FROM COUNTRY HOUSES TO POLITICS
First Treatise on Politics--Radical Propaganda--First Visit to
the Highlands--The Author Asked to Stand for a Scotch
Constituency
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, nobody 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 substitute 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 analyzed was purely artificial, and unsatisfying for
that very reason--that the book was addressed only to an idle class, and
that from the conditions of this pampered minority no conclusions were
deducible which had any meaning for the multitude of average men. Some
such objection had been anticipated from the first by myself. I was
already prepared to meet it, and my answer was in brief as follows, "If
life without a God 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 passions 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 associated 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 passage 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
goddess 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 class 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 class.
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 passengers, 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 passed, or at which we stopped, wore all the colors of
all the grape clusters 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 masses 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
superstition 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 Canal, 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
assailants 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 mass of medieval
charters, in which were assigned 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 analysis 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
circumstances. 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 mass 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 sparse 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 illustrations 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
passengers 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 passed 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 clustered 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. "God bless Sir John," he began.
"God 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
documents 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 assertions 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 document 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 passengers 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 passage. "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 illustration 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 substitute 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 illustrate 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 analysis 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 constituency 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
canvassing 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.