after a visit to Tsushima Island, where he discovered a Russian force occupying a secluded bay and obtained its withdrawal. The attack on the legation left him with permanent damage to one of his hands. He was sent to Poland in 1863 as a British observer to report on the January Uprising. Oliphant returned to England, resigned from the Diplomatic Service and was elected to Parliament in 1865 for Stirling Burghs. While he did not show any conspicuous parliamentary ability, he was made a great success by his novel Piccadilly: A Fragment of Contemporary Biography (1870). Oliphant's later novels include Altiora Peto (1883) and Masollam: A Problem of the Period (1886). He then became connected to the spiritualist prophet Thomas Lake Harris, who, in about 1861, had organised a small Christian utopian community, the Brotherhood of the New Life, which was settled in Brocton, New York, on Lake Erie, and he subsequently moved to Santa Rosa, California. After initially being refused permission to join Harris in 1867, he was eventually allowed to join his community, and Oliphant caused a scandal by leaving Parliament in 1868 to follow Harris to Brocton. He lived there for several years engaged in what Harris termed the 'Use', manual labour aimed at forwarding his utopian vision. Members of the community were allowed to return to the outside world from time to time to earn money for the community. After three years, Oliphant worked as correspondent for The Times during the Franco-German War, and afterwards spent several years in Paris in the service of the paper. There he met, through his mother, his future wife, Alice le Strange. They married at St George's, Hanover Square, London, on 8 June 1872. In 1873, Oliphant went back to Brocton with his wife and mother. Later, he and his mother had a falling out with Harris and demanded their money back, which had allegedly been derived mainly from the sale of Lady Maris Oliphant's jewels. That forced Harris to sell the Brocton colony, and his remaining disciples moved to their new colony in Santa Rosa, California. In 1876 Oliphant returned to England while his wife, Alice, chose to remain with the Brotherhood of the New Life in Brocton. By 1878 Oliphant, caught up in a wave of Western concern that Russia intended to conquer the Middle East, devised a "Plan for Gilead" under which Britain would plant a Jewish