purchased by himself. Similar examples in other islands were submitted to the attention of the Commissioners. In Coll the small tenants have been removed from the larger share of the surface, and have been crowded upon a single property occupying a limited part. In Ulva the people have vanished altogether. No doubt other instances of clearance and consolidation might be elicited by inquiry. An excessive sub-division of holdings is revealed by the statistics furnished by the Duke himself; of 3,300 crofters inscribed on the valuation roll of the county of Argyle, not more than one hundred and fifty belong to the comfortable class, which ranges between 201. Jand Jand 50l. of rent.' The condition of the 3,150 uncomfortable crofters is not explained. Of the number of the landless cottars, labourers and fishermen, no account is supplied, but we are informed that the island of Tiree alone contains about three hundred families in the condition of squatters paying no rent, whose condition in unfavourable seasons is a source of commiseration and anxiety. We cannot suppose that Tiree is a solitary example. In the county of Inverness, by the Duke's own showing, out of 7,000 tenancies of land 5,111 are below the 101. line. In the presence of such facts, I submit that the Commissioners were justified in referring to the repartition of land outside of the boundaries of their selected area in terms of qualified commendation. I recognise, however, that if I had had before me the statistics of occupancy in Argyleshire at the time the Report was written, I should have made a broader admission of the favourable conditions which prevail. The Report states that small farms and graduated tenancies exist in certain' parts of the county. It would be more just to say that they exist in considerable numbers in most parts of the county; but with Argyleshire to the south of Ardnamurchan, as I said before, the Report does not pretend to deal.

Having thus repudiated the reproach of misrepresentation addressed to the Report of the Commission, I now proceed to consider briefly the objection of culpable omission-the allegation that the Report disseminates and accredits a partial and prejudicial view of the condition of the Highland people in regard to the tenure of land, because it does not offer a statement of the repartition of tenancies in the Highlands compared with the distribution of farming areas in other parts of the country. Here I must take a decided objection to the opinion entertained by the Duke. It formed no part of the business of the Commissioners to frame a statement of the kind suggested. Their prescribed mission was to inquire into the condition of the crofters and cottars of the Highlands and Islands, and their implied duty was to suggest remedies for any evils which they might recognise in that quarter. But to frame a treatise on land tenure in its comparative aspects would have been beyond their province, and incompatible with their character. What the Commissioners could See Letter to the Chairman of the Royal Commission, p. 42.

not do in a harmonious official Report the Duke of Argyll may justly attempt in an independent essay, and while I disavow the obligation which he desires to fix upon the body over which I recently presided, I am quite ready to follow him upon the ground which he opens for free individual discussion.

In framing his comparison between the agricultural conditions of the Highlands and the Lowlands, and especially between the Northern and the Southern Highlands, the Duke of Argyll proceeds upon the general proposition that the Lowlands have in former times passed through the same economical transformation which has affected the Highlands at a more recent period, and he records, substantially, the following conclusions. First, with reference to depopulation, that the desolation of the Southern Highlands by the removal of the people is even greater than in the north; and secondly, with reference to the statistics of occupancy, that there is in the Southern Highlands a " total absence of possessions strictly of the crofting class, while the small class of farms which constitute a step between the labourer and the capitalist farmer has been almost obliterated, leaving the consolidation of the land in large farming areas more absolute and complete than in the great bulk of the northern and western counties.

The positions thus taken up by the Duke of Argyll are in their general outline correct, and contain nothing that is inconsistent with the statements of the Crofters' Commission; indeed, they are recognised by the Report itself. If I demur to them at all it is in consequence of errors of detail into which the Duke has been betrayed by an unguarded impetuosity, and on account of the absolute unqualified character of his conclusions, which are subject to local exceptions and reservations.

The Duke of Argyll has called attention to the fact that many of the conditions affecting land and people which exist, or recently existed, in the Western Highlands were common to the rest of Scotland in former ages, and that evidence of them may still be clearly discerned in the Border districts. No one has these truths more deeply impressed upon his heart than I have. Along the Scottish Marches there were certainly in old times tacksmen, sub-tenants, and townships; common pastures, domestic industries, feudal services, labour rents, rents in kind, and all the features of rural life which in the Highlands and Islands survived to a later date and are not yet in all respects extinct. These conditions have been dissolved partly by the arbitrary decision of landlords, chiefly, I hope, by the inexorable influences of natural social change. In one shape or another they have been swept away by the resistless tide of time, and have gone down into the great deep of the past, where for many they are covered with oblivion as if they had never been. The names of places, the records of estates, the parish registers, the testimony of the turf itself conspire Report, p. 109.

to prove that peasant communities flourished and decayed where now solitude and silence are only broken by the curlew and the sheep. An immense vacancy and melancholy brood over much of the Border Land. How and when the depopulation of the country was effected has not been sufficiently studied and explained. No doubt the first blow must have been struck by the Union of the Crowns. Buccleuch for two generations may have carried off many of his idle retainers, and many recruits from other clans, to the wars of Holland. It is surmised that others went with the Protestant settlers to Ireland under James the First. Many of the Border people may have been consumed in the great rebellion. Before the end of the seventeenth century the system of pastoral farming was generally introduced, but there were many more small farms than there are now, and more small proprietors settled on their estates. What evictions, what migrations there were then no man can tell. There may have been much suffering, but the people passed away unnoticed and unmourned. The process of extinction was probably very gradual. In the whole circle of Border poetry, as far as I am aware, there is no dirge for a departing race; no plaintive strain ascends from the Teviot or the Tweed which repeats the sentiment of Lochaber no more.' The Duke of Argyll paints the vistas and the sweeps of desolate moorland' with which we are familiar with a pencil only too powerful, and too faithful to the pathetic reality. When he exchanges the canvas for the census tables, and illustrates the spectacle of Border depopulation by reference to particular examples, his hand becomes less happy. Adopting the tactics of aggression, he carries the war into the parishes of Ettrick and Yarrow, 6 with which the chairman of the Crofter Commission is connected,' and in which, it may be inferred, he is subject to moral responsibilities. In these places the Duke recognises, not without an appearance of elation, the scene of enormous depopulation in the most recent times.' This statement is founded on the following figures. The census of Ettrick in 1831 gives a population of 530. The census for 1881 gives a population of 397, involving a diminution of rather more than 25 per cent. in fifty years. The census of Yarrow in 1851 gives a population of 1,294; the census of 1881 gives a population of 611, involving a diminution of more than 50 per cent. in thirty years, equal,' it is remarked, to the depopulation in the parish of Bracadale in Skye, on which Lord Napier dwells in his Report as a typical example of depopulation in the Highlands.' Let us examine these assertions more closely than the Duke has cared to do. The population of Ettrick in 1831 is set down as 530, which seems to have been augmented by the presence of a party of twenty-five labourers from without employed on county road works. The census report mentions the circumstance.3 The normal population of the parish was, we may

Population of Great Britain, vol. ii. p. 1030. Had these people belonged to the parish they would probably not have been referred to specifically in the Census Report.

assume, about 500. In 1881 the population stood at 397, involving a loss of very little more than 20 per cent. in half a century. This considerable falling off in the number of the people may be chiefly accounted for in the following manner. In the early years of the present century an unusual amount of employment was afforded in Ettrick by works incidental to the establishment for the first time of a proprietary residence in the parish, and also by the development of the public road system. A certain number of labourers' families were attracted to the place. As the sources of support were gradually withdrawn the people fell away. Some families became slowly extinguished, others emigrated to America and Australia. A reduction in the population of a pastoral parish in fifty years by 20 per cent. can hardly be cited as a case of enormous depopulation, and it is no doubt the case of Yarrow which in the eyes of the Duke of Argyll justifies the application of these severe expressions, and prompts the charitable inquiry,' Has there been a clearance?' With reference to Yarrow the Duke has been misled. Here it is not the population but the parish which has been halved. Subsequent to the census of 1851 Yarrow was subdivided. A new parish called Kirkhope was taken out of it, and the alteration is recorded in the Census Report of 1861. The old historical parish of Yarrow accordingly appears in the later returns in very straitened proportions. Comparing the whole area occupied by Yarrow parish in 1851, within the county of Selkirk, with the same area now divided between the two parishes, we find the following results. In 1851, population 1,294, inhabited houses 223. In 1881, population 1,158, inhabited houses 218. There is thus a diminution of population in thirty years of 136, or between 10 and 11 per cent. This decline may be referred to some consolidation of farming areas and a reduction of land under crop. However this may be, the enormous depopulation' disappears, and Bracadale of Skye has not found its match in Yarrow of Selkirk. The mistake committed may seem a natural and venial one, yet I cannot entirely suppress my surprise that the extreme improbability of the statement so confidently recorded did not awaken the suspicions of an acute observer, especially when I consider the amount of local and social knowledge at his command. Had such desolation really fallen upon the Dowie Dens of Yarrow,' would the fact have remained so long suppressed? The district is, as the Duke of Argyll remarks, one of the classic scenes of the Scottish Muse. It lies on a public highway, traversed every summer by hundreds of persons in quest of health, or sport, or scenery, or song. Could it have been reserved for a Campbell to discern today that the flame was quenched in the Farmer's ingle,' and that the walls of the shepherd's cottage were levelled with the moor? Would the eyes of Russel of the Scotsman have been sealed, who lived hard by the margin of the stream? Would the Border news

6

papers have been dumb? and if political vigilance had been at fault, what of the Border poets, the proper guardians of the visionary vale? Would Professor Veitch and Andrew Lang have deserted the domain touched with ideal hues for all people and all time by the fancy of Wordsworth and of Scott? Would not some new minstrel have announced in more indignant accents that 'The Flowers of the Forest were a' wede away'? Granted, however, that traveller, press, and poet had all been smitten with insensibility and silence, and that the Duke of Argyll was designed by a wayward destiny to reveal the wrong, when the forbidden word 'clearance' started to his pen might he not have paused before the memory of the late Duke of Buccleuch ?4 The reflections which I have to offer on the statements of the Duke of Argyll, relative to the statistics of occupancy, are much the same in spirit as those concerning depopulation. I accept his general proposition; I demur to his particular instances. Had the Duke simply affirmed and proved by comparisons, fairly selected at large, that the repartition of tenancies in the Highlands, despite the immense areas in deer forests and sheep walks, is more congenial to the interests of the poor than the Lowland system, regarded as a whole, and especially more favourable to humble industry than the food factories of the Lothians, he would have encountered no denial on my part, but a hearty assent. As he has set the matter before the public I am constrained to protest. In doing so I feel the greatest reluctance in alluding to details which are almost personal to myself and therefore insignificant to others. But this is not my fault. It is not by my choice that a comparison between two divisions of the kingdom is converted into a contrast between the parish of Ettrick and the parish of Inverary. The Duke has committed to print in this Review the following sentence. In contrast with this parish of the Southern Highlands, which is the residence of Lord Napier, let us look at the statistics of occupancy in the parish of the Western Highlands in which I now write.' I cannot admit that it is equi table to institute a parallel between two localities which nature and history have rendered so dissimilar. Let us take a rapid prospect of Ettrick and Inverary. Ettrick occupies the highest recesses of an inland valley in the very centre of the country. The whole surface lies at a considerable altitude. There is not an acre in the parish less than 650 feet above the sea level. The hills run out to 2,000. The land susceptible of tillage is confined to a narrow strip of flat 'haugh' beside the stream, and to a few sloping fields above it on either side. I do not believe that out of 43,968 acres, forming the total superficies, more than 300 were ever at one time under the plough and spade. The traces of ancient cultivation are exceptionally rare. A 'clachan' did certainly once exist, and, to borrow the vigorous image

The Duke of Buccleuch is proprietor of more than half of the old parish of Yarrow.