Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

I found another way of using my leisure. In the spring of 1911 I became the Conservative candidate for the counties of Peebles and Selkirk, a constituency which then stretched from within a dozen miles of Edinburgh to within twenty miles of the Border.

My motives were mixed. I had always felt that it was a citizen's duty to find some form of public service, but I had no strong parliamentary ambitions. Nor was there any special cause at the moment which I felt impelled to plead. While I believed in party government and in party loyalty, I never attained to the happy partisan zeal of many of my friends, being painfully aware of my own and my party's defects, and uneasily conscious of the merits of my opponent. Like Montaigne I could forgive "neither the commendable qualities of my adversaries nor the reproachful of those I followed. " I was apt to fall into the mood which Macaulay attributes to Halifax: