f 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.

CHAPTER X

A FIVE MONTHS' INTERLUDE

A Venture on the Riviera--Monte Carlo--Life in a Villa at
Beaulieu--A Gambler's Suicide--A Gambler's Funeral

One May morning in London, when I had just completed a fortnight of
political speaking in Fifeshire, a friend of mine, Ernest Beckett
(afterward the second Lord Grimthorpe), came in a state of obvious
excitement to see me, and talk, so he said, about something of great
importance. He had, it appeared, been spending some weeks in the south
of France, and was full of a project the value of which had, so he said,
been amply proved by experiment. To me at first sight it seemed no
better than lunacy. I could not for some time even bring myself to
consider it seriously. This project was to play a new system at Monte
Carlo. It was a system founded on one which, devised by Henry
Labouchere, had been--such was Beckett's contention--greatly improved by
himself, and he and a companion had been playing it with absolutely
unbroken success. The two, with only a small capital in their pockets,
had won during the course of a week or so something like a thousand
pounds--not in a few large gains (for in this there would have been
nothing to wonder at), but by a regular succession day after day of
small ones. They had tested the system further by applying it, after
their departure, to the records, published daily in a Monte Carlo
journal, of the order in which colors or numbers had turned up
throughout the day preceding at some particular table. Adjusting their
imaginary stakes, in accordance with the rules of the system, to these
series of actual sequences, the two experimenters had discovered that
their original successes were, as a matter of theory, infallibly
reproduced. So certain, said Beckett, did all this seem that he would
himself be in a position to secure some thousands of pounds of capital
for the