of Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain, had pointed to the magnitude of the greater Highland estates as signal types of the abuses to which Highland landlordism is liable; but not till I took that journey on the steamer from Fort William to Inverness had I attached to these arguments more than an academic importance.
In the course of my ensuing visits I talked over the threatened revolution with persons of much local knowledge, especially with one of the Duke of Sutherland"s agents, and Father Grant, the chaplain of the Catholic Lovats at Beaufort. They did not, it appeared to me, take the threatened revolution very seriously, and they showed me how absurdly in error the agitators were as to certain of the facts alleged by them. One of their errors consisted in their gross overestimates of what the practical magnitude of the great Highland properties was, the rent of the Sutherland property being, for instance, no more per acre than the twentieth part of an average acre in England. Father Grant, who was a learned antiquarian, mentioned as a commonplace on revolutionary platforms the statement that in the Highlands no such beings as the private landlord existed prior to the rebellion of 1745, on the suppression of which the government stole their communal rights from the clansmen, turning them into tenants at will, whom the chieftains, now absolute owners, could evict and expatriate as they pleased. No fiction, said Father Grant, himself a crofter"s son, could be more absurd than this. It was absolutely disproved, he said, by a ma.s.s of medieval charters, in which were a.s.signed to the chieftains by the Scottish Crown the fullest territorial rights possible for lawyers to devise.[1]
At the same time my informants admitted with regret that landlordism in the Highlands was liable to special abuses, an instance of which had come to the fore recently. This was the long lease acquired by a rich American of enormous areas which he converted into a single deer forest, evicting certain crofters in the process with what was said to have been signal harshness.
All this information was to me extremely interesting; but I left Scotland wishing that it had been more extensive and methodical. It had, however, the effect of stimulating me in the work to which I was now addressing myself--that is to say, the elaboration of some formal and militant treatise, in which I might not only discredit by a.n.a.lysis the main fallacies common to all the social revolutionaries of the day, but also indicate the main facts and principles on which alone a true science of society can be based. This work took the form of a short treatise or essay, called _Social Equality, or a Study in a Missing Science_. The science to which I referred was the science of human character as connected with the efforts by which wealth and all material civilizations are produced. A French translation of it was soon issued in Paris. I was also asked to sanction what I had no right to prohibit--namely, translations of it into Rumanian and Spanish. My main object was to show that, as applied to the process in question, "social equality" was a radically erroneous formula, the various efforts to which wealth is due being not only essentially unequal in themselves, but only susceptible of stimulation by the influence of unequal circ.u.mstances. The Radical doctrines to the contrary, which were then being enunciated with reckless bitterness by Bright, were taken to pieces and exposed, and the claims of mere average labor, as opposed to those of the capitalist, were in general language reduced to their true dimensions. I supplemented this volume by a criticism in _The Quarterly Review_ of Henry George"s celebrated _Progress and Poverty_, and Henry George himself when he came to London told Lady Jeune (afterward Lady St. Helier), without knowing that I was the author of it, that this criticism was the only reply to himself which was worth being considered seriously. I was conscious, however, of my own limitations, these relating mainly to matters of statistical fact, such as the exact proportion borne in a country like the United Kingdom by the aggregate rental of the landlords to the aggregate income of the capitalists on the one hand and that of the ma.s.s of manual workers on the other. I was conscious of being specially hampered in attempting to deal minutely with the statistical fallacies of Bright.
I was still in this state of mind a year after my first visit to Dorlin when I received a letter from Lady Howard asking me to come to them again. I went, and all the charm of my first visit repeated itself; but repeated itself with this difference--that it was no longer undisturbed.
The possibility of a revolution in the Highlands had now become a matter of audible discussion even in the remote Macdonald country. The temper of the spa.r.s.e population was there, indeed, not very violent, but the thought that some sort of disaffection was even there actually alive would often disturb my previous sense of peace, while the Glasgow and Edinburgh newspapers, whether by way of attacking the established order or defending it, were pelting one another with statistical statements in respect of which each party seemed to contradict itself almost as recklessly as it contradicted its opponents. My own growing ambition was to get at definite and detailed information which would either support the agitators or else give them the lie, and would also provide otherwise comprehensive and specific ill.u.s.trations of the general principles which I had formulated in my late volume. But as to the means by which comprehensive information of this specific kind could be collected I was still more or less at a loss; and from the vague and conflicting character of the statistics adduced it was evident that other people were in the same or in a worse condition. That the required information existed somewhere in the form of official and other records I was convinced. The problem was how to get at these and recast the information in a digested and generally intelligible form.
The necessity for doing this was brought home to me with renewed force by the fact that, when I left Dorlin, I was engaged to stay at Ardverikie with Sir John Ramsden, who was the owner, by purchase, of one of the greatest sporting territories in the Highlands, a large portion of which he was then planting with timber. The first stage of my journey from Dorlin was again Fort William, where I slept, and whence next morning I proceeded by an old-fashioned stagecoach to my destination, which lay midway between Fort William and Kingussie. We had not gone far before I heard an English voice shouting something to the pa.s.sengers near in tones of great excitement. The speaker, with his black frock coat, was, to judge from his appearance, a Nonconformist English minister, who was vaguely pointing to the mountains on the left side of the road; and at last I managed to catch a few words of his oratory. They were in effect as follows: "What was there on those mountains fifty years ago? Men were on those mountains then. What will you find there now? Deer--nothing but deer." This sort of thing went on for some time, till at last the coachman, a burly Highlander, turned round on the orator and said: "I"m thinking you don"t know what you"re talking about. In those mountains at which you"re flourishing your hands you won"t find a deer all the way from Fort William to Kingussie." The orator then, so far as I was able to understand, wandered away to the question of landed property generally, and Acts of Parliament pa.s.sed in the reign of William and Mary. It seemed, however, that his audience were not responsive, and he presently began descanting on the ignorance of the Highland people and their need of more education. Here, again, his eloquence was interrupted by the coachman. "Education," he exclaimed. "What you call education I call the Highland rinderpest."
After this the orator was comparatively quiet.
Meanwhile the character of the surrounding landscape changed. We began to see glimpses ahead of us of the waters of Loch Laggan. Presently the loch, fringed with birch trees, was directly below the road. On the opposite side were mountains descending to its silvery surface, some of them bare, some green with larches, and upward from a wooded promontory wreaths of smoke were rising. Then between the wreaths I distinguished a tall gray tower, and something like cl.u.s.tered turrets. Pointing to these, the coachman pulled up his horses, and I understood him to say that at this point I must descend. A man, who had evidently been waiting, came forward from a tuft of bracken. My luggage was extracted from the vehicle and dragged down to a boat, which was, as I now saw, waiting by the beach below; and a row of some twenty minutes took me across the loch and brought me to my journey"s end.
Ardverikie is a castellated building. It is something in the style of Balmoral, with which everybody is familiar from photographs. It is surrounded by old-fashioned gardens beyond which rise the mountains.
Down one of the graveled paths Lady Guendolen came to meet me, accompanied by her two daughters and Mrs. Arthur Henniker, the younger daughter of Lord Houghton--these, except for Sir John, comprising the whole party. Within were paneled walls, innumerable heads of deer, and two large libraries surrounded by a crowd of books, not many of them new, but all of inviting aspect. The pleasure of meeting old friends under fresh conditions for the time put out of my head the revolutionary orator of the coach. Indeed, the only specially Highland incident talked about was connected with a neighboring minister, who was accustomed to conduct on Sundays a religious service in the dining room, and who on the last of these occasions had unintentionally, but severely, affronted one member of the household. He had begun with calling down the special blessings of the Creator on the heads of all, mentioned seriatim, who were congregated under Sir John"s roof. "G.o.d bless Sir John," he began.
"G.o.d bless also her dear Leddyship. Bless the tender youth of the two young leddies likewise. We also unite in begging thee to have mercy on the puir governess."
I had not been many days in the house before I discovered a certain number of books, all more or less modern, dealing with Highland conditions as they had been since the beginning of the nineteenth century. These books were written from various points of view, and some of them were extremely interesting; but in every case there was one thing for which I looked in vain. I looked in vain for anything in the nature of statistical precision, except here and there in connection with minor and scattered details. Frequent references were made, for example, to the decline of the Highland population; but no attempt had apparently been made by anyone to state by reference to extant official doc.u.ments what the total of the alleged decline had been, or whether or why in some districts it had been greater or less than in others. The two voluminous works known respectively as the _Old_ and _New Statistical Accounts of Scotland_ were full of significant, but wholly undigested details. How should I succeed where so many others had failed? Where should I find records which would enable me to complete incompleteness and reduce chaos to some comprehensive order? One afternoon, when I found myself alone in the house, I was thinking these things over in one of the silent libraries, and staring again at the backs of books I had already opened, when, purely out of curiosity, I dragged at hazard a large and dusty volume from a row of folios which I had neglected, supposing them to be all atlases. I found that, instead of an atlas, the volume I had extracted was a copy of the huge Government Report which is commonly known by the name of _The New Domesday Book_. I had heard of this work before, but had never till now seen it, nor had I realized the nature of its contents. _The New Domesday Book_ was the result of an official inquiry undertaken some ten years previously into the number, the extent, and the rental value of all the landed properties of Great Britain and Ireland. Here, I thought, was at least a large installment of the kind of evidence of which I had felt the want, and during the rest of my visit to Ardverikie I devoted every possible moment to a study of this volume.
Without going into details, it will be enough to mention the broad and unmistakable facts which _The New Domesday Book_ disclosed, and which formed a direct counterblast, not to the oratory of the Highland agitators only, but also to the wider a.s.sertions of Henry George and of Bright. Henry George, whose statistical knowledge was a blank, had contented himself with enunciating the vague doctrine that in all modern countries--the United States, for example, and more especially the United Kingdom--every increase of wealth was in the form of rent, appropriated by the owners of the soil, most of whom were millionaires already, or were very quickly becoming so. Bright, in dealing with this country, had committed himself to a statement which was very much more specific. The number of persons, he said, who had any interest as owners in the soil of their mother country was not more than 30,000--or, to put the matter in terms of families, thirty-four out of every thirty-five were "landless." _The New Domesday Book_ showed that the number of proprietary interests, instead of being only 30,000, was considerably more than a million; or, in other words, the number of the "landless" as Bright stated it was greater than the actual number in the proportion of thirty-three to one.
Here were these facts accessible in the thousand or more pages of a great official survey. They had doubtless received some attention when that doc.u.ment was issued, but the agitators of the early ""eighties" had forgotten or never heard of them; and Bright, so far as I know, never retracted his own monstrous fallacies. How, then, I asked myself, should the actual facts of this particular case be driven into the heads of the public in a politically effective form? And how should other cognate facts, such as the profits of the business employers, Bright himself being one of them, be dragged effectively into light, compared with the rental of the landlords, and be in a similar way brought home to the public consciousness? Such were the questions which came to possess my mind when luncheons were being eaten among heather by the pourings of some hillside brook, or when deer at the close of the day were being weighed in the larders of Ardverikie.
To these questions a partial answer came sooner than I had expected. On leaving Ardverikie I paid another visit to the Lovats. On joining the train at Kingussie I learned that one of the pa.s.sengers was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who was, as an advanced Radical, to make the following day a great speech at Inverness. Needless to say, this speech turned out to be mainly a vituperation of Highland landlords. I mention it here only on account of one short pa.s.sage. "The landlords," said Mr. Chamberlain, "have made a silence in the happy glens which once resounded with your industry"--as though every wilderness between Cape Wrath and Loch Lomond had not so very long ago resembled a suburb of Birmingham. This is a curious ill.u.s.tration of how readily even a man of most acute intellect may be led by the need of securing applause at all costs into nonsense which, in calmer moments, he would himself be the first to ridicule.
As an antidote to Mr. Chamberlain"s propaganda another meeting was planned under the auspices of a number of the great Highland proprietors, who gathered together to discuss matters at Castle Grant (Lord Seafield"s), the ideal home of a chieftain. To this conclave I was taken by my host, Lord Lovat, from Beaufort. Five chieftains were present, supported by five pipers, whose strains might have elicited echoes from the slopes of the farthest Grampians.
Before the public meeting which was planned at Castle Grant took place I had left the Lovats", being called by business to England; but I had not been long in London before an opportunity of political action was offered me, in a manner which I could not resist. My book _Social Equality_ had, it seemed, so far achieved its object that a letter presently reached me, written on behalf of a number of students at the University of St. Andrews, asking me whether, could the requisite arrangements be made, I would be willing, at the next election, to stand as Conservative candidate for the St. Andrews Boroughs, as the present member--a Liberal--would before long retire. The proper authorities were consulted, and, the proposal meeting with their approval, I agreed to begin forthwith the needed preliminary work, on condition that if meanwhile some member of a Fifeshire family should be willing to take the place of a stranger such as myself, I should be allowed to withdraw and make room for him.
In the end such a subst.i.tute was found, and in due time was elected.
Meanwhile, however, I had begun a campaign of speeches which, so I was told, and so I should like to believe, contributed to his ultimate victory. At all events they enabled me to test certain expository methods which other speakers might perhaps reproduce with advantage. As among the subjects discussed by speakers of all parties, the land question generally, and not in Scotland only, continued to hold the most prominent place, I put together in logical form the statistical data relating to it, so far as I had been able to digest them; and having dealt with them verbally in the simplest language possible, I proceeded to ill.u.s.trate them by a series of enormous diagrams, which were, at the appropriate moment, let down from the cornice like a series of long window blinds. One of these represented, by means of a long column divided into colored sections, the approximate total of the income of the United Kingdom according to current imputations and the enormous portion of it taken as land rent by the owners of more than 1,000 acres as it must have been according to Bright. Another column, which was then let down beside this, represented in a similar way the rental of the larger landlords as it would be according to the principles laid down by Henry George. A third diagram followed, which showed the actual amount of land rent as disclosed by an a.n.a.lysis of _The New Domesday Book_, so that all the audience could see the farcical contrast between the false figures and the true.
As a means of holding attention, and making the meaning of the speaker clear, these diagrams were a great success, and I was invited before long to repeat my exhibition of them at Aberdeen, at Glasgow, and at Manchester. My Fifeshire speeches, moreover, through the enterprise of the _Fifeshire Journal_, having been put into type a day before they were delivered, were printed _in extenso_ next morning by many great English newspapers, whereas it is probable that otherwise they would have been relegated to an obscure paragraph.[2] I may, I think, claim for my speeches one merit, at all events--that though many of them were addressed to meetings preponderantly Radical, I so successfully avoided giving offense that only on one occasion, and then for some moments only, was I ever interrupted by dissent of a discourteous kind; while, when I delivered my speech on the land question at Manchester, I was, with all hospitable amity, entertained at a banquet by members of a leading Radical club.
Various opportunities, indeed were at that time offered me of entering, had I been willing to do so, the public life of politics. But various causes withheld me. One of these causes related to the St. Andrews Boroughs in particular. My own home being either in London or Devonshire, frequent journeys to and from the east of Scotland proved a very burdensome duty, and the boroughs themselves being widely separated from one another, the task of often delivering at least one speech in each was, in the days before motors, a duty no less exhausting. Further, I felt that the business of public speaking would interfere with a task which I felt to be more important--namely, that of providing facts and principles for politicians rather than playing directly the part of a politician myself. I was therefore relieved rather than disappointed when a communication subsequently reached me from the Conservative agent at St. Andrews to the effect that the head of an important Fifeshire family was willing to take my place and contest the const.i.tuency instead of me. My feelings were confirmed by a totally extraneous incident. The severe reader will perhaps think that I ought to blush when I explain what this incident was.
[1] Father Grant, at my suggestion, published one of these Charters _in extenso_ in _The National Review_.
[2] Another method which I adopted as a supplement to ordinary canva.s.sing was a fortnightly or monthly issue of a printed letter addressed to each voter individually, which dealt with statistics and principles, every letter inviting questions, which would be dealt with in the letter following.
CHAPTER X
A FIVE MONTHS" INTERLUDE
A Venture on the Riviera--Monte Carlo--Life in a Villa at Beaulieu--A Gambler"s Suicide--A Gambler"s Funeral