Piccadilly--an enterprise instigated by men one of whom, enlightened by disillusion, has subsequently earned respect as a grave cabinet minister. As for myself, the most pertinacious conviction which these movements forced on me was that, whatever elements of justice and truth might lurk in them, they were based on wild distortions of historical and statistical facts, or on an ignorance even more remarkable of the actual dynamics of industry, of the powers of the average worker, and of the motives by which he is actuated. Dominated by this conviction, which for me was verified every time I opened a newspaper, I found myself daily devoting more and more of my time to the task of reducing this chaos of revolutionary thought to order. But what most sharply awakened me to the need for such a work was an incident which, before it took place, would have, so I thought, a tendency to lull my anxieties for a time rather than to maintain or stimulate them. I had regarded the revolutionary mood as mainly, if not exclusively, an emanation from those hotbeds of urban industry in which the modern industrial system has reached its most complete development, and I pictured to myself the more remote districts of the kingdom--especially the Highlands of Scotland--as still the scenes of an idyllic and almost undisturbed content. As to the rural counties of England, I was, so I think, correct, but, as to the Scottish Highlands, the truth of my ideas in this respect still remained to be tested. To me the Highlands were thus far nothing more than a name. I was therefore delighted when one morning I received an invitation from Lord and Lady Howard of Glossop, to stay with them for some weeks at Dorlin, their remote Highland home.