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.