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.