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
o