s nationalisation, but I
did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands,
and attempting to produce beneficial social results through the pressure
of taxation upon the land-owning class. That might break it up in an
utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in
the direction of sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his
property, and such a course of action was bound to give us an irritated
and vindictive land-owning class, the class upon which we had hitherto
relied--not unjustifiably--for certain broad, patriotic services and
an influence upon our collective judgments that no other class seemed
prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy
it out, but do not drive it to a defensive fight, and leave it still
sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your
state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until
the outraged Liquor Interest has become a national danger. You now
propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which
has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and
there is nothing in these or any other of your proposals that shows any
sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders
you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it
not only in the House, but in the press....

The Kinghampstead division remained for some time insensitive to my
defection.

Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the
KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to
an open letter, signed "Junius Secundus," and I replied in provocative
terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends
of the constituency, and then I had a correspondence with my old friend
Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation.

My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people.
They had had to come upstairs to me and they were manifestly full of
indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself,
J.P., dressed wholly in black--I think to mark his sense of the
occasion--and curiously suggestive in his respect for my character and
his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor,
of Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in
mourning; she had never abandoned the widow's streamers since the de