AR2, ✓ ----- *-£ & Till; LAND QUESTIO N WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO NEW ZEALAND AND OLD SCOTLAND BY REV. JAMES MACGREGOR, OAMARU, N.Z. My kind, now vested with the eternal glory Of God made flesh, glorious to me became. Henceforth those crowns which shine in mortal story, It seemed a grief to hear, madness to claim. To be a man, seemed now man’s noblest aim : His noblest task, to serve one, even the least, Of those who fight God’s fight, and share His kingly feast —Aubrey De Vere. “ The first thing the student has to do is to get rid of the idea of an absolute ownership. Such an idea is quite unknown to the English law. No man is in law the absolute owner of lands. He can only hold an estate in them.”—Williams, On Real Property, as quoted by De Lavaleye. “ Latifundia perdidere Italian!.”— Pliny. Dunedin: James Wilkie. Oamaru: Andrew Fraser. Edinburgh : Andrew Elliott. X.'H MDCCCLA - XXIII. (r//jrn i>(Lio(i/./.(i//j/.HX mi/i Ufl/MAO ,H003H0)AK 23MAUV3H n\ v\$ THE LAND QUESTION. BY THE REV. J. MACGREGOR, D.D. FIRST LECTURE. A t the end of my lecture I find it has heaven that manhood now shines upon ; come to be a sort of secular sermon, in i throne, whets it is worn by oor God. , . , . , On earth, too, it ought to shine, as in , relation to land, about a nation s right thog0 whom He has made to be God’s and duty re maintenance of men. And , kingly priests. As in the universe there here at the beginning I may throw in, by , is nothing great but God, so, as the poet way of prolusion, what you may regard as , sings, “On earth there is nothing great ! a sort of prose hymn" about manhood, but man.” And to a nation its manhood That may serve to strike a key-note in is the one thing, lacking which the nation, your hearts as well as mine. There are J like a soul without God, has nothiug— all thiugs known in our hearts which lie there , its seeming wealth is only a long and vain slumbering useless like fire in a flinty array of nothings. rock ; and this prose hymn may serve to After that hymn, I will lay before you awaken the slumbering flame, recalling to j as my text the following ideal programme I recollection what we have had in our hard j of legislation regarding land. It repre¬ hearts-from the beginning by creation— j sents the view that has come to me from the true idea of manhood in relation to study of the subject. I believe it is in nations and to land. substance what is destined to be carried The great fundamental use of land is, ■ into effect among all free peoples ; and I Maintenance of men. The true ultimate know that its principles have their roots wealth of nations is, not money, but man- j deep and widespread in the relative con- hood. What, to a nation, is the use of i stitutional history of nations. But I lay it money but maintenance of men, as many i before you at this stage, not dogmatically, in number and as high in quality of man- j for your adoption, but tentatively, for hood as cau be consistently with national j your consideration. Your present extern- well-being and well-doiug ? What is a j poraneous adoption of it would be of little 1 nation but manhood multitudinous, or- | importance. It would be a thing of great ganised into unity of national being and i importance if your contemplation of it life / What is its prosperity, at bottom , should lead you to serious and fruitful ■ and in heart, but the amount and quality i thought about the subject. And for the of prosperous manhood multitudinous present it will serve as a text, for con- realised in the sphere of its unity? What veuience of reference in the lecture as a is its life, in the true sense of natioual i whole. life, but the vast harmonious movement j The first principle here is that the of that manhood multitudinous, in mani- nation, relatively to the land, is para¬ fold oneness of true rational agency, mount lord of all, entitled and bound to taking form in the nation as organ of make such laws as are best fitted to pro- the grandest of all conceivable harmonies inote the public interest of the nation as a in this outer court of God’s great temple : whole. Then, relatively to the nation’s pub- of the universe 1 so that when we say, the ! lie interest here, the vitally important sc- truo use of land is maintenance of men, condary principle is, that the trueuseof the we assign to it the highest and holiest ; land is maintenance of men for the nation, purpose conceivable in relation to crea- i Therefore in legislation about land we tures under heaven. For not only in I must seek a natioual provision for due 4 THE LAND maintenance of men. as a fundamental constitution to which all other things in the nation’s power must conform. Aud into that constitution there ought to enter such regulative maxims as the following : —1. Maintenance of men, to the extent and In the manner that are best for the nation’s public interest, shall, always and in all places, be a burden on the land, no matter what may be otherwise its tenure of ownership or occupancy, whether public or private. All constitutions and com¬ pacts to the contrary, past, present, or future, shall be to ipao null and void ; and violation or evasion of this law shall be branded and punished as a peculiarly in¬ famous crime ; but compensation may be made from the nation’s public purse to private persons who are made losers through operation of the law. 2. To the extent of the nation’s public interest in manhood, and of the land's caoability for maintenance of men, those who are willing to occupy land shall obtain it, of such quality, in such quantity, and on such conditions, that a man with fair ability and industry shall be able to maintain himself and his family by the laud, in such decency and comfort as are called for by due regard to the uation’s public interest in the maintenance of men. 3. The allo¬ cation of .the land, and the determination of the conditions of settlement, to such meu, shall never be left to private pro¬ prietors as such, but shall always be kept tn the nation’s own power, administered by persons appointed by the nation for the purpose, who have no private interest in the matter, but are solemnly entrusted with it, and made responsible to the nation for their administration of it, as a great public interest of the nation. Having endeavored, by means of this introduction, to initiate a common under¬ standing, or to suggest a general impres¬ sion regarding ideas and principles and regulative maxims, I now proceed to an exposition in detail, which will to some extent assume the form of notes and com¬ ments on the programme that has been read to you as a text. That there ought to be no private property in land, and that landlords ought not to receive compensa¬ tion for the confiscation of their property by the State ;—this is what I have re¬ ceived as a summary report of my lec¬ tures in Dunedin. On both points it happens to be precisely the opposite of true. One of the leading points of my first lecture-was, that private property in land is perfectly compatible with the pro¬ gramme 1 have suggested ; and that there must be private property in land if there is to be any effective occupancy of it, ex- QUESTION. cepting that communistic occupation which is barbarously wasteful, and there, fore incompatible with due regard to the uation’s public interest in land. As to compensation to landowners for loss re suiting to them from legislation in that interest of the nation as a whole, | made provision for such compensation *q integral part of the programme even in outline, and in the lectures I showed that such compensation could be fairly con. tended for as reasonable and right, it ^ not very exhilarating to find my laborious exposition thus read backward like a witch’s prayer. Hut that report, *um. ming up the whole matter in two aver¬ ments which are both precisely the opp 0 . site of true, now does me good service by giving me occasion and excuse for en. treating you, in relation to the very im- poriant matter in hand, not to strike without hearing, last you wound me through a man of straw, and fail to see what I am striving to show, for the true interest of landlords and “ landless” alike, and for that national iuterest which equally concerns both. Te Wliiti has gone home from Christ¬ church, and the Glendale martyrs from Edinburgh, where they have had oppor¬ tunity, like Jonah in the whale’s belly, of meditation on the inconveniencee of taking the law into one’s own hand. The Maoris, too, have gone away, though not potatoless yet discomfited ; and our brethren in Skye, though perhaps “ nursing their wrath to keep it warm,” are reduced to passive resistance ; while their philo-celtic friends and lovers, once jubilant as well as militant in eloquence, are now thrown out into mere sentimental weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth. Captain Sword reposes on his laurels under the sign of the White Horse, and Captain Pen has resumed his wonted leadership of public opinion,— leadership like a wheelbarrow’s to the froward child propelling it. Civil war has ended happily, with few tears aud no bloodshed, giving place, amid cheers and some laughter, to a sometimes not very civil war of words. Yet, after all this, in these “ piping times of peace,’’ here are we, as if on eve of battle, not only f a disciplined habit, and authority of right long de¬ scended and unquestioned, as well as high heroic motives of ancestral noblesse oblige. The spirit of the system, as animated by the great idea of the nation, is well illustrated in our own old border history of Scotland. The tribes along the border were far from exemplary in formal sub¬ ordination to the central government at Edinburgh or Stirling. And they often had fierce private wars and furious feuds among themselves. But there is no other thing in our national history more remarkable than the manner in which, if the nation should be seriously threatened from without, those seemingly wild tribra promptly flew to the defence of it. If only an English army of invasion came and looked across the border, then, no matter what may have been the dear de¬ lights of fighting, or other occupations or recreations, at home, the Scott, or Kerr, or Hume, or Douglas— whatever groat lord happened to be nearest with his force—he at once went straight with his force to place himself and them ub a shield between the hostile sword and the nation’s heart. And this was ordinarily done with promptitude swift and unhesi¬ tating, as if it had been felt, not as a matter of painfully oppressive obligation, nor as one of high but difficult public duty, but as a matter of course, in relatiou to which there is no occasion for hesitation or delay, as there is no possibility of doubt. That is very remarkable. Another thing in that old history is perhaps equally so. That is, the manner of those who relate the story, in prose or verse, in annalistic writing or oral tradition. They do not speak with wonder, in terms of admira¬ tion, as in the case of a thing really not common, aboutthatsacrifice for the nation, that complete self-surrender to its interest and will, which to us is so striking on the part of men ordinarily so fierce in im¬ perious self-will. They refer to it simply as a fact, in the manner of one who does not see anything to wonder at, and ia not in the least aware that yonder deed, of battle unto death for the nation, of self- devotion to death for the nation, by the chief aud his followers alike, has in it anything but mere matter of course. Such in reality was “our old nobility.” The spirit of modern autocratic land¬ lordism is thus of a wholly different species from the spirit of a true feudal chief, “ that fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time.” It is indeed a modern spirit, of the basest sort, mas- 18 THE LAND querading under ancient if not antiquated forma. In respect of exclusive regard to private pleasure and profit, to the exclu¬ sion of the nation’s interest and right to rule, it is essentially that same spirit which animates a “ring” of Yaukee speculators, in sordid worship of mammon, banding together for the purpose of prey¬ ing on the common-weal, so that, while carefully keeping clear of the hangman, they may rise and shine as “ bosses ” or millionaires, To one desiring to “ honor all men ” there is nothing more saddening than that modern illustration of “ the deceitfulness of riches,” that gilded but most foul dishonor to true manhood, the worship of the “ almighty dollar.” There is no more sad finale of sordid ness to a human career than a strong man’s paean over “success in life,” “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years : take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry." There is no more shameful suicide of mauhood than is involved in the self-devotiou of an able man to that “ success” as the end of his life’s career. The highest success here is a ruinous failure. The ‘ ‘ man made of money” is— like Jerrold's terrible picture of one literally turned into bank-notes—a man unmade by money, self-debased to the dust to which he cleaves with his poor soul, sunk beneath the materialism of the Mammon which he worships, a rational being who glories in the shame of being a very highly prosperous mole ! But in the romancing imitator of feudalism the shameful degradation is peculiarly revolt¬ ing. We have spoken of the sham clan chief as the “ red fox” prowling in the long desolate ruins of once lordly and festive Balclutha. The sham feudal chief —to what shall we compare him? Shall we say, to a bloated spider that has crept into an old hero’s helmet on his tomb ? Certainly the grasping autocratic land¬ lordism of our new time stands related to the heroic nationalism of the feudal system in “ the brave days of old,” as the bloated spider to that hero,—in relation of despicable, loathsome, hateful, pro¬ foundly humiliating contrast. I now repeat the statement made at the beginning of this section of my lecture. Individualism, tribalism, nationalism, are the only three forms of property in land that have ever existed in our country, or that are known to the history of mankind in civilised society. The autocracy is alien to society in relation to them all alike; and therefore is in effect coudemued by them all alike as an outrage on the “law of nature and nations.” Prom the view-point of the constitutional history of QUESTION. mankind in relation to land, it falls to be regarded as having no real root in any sound principle of law, and thus being only the unfortunate “accident of an accident”—while practically it is a dan¬ gerous innovation, profoundly revolu. tionary, subversive of the very founda¬ tions of civilised human society. It is important to observe at the same time, as a fact shining along the whole face of our past history, that the modern autocracy is by no means necessary to the existence of great estates, or of an aristo¬ cratic class of great landlords. The de¬ struction of it would only remove from their property a burden—of power to depopulate—that is dangerous to them and to the nation, and replace it with a burden “ of obligation to due maintenance of men” that is salutary to both. Such a burden on the land, of obligation to maintenance of men of certain classes, is made familiar to us by the case of national establishments of religion, with their church rates and tithes. Suoh a burden in relation to ordinary settlement of men willing to cultivate the land for a living, is made familiar to us in New Zealand by the nation’s action towards leaseholders of great estates as sheep- runs, in covenanting for a reserve of power in the nation to break up the sheep- runs into small farms, in a manner deemed wise and good by the nation. And, I am given to understand, even in the caso of freehold, an obligation to allow what settlement of men the nation might think wise, was part of the original constitution of great landed estates in Canterbury. There is, in truth, no reason why it should not be so. Nothing, I mean, in the nature of the thing, pri¬ vate property in large estates, encourag¬ ing the manners and tastes of an aristo¬ cratic caste. Such a caste existed in ancient Athens, and in the Italian Repub¬ lics of the Middle Ages, where the aris¬ tocrats were in habit not like our great landowners resident on their estates, but rather like our merchants who are princes. But if you will have great estates, con¬ sider what has been said of the dan system and feudal system. Under both systems the modern autocracy of land¬ lordism was really inconceivable ; and—as a burden on the land — maintenance of men, to the full amouut re¬ quired by due regard to public interest of class or nation, was not only permitted and secured, but practioally re¬ garded as the one great purpose of the existence of the laud—yes, and of the chiefs. And were not those old chiefs of a sufficiently pronounced type of aris- 19 THE LAND QUESTION. tocracy ? It is well if tho aristocracy of I Burns would describe as “ noblomen by Chatham’s “silken lords” bo in effect, creation of God Almighty.” Still, a a gaudy and flimsy imitation, hiding a Hartington may have in him the older or ludicrous contrast, to tho warlike glories oldest nubility of nature, tho title to of his “iron barons,” or to tho simple lead that is constituted by possession of grandeur of a true old Highland chief. “ the kingly governing faculty.” And if b What I 8*y, then, is, Delenda cst Car- ho have this, his power for noble ends is thago. With a view to the nation’s great greatly enlarged by what ho has in his old interest in manhood, ample in quantity nobility of circumstance,—prestige of in¬ fer the nation’s purposes, and as high in herited honors aud high rank, as well as quality as legislation can provide for, the • the material resources and varied social autocracy of landownership, vile inno- j influences of the heir of a vast estate, vating upstart, has to bo destroyed. Let J So long as the world stands, with tho nation resume the power, and always its firm abiding unity in endlessly in- exercise the power, with vigilance and j foresting variety of human popu- trenchancy unsparing, of guarding that lation and circumstance and feeling, intorest as she would guard her life. If our great landowners may continue to not, then, though matters should present have a great opportunity, of leading as bn aspect of prosperity, yet, in relation to their fathers led, though in a different 'the very foundation of a nation’s life and fashion because in different times. Lord strength in manhood, tho body politic Elcho, now Earl of Wemyss, may serve may be sinking into fatal fatty degenera- his kind as truly in watching over the tion of heart, or becoming poisoned in blood farmers aud hinds on his great estates in through degradation of the quality of j East Lothian as when he did such splendid immhood, or, through undue diminution public service in organising the British of the number of men, perhaps here and army of volunteers. Tho present Duke thore in unregarded extremities, be bleed- : of Sutherland finds ample for his remark¬ ing to death. And let tho work be done, ably great force of character as well as not from deference to merely sectional wealth, playing a truo Duke—dux— democratic impulses, whose cries may be i “ leader” of men, in a very different sort no bettor than “blatant blockheadism,” of “Sutherland clearance” from some and whose spirit may be merely that of hard and scraggy selfishness, but from due patriotic regard to those principles, rela¬ tively to the interests of the community as a whole, which were incarnated, under forms adapted to the times, in the clan and feudal systems at their best. In this ■ way the landlords themselves shall be re¬ lieved of their dangerous burden of autocracy ; and tho movement, in break¬ ing off their chains, tearing off their grave- clothes of that innovation, will be really in effect most beneficent toward them, and truly give us back “ our old nobility.” And for that “old nobility” brought back, thero may bo a really great career . in our new time. I have spoken of tho progress of our Christian civilisation, in loading men more and more to regard the whole community as within the pale of proper citizenship of the nation. That progress, in bringing manhood as such to the front, has in some measure superseded the old nobility of circumstance, in favor of an older nobility, which, indeed, is the oldest and truest nobility, of nature. The nobility of circumstance are thus, by such a formed free nation as ours, no longer needed as they once were. Their place and power as leaders of mankind are coming to be more and more occnpied by commoners like William Pitt, and William Ewart Gladstone, whom Robert we have heard of,—in labors of Hercules for bringing a railway to the Pentland Frith, and trans¬ figuring wide regions of barren waste into gladsome fruitful soil for mainten¬ ance of men. If only our noblemen and gentlemen by rank be in reality manly men of heroic type, like him, taking a lead in great beneficent enterprises for the nation’s good, then tho “ red spectre” will never so much as look in through our windows, and we shall not be seriously discomposed when deafened by the bray¬ ing, though we may bo disgusted with the hard and scraggy selfishness, that some¬ times goes masquerading under the abused name of Democracy. What is bred in the bone will come out in the flesh. You see that I have taken to preaching, in relation to the present and future, and am giving way to Celtism in my leaning towards the days of old. Why should I not 1 The evils in our view are caused, not simply by want of thought, but also by want of heart. And tho heart is benefitted when the mind is made to dwell on what was good or great in the past. Then tho past comes to live anew among us, “ though dead, yet speaking,” with a power to us in the pre¬ sent which truly is a river of the water of national life, flowing in Providence from the throne of God everlasting. And now THE LAND QUESTION. 20_ let me reward your patience by showing you, in conclusion, a picture from the past, which I showed some time ago to the people of Colutnba Church, Oaraaru. I have spoken of a “ ring ” of paltry American adventurers preying like foal birds upon their nation’s life. And in derisive scorn I havo spoken of another ring ” of the same sort, as formed os¬ tensibly on behalf of “ old nobility,” but really for sordid selfish class purposes, of men proceeding upon the view, that the land with all it contains is for them. Why should not they, and we, proceeding upon the view, that they and we are for the land and all that it contains, form a very different sort of ring a ring, a gold-be jewelled ring, of honest patriotic citizens, banding together for promotion of the nation’s public good ? That is what we all ought to think of, and long for, and make for:—not the degradation, from natural place of dignity and power, of any one class, whose existence is not proved a dangerous nuisance; but the elevation of the nation in all its classes ; or, bettor still, by all its classes, banding and battling together for the nation’s well-being and well-doing under God. For those who are of this mind I will now Bhow the picture I have spoken of. It is of a ring, a gold-bejewelled ring, that once was formed by our Scottish fore¬ fathers, standing “ shoulder to shoulder,” “red wat-shod in blood;” while all sought and fought for the common good, and everyone found occasion to feel that “ the rank is but the guinea stamp ; the raau’a the gowd, for a’ that.” The picture is done by a master hand, and, one might say, with the heart’s blood, of one who loved the “ old nobility,” perhaps “ not wisely, but too well,” but who loved his nation as became one bearing the “kindly” name of Scott. The ring he depicts was formed round James IV. of Scotland, on Flodden’s fatal field ; when “ the wise auld Scottish nation,” driven to bay, unwavering and unshrinking confronted pale Death ; and the valiant “ Soutars o’ Selkirk ” fought and fell abreast of lordly Douglas “tender and true,”—the desperate rampart ring that never was broken, but melted away in advancing shades of death and night (“Marmion,” vi., 34):— The English shafts in valleys hailed, In headlong charge their horse assailed ; Front, flank, and rear, the squadrons sweep To break the Scottish circle deep, That fought around their King. Bat yet, though thick the shafts like snow, Though charging knights as whirlwinds go, Though bowmen ply the ghastly bow, Unbroken was the ring. The stubborn spearmen still made good I heir dark impenetrable wood, Each stepping where his comrade stood Tho instant that he fell. No thought was there of dastard flight; Linked in the serried phalanx ti :ht, Groom fought like noble, squire liko knight / a fearlessly and well. Till utter darkness closed her wing O'er their thin host and wounded King. Glorious defeat! Yes, and having in it seeds of a victory as glorious. Giant England, in 314 pitched battles, with skirmishes and sieges, in the long wars of independence, succeeded in hammering and welding the Scottish people into a nation compact ia unity of strength and soul and heart. Thus was formed a national character which, according to English Froude, has proved to be worth “ mountains of gold” to the empire. And from the long baptism of fire, undergone by princes and people in common, there emerged a social benefit perhaps greater than the political. That is, men learned to love and honor as brethren all who had gone along with them through the flames. So ic came about that Scotland was think¬ ing, not only of her “ princes and lords,” but also, and perhaps especially, of hor “ bold peasantry,” her crofters and cottars and burghers, when she raised her long-remembered lament over Flodden and her “ flowers o’ the forest, a’ wede awa’.” And their descendants have come to love hor with that proverbial passion of affectionate veneration, which inspired Walter Scott as truly as Robert Burns, and which, all the world over, even at the remotest antipodes, makes them love to look on the face of a “ brither Soot.” To all true citizens of this most noble British nation there is a great career, with ful¬ ness of happy occupations well-beseeming nobleness, for all their heart and bouI and strength and mind. This career is open to the “ old nobility” of circumstance, as well as to the older or oldest nobility of nature. Only let them, thus noble men by rank or genius for rule, be manly men who love their kind with manly heart. And, were it only in order that as noble leaders they may ever have meet noble following, let them fill their native land, not only with sheep and deer in due place and proportion, but, above all, with a prosperous valiant manhood, like that which burned and shone in him who, peasant-born but Heaven-inspired, claimed to be “a nobleman by creation of God Almighty.” SECOND LBOTtTEE. Themistocles, when laughed at for the badness of his music, said it was true that he could not play tho flute, but that he could make a small state into a great one. One does not need even to be a practtca politician, to say nothing of political genius like that of the Athenian states^ men, in order to be able to utter a warn ing about a danger which he has seen that may be of advantage to his nation. The warning which I now proceed to address to you is about the growth of a upas tree, under whose deadly shade the British nation has in some respects been lan uish- ing to death. And it is now addressed to you, whoso nation has to a considerable extent a tabula ram, carte blanche, or clear open field for legislation about land, happily free from complications which have risen to older states from inheritance of constitutions that have lost their good and gained an evil in the room of it, as a body which is wholesome and lovely when in life becomes a loathesome and dangerous nuisanco after death. And to you it is addressed in tho hope that you may Beck, through timely use of your power as citizens of the nation, to prevent that upas tree from growing up among you to blight your future as a nation, or, if it have to some extent grown up already, to destroyit when tenderand young, before it have become old enough and strong enough to destroy you as a people. There are evils which in the germ hardly appear to bo evil, or may appear to be good. Tho upas tree in germ may not be very clearly distinguishable from a tree of life, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. And, relatively to this, a young nation engaged in laying the foundations of the future, may obtain a vast advantage, the benefit of experience without tho painful cost of it, if only it study the warnings of history of older states, so as to learn from the distant and the past. The upas tree is autocracy of property in land, or absolute or despotic power of right in private proprietors such, c.g., that a landowner shall be able, by hia mere will, irrespective of the nation’s interest and will in tho matter, so far as his land goes, to depopulate the country ; as, for instance, at this hour a very small number of private persons have it in their power, by law, to depopulate almost all the Highlands of Scotland. In another lecture I have shown that tho autocracy or absolutism of landownership is by no means necessary in order to existence of private property in land, or of large estates in the hands of private individuals ; that such absolutism or autocracy has had no existence either under the feudal system, or under tho clan system, or under tho udal system—tinder any form, of nationalism, tribalism, or indivi¬ dualism, of landownership, that ever has had any root of principle of law in the constitutional history of our nation re¬ latively to land ; that the autocracy of modern landlordism is a dangerous inno¬ vation upon our whole constitution re¬ latively to landed property and every other sort of property ; and that, in especial, an obligation to maintenance of men upon the land, at the nation’s dis¬ cretion, and to the amount and on the conditions prescribed by the nation, that this obligation, so far from being incom¬ patible with the maintenance of private property in landed estate, great or small, is fully compatible with the existence and enjoyment of every kind of landed property conceivable in civilised society, and was amply and nobly illustrated as a fundamental constitution of the two great historical systems of tribalism under clan chiefs and nationalism under feudal chiefs. And now, in the present lecture, I will endeavor to illustrate the positions that have been exhibited in tho more abstract form of general discussion, from the pathetic history of the Scottish Highlands as bearing on the interest of the Empire. It may be said in this relation, the things which you propose in your programme to be done by the nation through its law, 23 THE LAND arc or will be done by the landownora of their own will. To this I answer—first, in that case they ought to have no serious objection to have things prescribed by law. Second, we do not want to have these things done by the will of private owners of land ; wo want them done whether they will or no ; wo want them to be placed high and and far above the mere will of individuals, and solemnly undertaken and provided for by the nation magistratically, as things vitally affecting a great national interest, transcendentally superior to all personal or private inclina¬ tions of individuals or families. And, third and last, we know from a long and painful experience of our nation, that this great national interest, which the nation cannot let out of its own hands without shame, cannot with safety, without great appalling peril, be left in the hands of the private owners of land. The experiment was made in circum¬ stances most favorable to the justification of landowning autocracy by the result. The Highland proprietors had the strongest imaginable reasous for being just and generous to their tenants in the use of the autocracy secured to them by law. The land had really belonged, not to the chiefs, but to the clans. The chiefs had been, not lords of the land, but leaders of the men. They, like other gentry of the clan, might have separate estates of their own, with tacksmen, crofters, and cottars under them. Tho chief, besides, for his maintenance in state, of both peace and war, might have certainresorvesof thepub- lic land, and certain tributes or rents from land appropriated to clansmen. Still, qua chief, he was not, like our modern lairds, a lord of the land, but only, like a Maori chief in the North Island, the leader of the men—sometimes only tho electivo loader, within the limits of—so to speak— the royal family of the tribe. The clan was paramount lord of all. And the clans¬ men, whether as tacksmen, as crofters, or as cottars, under the broad constitutional shield of the clan, had rights of property in their holdings, whether as owners or as tenants, independently of the will of the chief. These rights of theirs were simply destroyed,by an act of the national will, after the suppression of the rebellion under Charles Edward Stuart in 1745-4G. The hereditary jurisdiction of the chiefs was abolished. The clan system was broken up. And they who had previously been chiefs, leaders of the men, were now exalted (or degraded) into lairds, or owners of the land. Further, the clans¬ men, having in this way so strong a claim upon them in justice, had a peculiarly QUESTION. strong and tender claim upon their affect tion. For by common consent they were of the chief’s own blood ; bo that their very name—of clan-meant “family”, and his designation — ccann-cinneach-1 meant “family head” or “patriarchal ruler ” of his children. It might therefore have been expected that these new landlords would shew themselves perfectly safe and trustworthy keepers of the nation’s great interest in manhood ; that on their lands, at least there would always be plenty of good men for the nation. Although it had been so in their case, it would by no means have have followed that it is safe and wise universally, or ordinarily, to trust an, autocratic power over population in the hands of private proprietors, who may have an interest, or a perverse irrational pleasure, in depopulation. But in fact the experiment, in that most favorablo case for the autocracy, in a century has resulted as follows :—(1) The population of the Highlands is not half of what it ought to be in tho nation’s public interest. (2) Of the fractional population that there is, a considerable proportion are so ill- placed upon the land that it cannot main¬ tain them in such decency and comfort as would be compatible with maintenance in them of a high quality of manhood. (3) Tho landlords, partly supported by rack- rents, scraped together by semi-pauper tenantry from outside of their holdings, are partly dependant on public charity, in the shape of occasional spasms of en¬ deavor to keep the poor tenantry from starving—endeavors which thus operate as an insurance for tho laird and his “ rents.” I have already referred to tho general fact, that at the end of the century of autocratic landlordism the population of tho Highlands has not diminished, but augmented, since the beginning of the now regime. That fact has been appealed to, by some who ought to have known better, as if showing that the reign of lairds has been a good one for the country. But, Canning said, “ There is nothing more fallacious than figures—except facts. ” And it is easy to show the fallacy of the “fact ” now in view. In point of logical cogency, to prove the thing alleged on the ground of it, it needs only to be steadily looked at in order to disappear from view into nothing—like a bodach glas of imagi¬ nation or of mist. For, (1) The augmen¬ tation, where it has taken place, may have taken place, not by reason of favoring influences of autocracy of landlordism, but in spite of malignant influences of the same, through favor of other influences 23 THE LAND counter,'icting tho malignity. (2) Though the population over all have boen aug¬ mented, and in some places it is too great for the public good, that does not justify total annihilation of population in some places through deer foresting, and a de¬ population really detrimental to the public interest of the nation through a cer¬ tain sort of sheep farming in other places. Charles Lamb, when blamed for always coming late in the morning to his work at the India House, humorously excused himself on the ground, that ho always went away from it early in tho afternoon. But the humour of thus making “ two blacks ” into “ one white ” is out of place in relation to a matter so grave as right settlement of the land question. And if half of the Highlands be emptied of men, and the other half bo over-crowded, then in this case to plead growth of population as justification of tho reign of lairds, is to say in effect, that two blacks make one white. And (3), and above all, though the population should now bo a third more than it was at the beginning of that reign, yet the reign is shown to have been a disastrous one if it be true, as it can be proved, that the population ought to have now been at least double of what it then was. Tho suggestion, that the population of the Highlands all over ought at least to have been doubled, needs only to be con¬ sidered in order to be seen to bo feasible. The population of Scotland all over has, within tho same period, been more than doubled. Her wealth has vastly moro than doubled ; so that her average wealth per citizen, which at the union was ludi¬ crously below that of England, is now above that of England. The Highlands, then, if they had economically progressed at the rate of Scotland as a whole, would have had about double their present popu¬ lation. But tho rate of progress in the Highlands ought to have been greater than that in Scotland all over. For the Highlands ought to have benefited in larger proportion than tho Lowlands from a century of great improvements in agri¬ cultural science and art, and in facilities for internal intercourse of commerce as well as for coasting navigation ;—improve¬ ments, that is, in respect precisely of those conditions which have most to do with a country’s capability for maintenance of men. That century has in the Highlands been charac¬ terised remarkably by a reign of peace : a peace so profound that an armed man is never seen there unless it be a soldier at home on furlough on peaceful visit to his friends ; and tho policeman fiaa hardly QUESTION. ever any business except to try to look busy and important; and serious crime is almost completely unknown. The rural districts of the Lowlands have, no doubt, especially the purely pastoral and agri¬ cultural districts, boen, in considerable though not equal measure, similarly blessed with peace 5 lions in the field have there too boen lambs in tho fold ; in the Lowland parish where I first was minister, during tho four years of my ministry a policeman was never seen on serious duty re crime but once, when he was hunting after a thief who was supposed to have passed through the parish on his crooked way of life nefarious. But the Lowlands, it must be remembered, had long before “Charlie’s year” been a comparatively settled country; though the patriotic Fletcher of b'alton maintained there were 200,000 “ sturdy beggars” or tramps, who onght, by way of abating the nuisance of vagabond idleness, to be caught and turned into slaves. In the Highlands, on the other hand, tho cen¬ tury’s reign of peace had come after cen¬ turies of almost unbroken reign of war, which must have been economically deso¬ lating as well as incessant ; as witness the following little “ fact,”—In the precincts of Balquhidder church, a few yards from Hob Roy’s grave, there are three or four fine old plane trees, which are singular in this respect, that there are no other trees in tho region of nearly equal ago with theirs ; and I was told by the late excel¬ lent Mr Macgregor, the minister of tho parish, that they had been planted about the time of the union of the crowns under Jam^s VI. of Scotland and I. of England, and that the reason why there had not been many other such trees planted in tho region in that ago was, that the age was so disturbed with wars as to be unfit for peaceful occupation such as planting. There woro feuds within tho clans themselves, and a normal state of private war of clan with clan, in¬ terrupted by lucid intervals of union of the clans in rebellion against the central government of the nation. Economically, therefore, the break¬ ing-up of the clan system after tho last rebellion was to the Highlands a vast advantage ; so that the regime of the lairds there, for which it is only claimed that during the century the population has grown to the extent of perhaps a third more, while it cannot be denied that much of this population is in a con¬ dition of chronic poverty involving con¬ stant peril of starvation—that regime falls to bo regarded as demonstrably disas¬ trous. 24 THE LAtfD And here let us pause to consider what, for the nation, is the woeful significance of disaster such as that. Our sense of the disaster is embittered by the circum¬ stance, that it occurred in a period of peace highly favorable to population :— It was not in the Battle : > o tempest pave the shock : She sprang no fatal leak ; She c me upon no rock. B it his sword was in the sheath, And his fingers held the pe i, When Kempeofeldt went down, With twice four hundre 1 men. Nor is the bitterness alleviated by the recollection, that the lairds, who once had been chiefs, were under peculiarly strong obligation of justice and honor, and blood relationship, real or supposed, to use their autocratic power in the manner most favorable to prosperity of the people, who had been made “ landless” by the act which made the chiefs into landowners. But let us look at the disaster as it is in itself, apart from the circumstances of pain and shame in its origin. And let us look at it only from one restricted point of view,—that of national economy. Of questions of strictly agricultural or pastoral economy, regarding the best methods of farming cn hill or plain, it would be ridiculous for mo to givo an opinion of my own ; though I may by and by give you the opinion of really qualified experts. But I may speak with a good grace, and you can hear with intelligent appreciation, about questions of what may be called general or ulterior economy : — what, on the whole and in the long run, will be most conducive to a nation’s prosperity so far as dependant on land. You and I know, for instance, as well as any farmer can, that scourging the land, though it should enrich him, will impoverish the nation ; and that our Scottish proverb, “The mair greed, the less speed,” will find illustration in his case if, in his eagerness for present advantages, he neglect the permanent improvements re¬ presented by fencing, and drainage, and manuring. Well, in relation to the nation’s ulterior economy, there is occa¬ sion for application of the maxim given to the world long ago by one who did not prophecy where he did not know : “ There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth ; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.”— (Prov. xi. 24 ) In my former lecture I spoke of the properly transcendental value of manhood itself, such that undue diminution of the number of men, or lowering of the quality QUESTION. of manhood, is a loss to the nation in re¬ spect of that highest and noblest wealth* as compared with which mere material wealth is nothing more than sheep and deer would be to tigers of Bengal. It falls to me habitually to inculcate as truth of God, that in respect of this highest and noblest wealth the nations can never fully prosper except through belief of that Word, the belief of which by the peoples has demonstrably been the instrumental cause of our modern civilisation to the peoples. But this is not the place nor time for that kind of teaching. Even the Bible history of land legislation, with its curiously interesting and profitable lessons of human sagacity and goodness under guidance of Divine inspiration, is not available for my present purpose ; be¬ cause the land laws of the Bible were in¬ tended, not for universal application, but for the special case of the Jews in Pales¬ tine, under pupillage and in training fop a special purpose, demanding constitutions that might not bo suitable to the rest of mankind. I will speak of economy only as related to material good. And in this relation I will speak of it as demanding men for the ulterior purposes both of protection and of production. 1. Of production I will say only a few words. I refer not only to the primary production, of agricultural and pastoral industry, but also, and especially, to the secondary production represented by manufactures and commerce. It is need¬ less to dwell upon the vastness of the ex¬ tent to which this may tell upon a nation’s wealth. Some years ago I became aware that after a very bad harvest in Britain, in one fortnight there came from foreign countries into the Port of Leith as much corn as would keep all Scotland in bread for the winter ; so that the people had bread, whero thero otherwise would have been probably a famine—possibly a revo¬ lution—if the natural supply of food had been intercepted by mischievously grasp¬ ing protective legislation. In Mr Ber¬ tram’s “ Harvest of the Sea” you can read that in the German Ocean there are 30,000 square miles of good fishing ground ; and that of that vast sea-farm every acre could, on the average, yield without impoverishment, year after year, six times as many tons of fish as the best corn land in England will yield of wheat. It is now near a generation since I some¬ where saw the statement that machinery in Britain was producing an amount of manufactured goods equal to all that could have been produced by 800 million pairs of human hands— i.e., a number I considerably larger than that of the whole THE LAND QUESTION. 25 raco of adult mankind now alive on earth. J need aay no more of the vast importance of manhood for the secondary production of wealth, and of the vital importance of having that manhood high in quality. A very little reflection will enable you to see that a nation is on tlie way to beggary in so far as its population sinks below what it well could be ; and would be on the same way of shame and sorrow although its population, remaining high in amount, were to be lowered in quality; so that for sailors we should have _say, Lascars, instead of Shetlanders making the long voyage ; and “heathen Chinees” instead of those artisans whose clear and masterly dexterity has made Britain the model workshop of the world; and perhaps South Islanders, brought by man-stealers pretending to be employers of labor, or a debris of shiftless loafers from the Continent of Europe, instead of ploughmen like those of Berwickshire and shepherds like those of the Scottish mountaiu land. It was recently calcu¬ lated that, as every British human being is economically worth, on the average, L100 to the nation, so the annual emi¬ gration of 150,000 souls means a loss to the nation of L15,000,000 a year. Of Course where the emigration is natural, and therefore wholesome, the lois directly will be made good indirectly, like a man’s expense of vital force on wholesomo and productive labor. But the calculation— oddly prosaic though it be in aspoct—is well enough fitted to show the badness of a national economy that does not provide for due maintenance of men. 2. Protection—I mean, protection, not against tho nation, but for the nation’s wealth ; uot against wealth from without, but against ivar without and fears within. Against fears within, security, so impor¬ tant to prosperity, is possible only where the population is high in quality as well as large enough in amount. For, to say nothing of elements of danger within a low-class population itself, there is over an ideal possibility of wars from without, to which commercial and manufacturing enterprise is keenly sensitive, so that a vagrant rumor of war may cause a com¬ mercial disaster to the nation. The mer¬ chant vessels, bringing wealth to our shores, are truly like the fleets of ancient Sidon, as doves that fly to our windows, with messages and pledges of peace from beyond the sea. But beyond the sea there are ironclads, possible armadas, against which wo must be and feel secure in order to enjoy the fulness of inward prosperity ; and against which wo can never bo nor feel secure unless wo have plenty of good citizens who can be turned into good soldiers. Political economy, teaching truth re¬ garding methods of attaining to material wealth of nations, does not teach the whole of truth that may bo requisite for our guidance even to that end. For in¬ stance, she teaches, Buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. And for ordinary purposes this is, no doubt, a lesson of truth, of beneficent truth ;— that in our self-regard we should practice that “benevolent neutrality,”—“for a con¬ sideration ”—giving away our surplus goods to th.-se who have most need of receiving them from us, and relieving of their surplus goods thoso who have most need of bestowing them on us. But there arc cases in which this maxiin of non¬ heroic virtue docs not apply. Take tho case of a besieged city, with provisions running short, and consequent peril of being driven to surrender by starvation, with clear conviction that surrender means death or “ chains and slavery.” Unless the citizens bo mad with blind accursed greed of gold, no amount of rent will in¬ duce them to set apart as pasture for sheep that space within tho walls which is needed as standiug and fighting ground for men. And, though tho enemy would joyfully purchase the lessening provisions for a thousand times their market-price anywhero else, yet the clever citizen, who shall take them out and sell them in that dearest market, will be, not landed as an economist, but hanged as a traitor. A nation will similarly entreat tho smart citizen who shall break through the blockade that shields his nation’s life. Now the British nation, among the nations of the world, may find itself at any lime blockaded or blockading. And in order to bo and feel secure against wars fr«m without, it must always hold itself in pre¬ paration to assume, if need be, the atti¬ tude and action of defence, or defiance, or assault which may be the best method of defence,—as Scipio saved Romo in Italy by destroying Carthago in Africa. It thus is not enough, even for enjoy¬ ment of material good, that we have it. Unless we have it scarcely guarded, wo can hardly with strict truth be said to have it,—not to speak of enjoying it and multiplying it. Rather it may 1 e said to have us, as timid apprehensive votaries, who tremble at the rustling of a leaf. A full purse, a good digestion, a clear busi¬ ness head, and even a kind neighborly heart, will leave him a dispicable weakling, and no mart, who, in a land full of robbers, lias no strong armed hand to shield or strike. And so of tho nation. 26 THE LAND QUESTION. We aa a nation are very much on the sea with our great wealth. And we may find ourselves very much at sea with it in another sense, like a whale among sword- ; fish, if we have not plenty of men who can and will fight, among hungry nations ! that can and will. So said the London ; Times once about Italy and Austria :— j Italy is all prey, and Austria is all sword. And our great British nation, with ail its admired wealth, may find itself as^helpless and despicable as a “ great whale,” among \ a shoal of hungry sword-fishes. Thej sword-fishes, no doubt, will all practice a j severe self-restraint, of “ benevolent! neutrality,” and “ act from a maxim fit to i become law in a system of universal legis¬ lation,” and pensive leave the whale to go in peace. At least, if we can believe the i blessed pacific philosophers of Manchester. But though we could believe them, we could not, I trust, endure the shame of acquiescing in the conclusion, that our nation ought, in the confidence of the kind consideration of other nations, to leave j itself helplessly dependent on their mercy. That were an impoverishment indeed, j and beggary in respect of what is best! worth having in a nation. The amount of mere material good that it i3 physically J possible to enjoy, is com para tit ely j limited ; and to that amount—thank God I —mere material good is fairly within I reach of all classes of citizens of this nation alike. Beyond that, the good which we have in the nation is mainly constituted by sentiments connected with nationality—the feeling and view of its happiness and grandeur in the pre¬ sent, and the heart-filling memory of its glories, in success or defeat, through the long eventful past. But if, in the way suggested by Manchester philosophy, of peace that is infamy, our nation sink into a despicable weakling, then for us— Ichqbod—the glory of citizen-life is de¬ parted, the memory of the past is only a | sting of reproach for present baseness, j and all the wealth of “bloated armaments” that are unarmed is only a transparent gilding to the shame. Instead, therefore, of such philosophy of infamy, we shall listen to fiery-so’aled poetry, to which indignation gives its verses of sorrowful scorn. And first, let ns hear gentle Goldsmith, lamenting over his “ Deserted Village ” :— Ill fares the land, to hastening i Is a prey. Where wealth accumulates, and men d cay. Princes and lords may fiou ish, and may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath lias made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, When Qucc destroyed, can uever be supplied. Then, at the end of that poem, in n part¬ ing invocation to the “ Muse,” ho resumes tho plaintive strain, until the lyre is grasped fmm his hand, and tho song is carried to its close, by strong-hearted and great-souled Samuel Johnson :— Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain ; Teach criing man to spurn the rage of gain • Teach him that states of nature strength possesfc, Though very poor, may yet bo very blest. Here, where gentle Oliver waxes weak, strong Samuel breaks in with a peroration of proud indignant warning. “Teach him,” ho cries, unmelodious, but ruggedly noble in strength, That trade’s pr<.ud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweep* thj labored mole away ; While self-dependent power can time defy. As rocks resist the billows and tho sky. “ States of nature strength possest.” “Self-dependent power.” Mark the words ! The poots here aro wise —vates — sacred bards, whoso poesy is prophecy. For, as wo have said, the true ultimate wealth of nations lies, not in dollars, but in men. Tho nation that will be strong, so as to stand in tho evil-day, and having done all, to stand, tnnst rely, under-God, not upon its money, but upon its man¬ hood, its own fundamental strength, of robust life, upheld and sustained in itself against all assaults without, like piuo of Clan-Alpine : — Mo >red in the rifted rock. Proof to the tempest shock, Tho firmer ho roots him the ruder they blow. Such a tree is the nation that has a pros¬ perous valiant manhood at its basis. That basis, or root, or living foundation, is at the same time the fountain of life, in robust fulness like its own, to all tho noble tree, which rears its proud head from the forest, and laughs at the storm. On tho other hand a rootless Christmas tree, laden with rich gow-gaws, and perhaps having a sham protictivo armour of dead branches and mock prickly spears, —there is the wealthy but effete nation¬ ality that lias not in itself the manhood of that “ native strength,” which would havo made it a “self-dependent power”; for the world if possible,—against the world, if necessary. You will not havo a nationality liko that ? Yery well : you must look to tho land for men that can serve as tho nation’s shield and sword. And in order to see them there when you look for them, you must have them there, in good condition, at all times. What, then, do you see on the Highland hills of old Scotland, whero 27 THE LAND QUESTION. you once had an eminently warlike though peaceful race of men ? Here we come to the second part of our pathetic story of misrule. Soon after the first beginning of the wholesale evictions, the then Glengarry, no longer a chief but a laird, accidentally stumbled on some smugglers in the soli¬ tude which he had made, as a way (they say) of peace for his wife, who had quarrelled with the clan, and could not bear their company on the land. The “ broken men ” seized him, and handled him roughly. The agitation of ruffled dignity occasioned to the dignitary a momentary lapse of memory ; and, forgetting he was not a chief, he cried out for “ his men ”—to the rescue. “ Call for your sheep, man,” said one of the assistants, “ the men are in America.” It was a sad thing to say, even for that “salvage man” that the men, the gallant simple clansmen, with all their happy fulness of picturesque variety of life, and storied memory and song, were gone for ever, like a dream of the vanished past, far, far from their own old famous “ land of bens, and glens, and heroes.” It was, perhaps, sadder for him for whose ancestors theirs would have exulted in fighting to the death in that old home of his people, where they would all but have worshipped his ancestors as demigods, there to stand naked and help¬ less, in a solitude broken only by a few skulking law-breakers, and be made to feel that even to these he wa3 only an object of loathing contempt, as the dis¬ honored scion of an honored line, who had sunk from their loftiness as leaders of men to the mean villainy of a man-selling trafficker in sheep. It was saddest of all for the nation. It was the nation that had given to a creature the power, when tempted by wife or devil, to banish a gallant race of its children from the old ancestral homes of their hearts. It was the nation that had, not only thus begun to bleed to death, but itself been the guilty author of the wound. It was the nation that had stripped her children of their defensive armour, of inherited right to remain in their homes. It was the nation that had put the lethal weapon, of legal power to banish them from their native soil, in the hand of a creature whom it placed under no responsibility for action so fatal. And the nation may yet have cause to lament its crime, and criminal stupidity, with a repentance all too late. A day may come, of battle sore and dire, perhaps for national freedom or life, against overwhelming odds, a day of desperate extremity, in which the nation, crying out tor “men” to the rescue in that agony, shall be answered from the mountains by the bleating of innocent sheep or the belling of dun deer, instead of the thu *tiyhinn fogham iiridh that should have shaken a thousand hills, the mustering war-cry of the bravest of man¬ kind. Here is a plain, practical test of the truth, and sincerity of the suggestion sometimes ventured on more or less ob¬ liquely, that after all there has been no such mismanagement of the nation’s business of population as will seriously affect for the worse the nation’s high in¬ terest in that business. Let the lairds— qua “ chiefd ”—call for “ men” to the na¬ tion’s defence. At first it was possible here and there to “ raise” a regiment for the service of the King. For the old habits lingered some time after the old constitution had departed. Not a few of the lairds retained a chief’s heart toward the clansmen whom they had retained on their land. But gradually new times gave occasion to new manners. “ The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” And Sisera—the new laird - ocracy — perhaps did not fight much against the stars, or swim very strongly against the “stream of tendency,” which the now law had created and was sustain¬ ing in their interest. They no longer had need of men, to be their strength in war, and their crown of joy and glory in peace. But they now had sore need of money, to sustain them in that new gentility of landlordism which had come in place of the old simple grandeur of chiefs—a gen¬ tility expensive, and ever tending to slide into shabby genteel. And money, much money, could be made by putting sheep, or deer, or other such higher animals, into the old immemorial place of men. And so the men were “ cleared” off the land, as troublesome cumberers of the ground, which their fathers had held by tenure of the sword after they had won it by their sword and spear ; to go to dis¬ tant lands, or anywhere else out of the way. And when the best of the men had thus gone away, with a rankling sense of wrong in hot Celtic hearts, those who re¬ mained, with the misery and shame of remaining, were not likely to show much of a fruitful enthusiasm in responding to the war-cry of a laird, to whom it was only dishonor that his fathers had been chiefs— cinne~cinneach —“ family heads,” to their fathers. And now let the process be “ tested by results.” Here and there it was long before the results were fully seen. There were landlords who strove in the new THE LAND QUESTION. 28 position to maintain the old patriarchal relations of chief to clan, and occupy the land as if the tribal ownership of clansmen had remained a reality, in fact though not in fiction of law. And that feeling on their part was meetly responded to. And a clansman has in him the making of a patriot. So, even In our time, during the great wars at the beginning of the cen¬ tury, Skye, it is said, sent to fight the nation’s battles 10,000 soldiers, as good as any the world has ever seen. And brave Fassiefern, when he fell at Quatre Bras, was at the head of a regiment of High¬ landers brave as himself, “ tough as the heather, strong as the pine,” and true as heart of oak. But now the men of Skye, when questioned by a Royal Com¬ mission, will bitterly mock at any word of their being soldiers, whose spirit is broken and crushed with a poverty shameful as well as woeful. It is doubt¬ ful whether it would be possible to “ raise” 500 soldiers in Skye by any form of appeal. And if the form should be that of lairds calling for “ their men” as chiefs, it ia certain that the appeal would, over the Highlands as a whole, be met only by derision as a ridiculous anachronism, such that even the energy of hatred has died out of the scorn that once met Glengarry in, “Call for your sheep, man : the men are in America.” The sad result thus suggested was in¬ evitable. On the one hand, the chiefs of old, whether patriarchal or feudal, had real need of the raeu. They were his volunteer army, and the fundamental part of his wealth. For him to expel them would have been to empty his purse and throw away his sword and shield, and set his house and fields on fire, with enemies all round him, hungry for his property, thirsting for his blood. On the other hand, under the new law the chiefs, while they no longer had such reasons for cultivation of manhood on their lands, gradually or speedily lost the power as well as the will. When the clans were made dependent on the mere will of chiefs turned into lairds, there was no guarantee that the old family should retain the old patri¬ archal affection, or should remain in pos¬ session of the land. Those who did so, and strove to swim against “ the stream of tendency,” and retain the people on the land in the old fashion, ordinarily brought ruin on themselves and their families, while doing little good, if not harm, to the people. Others, with what to them was a veritable windfall of money, were ruined by extravagance, as of a poor man made suddenly rich ; others, by in¬ competency to carry on business in a business fashion out of keeping with their training of previous habits ; others, by lack of adequate capital to carry on pro¬ fitably their business of speculation in land. And hence in many cases where the old family has not remained, perhaps in a condition more or less of effete- ness, the lands have passod into the hands of strangers, none of whom can know and love the clansmen as their chief, audsome of whom may not care for any man but themselves, and, caring for themselves, naturally care much for sheep and deer. For a sample of the result, let us look at the case of Glenelg (“ Yale of Beauty”), whose wild loveliness flashes out, as of a fairy princess glancing shyly from the window of a fortress, upon the sea voyager as he passes into Kyle Rhea, on his way to Outer Hebrides, through the romantic Sound of Skye, Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode, To his hills that encircle the sea. There you can see the process, in a disregarded extremity, uuder the hands | of autocratic landlordism, of a nation’s bleeding to death. The facts are digested in the editorial columns of the Glasgow Weekly Mail, April 28, 1883 The parish . . . extends 20 miles from north to south, and about the same dis¬ tance from east ta west. At the close of last century the population of the whole parish amounted to 2746. The tacksmen aud crofters possessed a large stock of black cattle and sheep. The soil in the valleys is good—part of a deep black lo im and part of sandy soil—and in those days yielded large crops of potatoes, oa*s, and barley. The hills are green to t’ e top, and afforded ex¬ cellent pasture for sheep and cattle. There were only 31 paupers in the parish, and the inhabitants were as a whole living in com¬ fort. But a great change begau when the clearances took place, and were carried out in the most ruthless manner. Tacksmen, ; crofters, cottars, all alike disappeared. . . A single sheep-farmer from Ayrshire rents the whole of this extensive valley [the “ Glen” proper) and the surrounding hills, which at the beginning of this century afforded a comfortable subsistence to a con¬ tented and well-to-do population of nearly 1300 souls. On the other side of the loch, which bounds Glenel/ on the north, lie? the extensive district of Kintail, from which the sheep-farmers and shepherds have been ex- ; pelled in a body to make room for a deer | forest to afford sport to an American millionaire. And so, as Lord Belhaven said, when to his view Scotland ceased to bo through union with England, “ There’s an end o’ I an auld sang.” So it appeared to a true 29 THE LAND QUESTION. poet with a Highland heart and a Low¬ land tongue At the silence of night’s contemplative hour, I have mused in a sorrowful mood, On the wind-shaken reeds that embosom the bower, Where the home of my forefathers stood. All ruined and waste is the roofless abode, And lonely the dark raven’s sheltering tree, Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trode, To his hills that encircle the sea. This is what has come of— 0, Caledonia, stern and wild, Meet nurse for a poetic child 3 Land of brown heath and thagey wood, Land of the mountain and the flood, Land of my sires, what morial baud Can e’er untie the filial band, That knits me to thy rugged strand ? The hand, replies autocratic landlordism, of “an American millionaire,” who wants “ for a deer forest to afford sport ” to his restless idleness, that “ land of my sires ” which once sustained the grandeur of the mighty Mackenzie, “high chief of Kin- tail.” Picture to yourself one of the old chiefs;— eg., Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel. Lord Macaulay will bid you find his picture in Ulysses, not the super¬ lative “ Artful Dodger ” of dramatic poetry, but Homer’s Odysseus ; —whose sheer indomitable manhood moves us more than the half-unearthly transcen¬ dentalism of Thetis-born Achilles ; who, under a surface of consummate sagacity and prudence cherished a spirit of adven¬ ture which was the realised ideal of adventurous (in his case literally “ dare¬ devil ”) Greek speculation ; and who to all this added in perfection the endearing homely virtues, of love to wife and child that twenty years of warfare and wander¬ ing could not quench, and kind considerate goodness to inferiors such that swine-herd Eumaeus loves and honors him far more than he loves his own life, and even the aged dog, that has not seen him for twenty long years, now, when he returns in the disguise of an aged and ragged beggar, flickers out the last feeble spark •of its life in the endeavor to welcome his returning. Such is the ideal which the warm-hearted clansmen represent to them¬ selves when they think of an old chief, like that other Lochiel of Campbell, with a following of men, whose “ swords are a thousand, their hearts are but one.” And now “ look on this picture and on that.” Enter Yankee, the “American millionaire,” with his “ almighty dollar and lo ! Exeunt omnes: farmers, shep¬ herds, sheep, and collie-dogs, all vanish pell-mell from the Beene, like a company of ghosts when the cock has crowed alarm. The dramatic effect of “ skedaddle ” occasioned by the entrance of that wan¬ dering conjurer from over sea, gives one a pleasing sonse of poetical justice. But that serio-comic effect must not lead our minds away from due contemplation of the really tragic aspects of that history. The history, for instance, brings into clear light, with a startling vividness, as in light of lightning flash (suggesting thunder - bolts), the real character of much of that regime of laird- ocracy to which the nation has confided so much of its profoundly vital in¬ terest in manhood. Though the sheep-farm should economically be a good specula- : lation—for them, and the deer-foreBt a better ; and though the money thus made should enable them to throw over the business a certain halo or “ glamour” of grandeur ; yet morally the grandeur is merely theatrical grandiose. It hides a shabby and dirty performer, who, out wardly a fine or noble gentleman, really is—like a fore-staller in the corn market —a Bordid speculator in human life, ready to sacrifice the manhood of a region in¬ trusted to him by God, at the bidding of an “ American millionaire,” who happens to be the highest “ bidder” in the market. Morally, what difference is there, except in favor of the enterprising American—no longer a slave-marketer—between that grandee and the most consummately “vulgar Yankey” that ever worshipped the Dollar l But the darkest aspect of the matter is | not that anti-climax of moral degradation ! in the landowning seller of men. Nor is 1 even the deep private tragedy of an evic- ' tion, in its bearing on the people sold out I of their old homes, the blackest of the 1 darkness of that aspect. We do hear with horror of such outrages, iuhuman i and ungodly, really murderous, upon families and individuals, as characterised i the “ Sutherland clearings” a generation ago, and on account of which a leading i representative of the great man was tried ; for culpable homicide, and in popular estimation ought to have been hanged. But our natural horror in contemplation of undeserved sufferings of helpless brethren of human kind must not blind us to a profounder tragedy behind. By the sea-Bhore of Galloway, one day in 1685, aged Margaret Maclauchlan was tied to a stake within reach of the rising tide. As she wrestled in her death agony, “for Christ’s crown and covenant,” the mocking persecutors pointed out her 30 THE LAND torture to young Margaret Wilson, also doomed to die for that cause. And they asked her— in terrorem—to frighten her into apostacy, “ What see you there ?’ 41 See,’’said Christiana,faithful unto death, “What I see there is Jesus Christ, wrestling inoneof His members.” Forus,alas! when we look at such an expatriation as that of our kindred from beautiful Glenelg, there is no such conquering hope ; but rather a sickening fear of “ woe to the land ” in which such a thing is made possible by law. But that which will strike fear into cowards may strike fire from the brave. And the fear itself may prove to be one of those that “kindle hopes,” if only it lead men, through the veil of that personal suffering in desolation to an innocent and prosperous population, to perceive and ponder, until it burn as a quenchless fire in their bones, the “fact,” that the nation there lies bleeding—the British Empire, to which more than to any other Heaven appears to have entrusted the destinies of the earth and its peoples, has, in that un¬ regarded extremity, been bleeding to death. That may serve as a sample of the bear¬ ing of autocracy in landownership upon amonnt of population. The district, you observe, which has been so completely emptied of manhood, is one well-fitted to maintain, in decency and comfort, a numerous population of men of high quality, such a 3 Dr Stuart was wont to find so cordially welcoming him and sumptuously entertaining him, on his way through the Highlands to college in his youth. There thus is no possibility of putting on this case the false face of as¬ suming that the land given over to deer is not fit to maintain men. But now let me show you another picture from the present day’s life, of the sort of land, and of economical condition, that may be granted to those men who are net absolutely banished from the country; and request you to [judge whether the lairdocracy can be trusted to make sure provision for high quality of manhood, though failing to make provision for due amount of population. Such a picture may serve to enable you to realise in your mind what sort of nursing “ for a poetic child ” is now-a-days given through the step-mothership of lairdocracy, by Scott’s “ Caledonia, stern and wild.” To say that in beautiful Raasay, John¬ son’s “island of the Phaeacians,” the good land is given to a sheep-farmer and the people are huddled together on the bad land, is not to convey a distinct realistic impression. In order to have that, you must look at a concrete case in detail. QUESTION. Well, here is the picture I have promised to show. It is of our acquaintances the Lewis men. They, on account of a de¬ monstration they had made on behalf of what is highest and best, were once, by an influential political paper, nick-named “the just men of Lewis.” Their good charactor was thus attested, when in¬ sulted. But now let us look at their homes :— The materials of the picture were fur¬ nished by a special correspondent, ap- j pointed this year by the Glasgow Mail, a widely-circulated paper of unquestionable integrity, simply to observe and report the facts, for the information of the public at homo and abroad. The digest of those materials, from which I quote, wa3 in the editorial columns of the Mail for the week ending April 28, 1883 :— The broad fact that in this pendicle of Ross- shire there are over 1000 families living in crofts the rents of many of which are variously one pound, thirty shillings, and fifty shillings a year, sufficiently indicates the vital importance of the question [regard- i ing the “ state of affairs ” “ revealed ”]. It ' is quite certain that anywhere within hail of civilisation or its ways, the bulk of these, rentals do not represent the value of house accommodation at all fit for human beings. No proprietor whose estates lay exposed to remark from modern public opinion would dare to house his tenants in the way that these rentals suggest. [Here the article gives illustrative cases— e.y.] Angus M‘Neill’s house . . . a byre, “or rather a midden- stead,” at the upper end, inside, with manure from one to three feet deep ; a kitchen in the midd e, with a fire on the floor ; and two box-beds at the other end ; all without par¬ tition, and nearly without furniture :—is the picture of one house. [Bnt observe, the rental, of, say, 3l‘s per annum (!) represents the value, not only of the house, but also of the croft—as to which we read] From the ground . . . the crofter must either raise sufficient of the fruits of the earth to supply himself and his family with a considerable por¬ tion of their every-day food, or he and they must starve, or live on chari y. Semi¬ starvation is chronic, and misery permanent. But something rather sterner than semi¬ starvation is present just now [threatening of famine. Here again the c-se.] . . A few fish-bones showed what sort of break¬ fast had been partaken of, and two or three uneaten skates, the charity of neighbors, was all the food in the house. No other food of any kind had been in the house for a week. This was not the hut of a savage in a newly-discovered island, be it remem¬ bered. It was the house of a respectable Scotchman, with a wife and five children. He is living in his usual place of abode, and his circumstances have just kicked 1 the beam a little over its ordinary hand-to- THE LAND QUESTION. 31 mouth balance. As he is, so, in tho main, are hundreds of families in the Lews at this moment. “ Meet nurse for a poetic child.” Very ! As they are in Lews, so are they in other parts of tho Celtic Highlands ?r>d Islands of Scotland. Let us, for instance, take a picture from Skye, still more to vivify realisation by individualising. This pic¬ ture has had the fortune to go before the civilised world in the London Times, and then to come all the way round to the Antipodes here, when I found it in the Oamaru Mail of July t th, 1883. But what has given it this rare fortune is not anything of rarity in the original ; but the accident of his having been examined on oath by Lord Napier of Ettrick, and the Royal Commission. Hero he is : — “Donald Nicholson. . . . described as a hale old man of 78 years of age.” Mark in his case what hopes for the future our brave young Highlanders have from Caledonia, what rewards of virtue for her “ poetic child.” “ I was a crofter in Totcscore, but I now reside in Solitote. I hare no land now. They doubled my rent and LI more. I offered to pay the double rent, but I would not p*y tne LI more, and I was ejected. The ground officer came and turned every¬ thing out of the house, and the tacksman of | Monkstadt sent round word that if anyone opened their door to me or let me into their i houBC they would be treated the same next year. My son’s wife and her two young children were with me, and we were all that night in the cart shed, and our neighbors were afraid to let us in, and were crying over us. There was plenty of meal outside, but we had no fire to make a cake. We lived in the stable all the summer. I could only erect one l ed in it, and my daughter and son’s wife and two children slept in the bed, and I myself slept on the stones. During a vacancy the Presbytery of the Established Chuich allowed me to enter the glebe. After that I got refuge in the house of a poor woman at Duntulm, and the factor chal¬ lenged the tacksman at Duntulm for allow¬ ing the poor woman to keep me in the house. Mr Grant, the parish mi istcr, supports me now. That happened five years ago.” At the conclusion of his st ry, the old man appealed to Mr M'lachlan, banker, Portree, who acted as interpreter, to con¬ firm the facts. In reply to Lord Napier and 1 ttrick, the chairman, Mr M‘Lachlan said :— “After he was put out of his house hs entered the shed and then he entered tho stable ; then an interdict was taken out against him, forbidding him to cuter fo ever the hou es or lands. I'ndcr stress of circumstances he entered the barn with his family, l'e was laid up for breach of interdict, and for this breach of interdict he was fined 10s, with the alternative of five days’ imprisonment. Tho expenses of the interdict were 1 8. Tncn there was a year’s rent due, and in addition o that ho was charged with ‘ violent profits,’ which means the doubling of the rent for remain¬ ing in possession after the term. Tho whole came to L35 odd, which the man paid. “ Lord Napier. —But do you mean to say that that money was really exacted, attd passed into the factor’s haud^ ? “ Mr M.‘Lach!ai.—Yes. I arranged with the factor for him, and advanced the money Oct of the bank. When the markets came round, and he realised his stock, he paid me every penny of it.” Here occurs a reflection. The state of things represented by that pathetic case must be far from unfrequent —e g., in the homes of the “ just men of Lewis.” Tho Glasgow Mail says that no landlord would care to have tenants in such accomoda* tion as is there given to respectable Scotch¬ men with their families if the life-long outrage were perpetrated in tho lfght of public opinion. Well, why is it not in that light ? Why is not the nation effec¬ tively in Lewis, with the “ bull’s eye ” of its justice ? Why arc tho cases of Angus M‘Niell and Donald Nicholson, whon un¬ earthed by an inquiry, as startling strango to the nation as Schliemann's discovery of the remains of the murdered Agamemmon in his “gory bed” beneath the long-buried ruins of Mycense ? The tyranny of old Rome would let no man escape from its view. There was not an acre in the civilised world in which the fugitive could conceal himself safely from her vengeance, which would not be searched with a hun¬ dred keen eyes and a hundred armed hands. How comes it, theo, that such lamentable evils, life-long and widespread, where the nation’s men are living honest and laborious lives, are so completely un¬ noticed by the eyes of its justice and love, which ought to be all-pervading as tho sun,—“And there is nothing from his heat That hidden doth remain ?” How comes it that their poor abodes are as “ dark places of the earth,” whose fulness of “ horrid cruelty ” is left to be dis¬ covered to the wondering “ public” by the chance diligence of a newspaper corre¬ spondent ? Because the nation has neg¬ lected its own business, to see to duo maintenance of mm by tho land. That slate of things could not exist anywhere in tho laud fur an hour if tho nation chose to see it and forbid it. Consider, again, the physical conditions of tho human life you have been contem¬ plating, and the native tendency of these in relation to quality of manhood. Seo 92 THE LAND QUESTION. what ia that life, under the reign of autocratic landlordism, in Lewis and Skye and elsewhere in the Highlands. The occupant is not maintained by the land but starved by it. In search of a maintenance for himself and his children, ho has to wander far over land or sea, like the crows or gulls, in order, through the hardest and worst-remunerated labor, to scrape together, if possible, and save, some little money, which he may bring home with him in the end of the season to purchase meal for his family, and pay fwhat is called) “rent” to his landlord. When the capable men and women have thus gone away, “ to beg a brother of the earth to give them leave to toil,” the wretched “ farming ” at homo has to be done by incapablca — married women, children, aged and infirm. One day in Skye, I said to a minister that the poor little skeleton of a pony, with which a woman and child were trying to work the land, which they had manured with sea- ware carried from a distance on their backs, that the ricketty little creature was not fit for the work ; that he and they might manage, simply with their weight, to drag the flimsy plough, so as to scarify the soil, down the steep hill face, but that for the return movement up¬ ward they would all require to be carried. Ho answered that he had seen such a horse draw a plough that was tied to his tail. There, you see, is the final cause of ahorse, or economical end of his tail in nature. So, miserably toiling, at home and from home, our men spend what we call their “life,” in which “semi-starva¬ tion is chronic, and misery permanent.” When they cannot do or find poorly re- munerativo work to supplement the “ farm ” produce, or when any little thing goes wrong with the crops, then they are thrown upon the charity of out¬ siders, making a spasmodic effort for prevention of famine, with pestilenco at its heels. It is thus that wo provide for high quality of manhood, in the best breeding ground for men under the sun. Wo drivo away the ablest men, and starve those who remain ; and wonder at the folly of the man who killed the goose that had laid his golden eggs ! Truly, we are masterly economists. Now tako a parting look at the land¬ lordism to which the nation has committed the trust that ought never to go out of its own hands. While the people aro chronic¬ ally half-starved, and public charity is relied upon as an insurance against .starva¬ tion, the landlords are driving a profitable trade in sheep-farming or deer-foresting, under protection of a nation which they do not support, as the mouse does no t support the cheese in which it has a and a portion. And, in addition to that they charge their crofters and cottar! ''•hat h called “rent”-tor “aT, For the hovels and patches of land that are called their homes. Why should Ihev pay “ rent” for these, beyond a mcr e tribute in acknowledgment of lordship or superiority in the landowner 1 '] hey are not homes, such as will give due main- tenance to men, but only like the nests of crows and gulls, a sort of geographical point of departure and returning to those who wander far in search of a mainten¬ ance abroad. The landlord has not built them these crows’ nests. The houses as a rule are built by the people themselves and ordinarily the patches of land are created out of nothing but mere “ waste” land by them—one of whom, after he has created a small farm with heavy toil of some years, can be turned out of it at any moment, with no “ compensation for implements,” at the mere nod of the landlord or his factor. When, then, thoy pay for their holdings what is called “ rent,” it is not the whole truth that the land is not maintaining them. . It is another part of the same truth, that it is not maintaining the landlords. The land¬ lords are maintained in part, either by the slavish toil of their so-called tenants in scraping together a “rent” from the lowlands or the sea, or by that public charity which is rolied upon as an insur¬ ance against famine. That is what en¬ ables the tenants to pay so-called “ rent” when the wolf is only at the door. And therefore into that so-called rent there enters the infamy of a pauper dole to tho landlordism which, with “ a hundred pipers an’ a’, an’ a’,” struts about in glory—so shameful. Than such a deep, of despicable mean¬ ness of grandoeism, can there be a lower deep? I spoke of the gentility of that grandeeism, come in place of the simple grandeur of old chiefs, as tending to slide into shabby genteel. Has it not slidden into shabbiness inexpressible ? Ah ! it is not only in the persons of crofters and cottars that the nation is undergoing de¬ gradation in quality of its manhood. JJehmla cut Carthago. Abolish for ever that autocracy of landownership which has made it possibles for an honorable order of Scottish gentlemen to sink, in¬ advertently, into a gilded pauperism so vile—to maintain a shameful grandeur upon tho lives of poor dependents, who themselves are dependent on charity of strangers ! Surely, surely, “ there’s something rotten in that state.” THE LAND QUESTION. 33 One can regard with real sympathy, and even a sort of respect, a certain proud reserve of misfortune, on Iho part of old families incapable of dealing with the neff situation, and disdaining to appeal for comfort to the sympathies of the com¬ monalty. In that reserve of manly pride, even whon it goes to the extreme of re¬ straining from expression of natural sorrow on account of the misery of others, there is a certain grandeur, though it should be a savage grandeur—as when Cesar or Agamemnon covers his face with his mantle, or Outalissi will not wail, though ho mourns, with Albert : — As monumental bronze unchanged his look, A soul that pity touched, but never shook ; Trained from his t ee-rocked cradle to his bie--* The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook, Impassive — fearing but the shame of fear— A stoic of the woods, a man without a tear. Such an aspect might not, in meet circum¬ stances, ill become the descendant of that old chief, who scornfully kicked away the suowball on which his son had laid his head to sleep, indignant at having lived to see the day when sou of his was so far gone in effeminacy as to make use of a pillow. It thus is conceivable that a ter¬ ritorial grandee, looking on the dosolation of the people entrusted to him, should be restrained from utterance of tearful con¬ fessions and lamentations, by a pride of manhood which is not unmanly though unnatural, like that of Prometheus chained to his rock, who will utter no cry of pain while the vultures are rending his bowels ; and be sustained in the un¬ natural hardness by a sort of. perverted ancestral noblesse oblige: — E’en fr m the 1 »nd of shadows now, My father’s awful ghost appears, t midst the clouds that round us roll. He bids my soul for battle thirst — Ho bids me dry the last—the first — The only tears that ever burst l«'rom Uutalissi’s soul ; Because I may not stain with grief, The death-song of an Indian chief. But, woe’s me!—the prido now in our view is a pride that can stoop to live upon the misery of dependants, and to wring from them a part of the pauper dole of charity, making spasmodic efforts to save them from famine ! That prido you may call a “ILeilau’ pride.” But in this case it is a low and dirty thing, vile and malig¬ nant as tho poison that swells a serpent’s loathsome head, and meriting the doom upon that “old serpent” in Eden, “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou oat all the days of thy life.” In reading the history of tho Stuart Kiugs of England, and of “ Bonnie Prince Charlie ” after he had got safe away from the ruin which came upon so many in his causo, one is struck with tho debasing effect of despotism on tho despot. Plato’s awful description of a tyrant’s heart, as gashed and torn by passions, is to mo less awful than the view of that heart simply hardened, “ past feeling,” bo as to regard all sacrifices and sufferings of de¬ pendants as mere matters of course. Such, in relation to landowners of largo estates, is tho native tendency of that autocracy or absolutism of property, for tho exist¬ ence of which there is no real need in the nature of private property of any sort, and which had no existence in relation to private property in land until it stole in recently as an inadvertent innovation upon our national constitution, so as to be constitutionally only tho unfortunate “ accident of an accident.” You can see I have not formed my view of the stale of tilings from abstract reason¬ ing about the native tendency of a system, but have only generalised from observa¬ tion of tho system as it works in actual experience of life. And my view is not that of an isolated enthusiast, creating for himself a theoretical “ idol of tho cave.” It is the view taken by men of affairs, who have eyos in their heads and hearts in their bosoms. The following statement was published within this year in the leading periodical of tho capital of the Highlands (Inverness Courier, March 22, 1883). The writer (Scotus) is evidently a very able man, and seemingly an honest one. But we need not enquire about his character, for the statement speaks for itself: — Those who are practica'ly acquainted with wh it has been going on in the North for the last half-ccn ury are aware that the crofters’ grievances.solve themselves . into the irrepressible qnestion of pasturage, without which, natu e and local circum¬ stances plainly teach, no rents can be earned in a region to elevate 1 and exclusive’y pas¬ toral. That again involves the necessity of a searching inquiry into the moral and econo¬ mical consequences of large sheep runs, that have resulted in the serious deterioration of our mountain pasturage, and in tho diminution of our flocks (notwithstanding t an extensive resort to low country and arti¬ ficial feeding in winter), and of those deer- forests that render a full third of some of the best grazings in tho Highlands practi¬ cally a mere waste, as useless as the ahara; where neither men nor rueful beasts of the : eld arc permitted to have a home or an abiding place, lest they may interfere with the amusement of ‘the soft l-'axon,’ who 34 THE LAND shoots down a few half-tame animals in autumn, and calls it ‘sport.’” Tho deer forest we already know as land effectively insulated, or, for working pur¬ poses, sunk beneath tho waves. Of tho extent of tho solitude thus created for sportsmen, whoro there well might have been men for the nation, our witness says, “a full third of some of the best grazings in the Highlands”—a statement somewhat misty in form of expression, but sufficiently impressive in substance of intended meaning. That great sheep- farms make the pasture land worse instead of better, and consequently make the pro¬ ductiveness smaller instead of greater, and in effect is thus a sort of ‘‘ scalping” grandiosely,—this may be news to some of you, though I suppose it is not to prac¬ tical men of land-cultivation. But observe that with such sheep-farming the nation is, in respect of economy, living on the capital of its life,—while the landlords may be thriving on the ruin thus involved in it. Tho witness is not before us on his oath. Personally I have no doubt of the substantial accuracy of his statement. But before you I lay it only as a repre¬ sentation, of what may be, and is credibly alleged to be, the state of things over tho Highlands as a whole, under the reign of autocratic landownership. Is that a pos¬ sible Btate of things? No honest able man who knows the facts will deny that it is actual. Every man in the use of his Benses must perceive that it is possible. Well, then, for argument’s sake, suppose it to be possible ; think of it as conceiv¬ able. The possibility, fairly considered, will enable you to see how the population of the Highlands, though larger than it was some generations ago, may be less than half of what it ought to be now. But, you still may think, that requires a process of reasoning ; and a question like this,—What ought to be the popula¬ tion of a country, all things considered ? —is, not one for mere argument by clever men with thoir spectacles and books, talking like students in the cloisters of a college debating society. It is a question for an experienced man of affairs, with wide and deep personal knowledge of such matters in the Highlands, and a well- approved solidity and strength of judg¬ ment, as well as unquestionable impar¬ tiality. Very well. Here is the very man you desiderate as judge. If there be one man of our time more than another whose judgment would be uni¬ versally owned as the weightiest by all classes in the Highlands, whether tenants or landlords, or friends of both, that man of men for your purpose was the QUESTION. late Mr William Mackenzie, of Auchin- dunie, the famous factor of Ardross whose beneficent skill, enterprise, and success for the landlords, as well as wise benevolence toward all, must be known by reputation to not a few even here at tho Antipodes. Of him our witness justly says that he “ was admittedly the highest authority in tho north on that subject.” And here, on your question, is the judgment of that authority, “ ad¬ mittedly the highest (ut supra t Inver¬ ness Courier. Be [Mr Mackenzie] deolared to me that were the lands under excessive sheep pas¬ turing, and the vast tracts occupied, to no good purpose, by deer fores's, divided into moderate-sized joint-arable and pastoral farm*, with a mixed stock of sheep, catt’e, : &c., or into those club-fa:m» which are pro- i ductive of such markedly beneficial results on the estates of Sir Alexander M ttheson— alike to tenants and owners—the county of Ross alone is capable of maintaining in : comfort double its present population, and producing corresponding agricultural and pastoral results. This judgment—of a great acknowledged expert—has immediate reference only to Ross-shire. But on this account it is all the stronger for our case in relation to the Highlands as a whole. Ross-shire is in its eastern part, by benefit of tho balmy gulf stream climate, a richly cultivated lowland, part of “ the garden of Scot¬ land.” According to Mr Mackenzie, the population of the wilder half of Ross-shire could, by reasonable improvements on a semi-barbarously wasteful mode of occu¬ pancy, well bo raised so as to double the population of the county as a ivhole. But other parts of the Highlands have no such “ garden ” lowlands, already well-peopled, to counterbalance the solitude of their un¬ reclaimed wilds. Consequently, of the Highlands as a whole the population well might be, and therefore ought to be, not only twice as large, but considerably more than twice as large as it is. Observe that Mr Mackenzie, as well as the writer I have quoted, not only be¬ lieves, but regards as unquestionable or unquestioned, that replacement of human population to a due extent in the sheep and deer solitudes, while of course it would add to the strength of the nation, would at the same time directly add to its wealth. Mr Mackenzie also holds, that the landlords would be really enriched by the process : that ihe excessive devotion to sheep and deer is for them a killing of the goose that lays the golden eggs. That, howevor, does not much concern us. 1 What does concern us much is, that the THE LAND QUESTION. 3fi nation, even in respect of material good, j B directly made the poorer by the process of that devotion. It needed but this to ooinpleto the condemnation of landowning autocracy, now under trial with a witness and a judge, and therefore on tho way to be found wanting os a public enemy. The system has not only wrought wofully ill to the nation all round, but under it the nation is now barbarously scourging the land, directly living on the landod capital of its life. But what is the use of blaming the men for that ? It is not the result of any evil taint in tho blood peculiar to them. They are naturally of the same flesh and blood as their neighbors. You and yours would have been no better than they if you had been in their place. It is not the men that have made tho system ; but the system Has made the men, or unmade them, if you will. Precisely. That has boon my contention from the beginning, as it is my hope to the end. The system - auto¬ cracy in landed property—is at the root of those evils. It is idle to go lamenting and pottering about the fruit. To tho root of the tree the axe must be laid. The system must be destroyed, so that never¬ more it shall be out of nation’s power to provide effectually for applying tho land to its fundamental use, duo maintenance of mon. That may cost money to begin with. So does the “ clearing” of waste laud for cultivation. So does the fencing and drainage of a farm. So does the ploughing and sowing of one spring. Shall we grudge the cost of retrieving what the nation has lost, and providing for its future prosperity, in respect of that man¬ hood which is its fundamental wealth— the root, the living foundation of all the nation’s prosperity and life ? II ither than suffer human beings to live under conditions unfit for manhood, tho cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow have, at their own expense, demolished whole streets and quarters, worth far more than tho whole estate of many a grandee. Wo paid 20 millions of pounds for the freedom of black slaves in the West Indies. Shall we grudge the cost that may have to be in¬ curred for the existence of free white men, under conditions compatible with due maintenance of manhood, in the sacred motherland of free institutions and nations. If we grudge it now, we shall have to pay it again, with compound in¬ terest, as surely as God lives and reigns in righteousness, or there is any reign of righteous retribution in the history of nations. But why have you not spoken of tho great question about compensation to landowners, until you now have come to “ the sentence after the last?” Because it really belougs to the place after the last. Interested parties have given it, and inadvordent listlossness has allowed it, in tho discussion of tho land question, a place of prodigiously exaggerated im¬ portance. In comparison with tho real and great interest at issuo, the nation’s trauscondoutally great intoroat in man¬ hood, the question about compensation is a characteristically paltry bagatelle of a side question. Still, ns it is in the air, and may occupy and trouble honest mon de¬ siring to know the truth and do the right, I will now say a few words about that question. The settlement I have suggested would destroy the absoluteness of private pro¬ perty in land. That absoluteness, wo have seen, is peculiar to land, and albcts tho nation’s great interest appreciably only in the case of groat estates. And the owners of those estates have a peculiarly groat in¬ terest in the peace and general prosperity of the nation. The skilled artisan, or hardy rustic or seaman, can hardly fall, anywhere or anyhow, but on his feet : he carries his fortune always under his hat. But as for tho great landowner’s greatness, any whirlwind of war or revo¬ lution might scatter it like chaff, whilo apart from an orderly society of mankind, civilised and tolerably prosperous, his land would be to him only what his land was to Robinson Crusoe. Further, as may bo seen in the history of landed pro¬ perty itself, the innovation of autocracy in private property is contrary to good public policy of nations, or natural rights and duties of society as a whole ; and therefore tho autocracy can never attain to any footing in constitutional law, nor right in constitutional principle to be maintained in being by the nation— as if it had been founded on Parlia¬ mentary abrogation of the eighth com- mandmuut of the Decalogue. Still the in¬ novation is a fact. Rightly or wrongly, tho autocracy has the sanction of custom which makes law, and of legislation pro¬ ceeding upon this law as making positive right, so long and so unquestioned as to have, let us say, materially augmented to be market value of tho property. And to the exteut of that augmentation, tho market value of tho property will bo diminished by the settlement now pro¬ posed, in destroying that absoluteness of property or autocracy of ownership. Further, tho present proprietors cannot in justice bo regarded as thomselves, ex¬ clusively or distinctively, the guilty authors of the innovation. No matter 36 THE LAND how it originated at first, the whole com¬ munity, by its law and practice, had made itself responsible for the innovation long before the existing owners of the land were born. Hence, it may fairly be reasoned, the proposed settlement, in so far as it diminishes tho market valuo of their land, will toward them be an act of confiscation, unless they receive compensa¬ tion ; a compensation which falls to come out of the nation’s public purse, because the deed is done in the nation’s public interest. Now, so far as I know, there was no compensation made, nor thought of, to tho clansmen, when their properly was destroyed by the dissolution of the tribal ownership of clan lands. Nor was any compensation made or thought of to the commonalty of England when the “ commons” were enclosed, and turned into private property of landowners. In relation to both classes of men, tho natiou’s deed was one simply of confisca¬ tion, from tho weak by tho strong, in favor of the class who now aro owners of the land. No doubt it was best for tho whole English people that tho “common,” which was another name for “waste,” should be made productive, and become a fruitful field of remunerative labor. And the Highland clansmen had an interest in common with other citizens in tho good results of abolition of the clan system, with its evils of semi-independence re central Government, and the consequent insecurity of peaco and order, both to tho clans themselves and to tho nation as a whole. Such consoling rea¬ sons of State necessity or general econo¬ mical expediency might not bo highly appreciated by the Euglish working classes when every tenth man of them was in the workhouse ; and may not be by the clans¬ man of our day, when ho has, perhaps, to leave a bod-ridden parent perishing with hunger and cold, in order, with wife and children, to wander and prowl along the desolate sea-shore, in search of shell¬ fish or of carrion to keep famishing body and soul together. And, though they should now consent to starvation as martyr¬ dom, or to emigration as “ leaving their country for their country’s good,” still the fact remains, that to their class, when its property was being destroyed, and tho proceeds handed over to the ruling class as a free gift, there was no word nor thought of compensation. Still, compensation in such a case has at least an air of justice, as well as generosity. And compensation is made to Maori savages when their interest in landed property is made to give way to some on -st i ox, public interest of the nation. The nation may think it right to deal with noblemen and gentlemen owning lands in tho High¬ lands, not as it has dealt with Christian Englishmen and Scotchmen of low de¬ gree, but as it has dealt with Maori savages of every degree. And perhaps in its way to making the compensation there may bo round no insuperable diffi¬ culty, through impracticable stubborn- mss, “ more than perpendicular,” of that perfectly disinterested public spirit in relation to money matters, which wo have supposed, for argument’s sake, to occupy tho whole heart of all Scottish landowners in all times. For Dr Chal¬ mers siid that thore aro two things in nature which never change—“ the fixed stars, and the Scotch lairds.” And as a class they have not heretofore shown any disconcerting and baffling sensitiveness of bashful backwardness about receiving such compensations. They did not, for instance, evince any agonizingsensibility totheshame of accepting a free gift of the property which, without compensation, had been confiscated from their clansmen, in com¬ pensation for their loss of dignity and power through the abolition of the heredi¬ tary jurisdictions,—which really wero not theirs, but properly a public trust from the clans. Again, they as a class held a public trust in the presentation to ecclesi¬ astical livings, or patronage of churches. Some of them dealt with these as if they had been personal interests, and in this spirit battled for them as for dear life, at the cost of a fateful disruption of the union of Church and State. The burden of this public trust, they have been manifestly more than willing to undergo as if it had been for them a “ burden that is light ’’—and on occasions of their being relieved of it, they have accepted compen¬ sation for the relief (from an onerous public duty) since the Reformation, not only once, but, 1 think, really three times. Possibly, then, the nation may find no difficulty, in tho shape of over-scrupulosity in them about accepting compensation, to prevent it from relieving its own con¬ science by doing all that rigorous justice could exact for them. But when a great public interest of the nation is concerned, the feelings of that class must not be allowed to determine or to influence the nation’s action relatively to tho main question ;—as compared with which—as I have said, this question about compensa¬ tion is only a characteristically paltry bagatelle of a sido one. Now let mo say a closing word to kin¬ dred Celts, about a matter which, sprung out of that clan system in which they THE LAND QUESTION. 37 have a peculiar interest, yet has a common interest for all. I refer to a certain sentiment of right, to some¬ thing like permanent occupancy of their holdings, on the part of the existing occupants of cottages or crofts or small farms, in the Highlands. In Ireland the grievance on this account is, characteristi¬ cally, in blundering patriotism, compli¬ cated with a semi-political grievance, against the Saxon oppressor, on the score of his having ousted from ownership the old Irish lords of the soil. In the Scot¬ tish Highlands the grievance, in relation to personality of ownership, is rather the other way ;—that the person by whom the people are now oppressed is their own kinsman, the representative of their old ceann-cinnectch, “ family head,” patriarchal chief of the clan et tic! Brute. Bis being the person from whom the oppres¬ sion comes, is to their feeling a peculiar aggravation of its bitterness ;—“ that was the most, unkindest cut of all.” Further, in the Glendale case there has been, on behalf of certain pasturage occupied in common, a contention on the ground of Borne recent covenant, between Lord Macdonald or a recent predecessor and the peoplo of the township. But deeper than that, in the mind and heart of their class in Skye and elsewhere, there is that sentiment of right I have spoken of. The right hero in the people’s view, in Ireland as well as in Scotland, is specifi¬ cally distinct from that natural right, which some have claimed for all men as men, on the ground that the whole eartli is the common inheritance of mankind as a whole. The right of which the High land crofter thinks is, not thus natural, but distinctively and emphatically posi¬ tive. It is not a common right of all men as men, but a special right of the existing occupants of this piece of land. And the ground of it is not that all the world be¬ longs by nature to all descendants of Adam conjointly, but that this particular district of the Highlands was, before the chiefs were made lairds, owned distinc¬ tively by a certain sub-division of a certain branch of the clan Japhet. Now the very existence of that senti¬ ment, with an historical occasion that may naturally have led honest simple men to entertain it, entitles them to re¬ ceive from us, or at least binds us to bestow on them, a certain sympathetic appreciation of the moral quality of their contendings ; so that,—c f/.—though it may be necessary to the good order of society that they should not be allowed unpunished to take the law into their own hands, yet for a formal transgression of it they must not be regarded nor treated as mero thieves, or robbers, or lawless fili¬ busters. Further, apart from particular occasions of painful trial and perplexing and perhaps irritating difliculty, tho his¬ tory of the Highland population as a whole in relation to the land, and of the manner in which that interesting and virtuous population has been brought into deplor- ablo ill condition, lays the nation under peculiar stringency of obligation to devise and to execute whatever measures may be best fitted to relieve tho peoplo from that condition ;—carefully remembering that this is the purpose to bo kept in view, and not merely our deliverance from sen¬ timental pain in seeing human suffering through woful want; and that there may bo a kindness which is selfishness or cruelty disguised—witness Isaac Walton’s precept about impaling a frog as angler’s bait, “ Do it gently—as if you loved it.” But all this is clearly short of even begin¬ ning to satisfy that sentiment of right. Tho sentiment will not be satisfied short of conceding a permanency of occupancy to those now holding tho crofts and cot¬ tages. And my own view is, that to speak or think of this satisfaction to them as a settlement of tho land question, is j perfectly idle, and worse than idle. To I do right in that way is simply impossible ; I and, right or wrong, the establishment of existing occupants in a perpetuity of tenure would be no real settlement, nor beginning of a real settlement, of tho land question as bearing evou on crofts and on cottages. That thero ought to bo crofts, cottages, pasturage, wherever that is desireable for the nation’s public interest in manhood ; and that it ought to bo an abiding burden upon all property in land to be available for that purpose on terms which tho nation may see to be reasonable, and to be such that the occupants shall be able to live in decency and comfort; this I not only admit, but regard and maintain as essential and fundamental to right settle¬ ment of the land question for the nation as a whole. But this would imply that the settlers, while thus enabled to obtain land worth keeping and able to keep them, would pay for it a fair market price, either as a round sum for freehold or as an annual rent for leasehold—would pay, that is, at least a minimum price to be named by tho nation through its representatives. But tho satisfaction I have spoken of, to the sentiment of right in tho heart of existing occupants, would, on consideration, be far from being a satisfaction to other poor men who may wish to occupy laud. Its effect would bo TUE LAND QUESTION. §8 _ that they and thoirs would be excluded ' isation of titles,” though it may be diffiT from the possibility of settlement on the cult, is not impossible. For their tribal land at this time, or, indeed, in any ownership of land is a fact at this hour; future time. And to compel the landlord and the individual s fair proportion of the to izive permanent occupancy, not for a proceeds of a sale is a thing that now ad- price which the nation deems fair and nuts of judicial investigation and ascer- rcasonable now, or afterwards at recurring ; tainment, by just men in Land Courts, neriods for reconsideration of rent, but assisted by skilled lawyers, on the ground for the price which the occupants may; of evidence accessible and producible, happen to have been paying in the past,' But the tribal ownership in the Highlands and which may bo far beneath real value is a thing of the remote past. In law now or in the future-this would be an and in fact, every vestige of it passed effective confiscation from him ; which from being loO years ago How, then, nerhaps might be ventured on, as violent by the md of a dim shadow of it now remedy for violent disease, in some extra- haunting toe memory of day dreamers, ordinary condition of terrible crisis ; but; could you seriously set about distributing, which for permanent settlement of an if you had it, the inheritance of the old ordinary matter of national busines, clansmen, in fur proportions, among would be simply bad administration of their heirs now in life? The existing national affairs—present incapacity weakly ■ occupants of crofts and cottages—are these, sowing the seed of future disaster. alone, demonstrably, and in clearly ascor- Broadly regarded, tho process of satis- tamable proportions, the heirs of the old faction in that manner presents two clansmen 1 Some of thorn may not so aspects of sheer impossibility. On the ; much as bear the name of the clan ; ono hand, relatively to tho now existing ( others may not have so much as one drop landed owners. Kemcmbcr that these 1 of its blood in their veins. There may existing owners personally had nothing to 1 not bo one of them of whom it can be do with the dissolution of the tribal tW * nv W Ki„ ownership of the clan lands. Theso have now beon private property for a time so long as itself would havo made ownership by right of possession. In the meantime, the property may have changed hands by purchase, perhaps repeatedly. And be¬ sides, it must havo greatly changed in value, perhaps through improvements making the land a highly manufactured article. To claim the the aforesaid satis¬ faction, therefore, for tho existing occu¬ pants on the ground of that old tribal ownership, would bo to perpetrate a con¬ fused unreason of injustice, as if one of old commonalty, some of them are now you wero to claim the perpetual use of settled on other lands in the Highlands ; my coat, another of my plaid, &c., on somo are simply “landless, landless”; the ground that some of your great great some are in the Lowlands; many, far over grandfathers were joint owners of a flock, the salt sea the now living clan are dis- Bomo of which wero probably the remote ; persed to every wind of heaven, over ancestors of the sheep from whose flceco ! wery quarter of the earth. Who is to those articles of mine havo been wrought j find them all out, and identify them all, by the spinner and weaver and tailor. ; and show’ clearly what would fall to every The more closely you look the more | one of them in an equitable distribution clearly you will see “impossible” here, of the estate among them all? No one. And this leads to tho second aspect of, Not all the lawyers in New Zealand, or in sheer impossibility. That is— ! the British Empire, or in the world. Not In relation to the existing occupants.— ' thousands nor millions of “ wandering Supposo wo try tc distribute the old ;Jews.” The thing is a manifest and utter tribal inheritance, cr a fair proportion of impossibility. For working purposes of proved that any forefather of his ever had any distinct right to a share in the com¬ mon estate. And then, as to the whole body of the real scions of the clan—Who are they? What are they? Where arethey? Some of them, sprung from minor gentry or tacksmen of the old time, and now in positions corresponding to those of their fathers, arc apparently by philo- Celts to bo put out of the reckoning, and probably would make no claim for a share of tho spoil, although as a class they should have the clearest and strongest right to it. As to the descendants of the its present value, among them, so far as they really represent the old clansmen, and consequently are their heirs at law or in justice. We shall find it impossible to take so much as one real step towards that end in our view. In the case of the real life it has to bo dismissed as chimeri¬ cal, a mere day-dream, an illusion which will prove unfortunate to the poor man who carries his dream into business of daylight ; and seriously to speak about which, is to put a fool’s cap on any move- Maoris of the North Island, “ individual-1 ment for settling this land question to any THE LAND QUESTION. 39 good practical purpose. The existing occupants will of course guard and assert any special right they may happen to have, through covenant with the landlords, or through custom of occupancy, as under the old “ custom of Ulster.” But that has really nothing to do with settlement of the land question on a permanent basis of beneficence rooted in justice. In order to such a settlement, the existing occupants must be regarded simply as citizens in occupa¬ tion of the land ; having no more right to the land on account of the old clan owner¬ ship than is possessed in common with them by their neighbors who are not in occupation of it, and by their fellow- citizens of the nation in general. If the old clan have any true heir, that heir is not the body of persons who now happen to be in occupation of the land; but the na¬ tion, which is the true heir of all tribes that merge into into its unity, as well as, relatively to land, paramount lord over all. In short, the nation must place itself, as regards ownership or occupancy, in the same relation to the old tribal estates, now become the private property of lairds in place of chiefs, in which it stands to those English lands which once were “ common,” and are now made private property of landowners. That is, in effect, there must not be recognised any special right of any clansman to the land, on account of the accidental circum¬ stance of his residence or birth ; but all citizens of the nation must be placed on a common level, of equal right. And the equal right, in relation to the land, which all citizens have in common, practically amounts, it will be found on considera¬ tion, to a right to obtain from the nation that settlement of the land question, for all time and over the whole face of the country, which is best fitted to promote the nation’s interest in the land, espe¬ cially its great interest in maintenance of men. The Highlanders may think that, when thus regarded and treated simply as citzens, on the same footing with all their fellow-citizens of the nation, they are in some way impoverished in respect of a beneficial interest of their’s in the land. But in this case the poverty is one that enriches. They are stripped of vain illusions, in order that they may eonsent and seek to be comfortably clothed with substantial reality of benefit. For, while it is worse than idle to think seriously of of being replaced in the position of the old clansmen, on the other hand, by casting away dreams into dreamland, and considering what now is best, in broad daylight of real things, for them in 1 common with their neighbors, they, with the aid of their pathetic story of suffering and wrong, addressing the nation on reasonable and tenable grounds of appeal for all, may help their fellow-citizens in obtaining a good settlement for all, whose beneficent results shall at the same time be the greatest attainable benefit for themselves. We must not think about public questions only in kilt and plaid, nor speak of them only in Gaelic. In this relation dismiss from your minds the vain imagination of reversion to the clan system. Keep the kilt, and the Gaelic, and the bag-pipe, for high and solemn festive occasions. In ordinary life be contented with being simply a citizen,—of the greatest empire under heaven. The Celtic mind loves to linger in the past. And a restoration of the past, with something like what you sup¬ pose to have been the clan system, may haunt you in your day-dreams. But see that you regard it only as a dream,—a beautiful dream, perhaps—but only a dream. Ah ! broken is the golden bowl, The spirit fled for ever. It will only bring misfortune on you and others if you allow yourself to regard it in any other light; or allow it really to influence your practical thoughts, feelings, actions, relatively to this pro¬ foundly important question about land. The clan system was good for its place and time. Notwithstanding physical dis¬ comforts and privations which would now be felt intolerable by their descendants, the clansmen, though little blessed with “ peace,” and certainly far from “ luxury’s contagion, weak and vile,” yet appear, under the endearing and elevating in¬ fluences of patriarchy, to have enjoyed abundance of “ health,” and a fair mea¬ sure of “sweet content.” But though j the system thus was good for its time and , place, its time is in the past, “ returning never and its place is nowhere now, in that great empire in whose citizenship we have the privilege of sharing. Let, then, the irrevocable past—be past. Patriarchy, with its enchantments, is only for the childhood and youth of our race : na¬ tionalism is for its robust manhood. To the history of that past, with its beauties and glories, real or imagined, we look wistfully back, as manhood looks wistfully back to childhood and youth, while “dis¬ tance lends enchantment to the view.” But childhood and youth do not return. Manhood, with all its hard realities of stern disillusionment, is better than child- 40 THE LAND QUESTION. hood or youth returning. While, there¬ fore, we cherish, as matter of pleasing and not unprofitable sentiment, the recollec¬ tions and associations of the close unity of the clan, let our real life be cheerfully given to the endeavor to enjoy, and worthily fill and adorn, our place in the wider, and far higher and nobler unity of citizenship in the nation. So shall we pass into the manhood of mankind ; when the clansman, brave as his fathers, sets himself bravely to confront and to deal with the existing situation, in which the clan exists only as a lingering tradition, and the nation is a grand reality, ever spreading toward omnipresence like that of the ocean. Towards that nation as a whole, if we will serve God, we must cherish and exercise the feeling which the poet expresses toward a part of it ; Oh Scotia ! my dear, my native soil ! For whom my warmest wish to heaven is sent ! I ong may thy hardy sons of rustic toil Be blessed with health, and peace, and sweet content And oh ! may Heaven their simple lives p event From uxury’s contagion, weak and vile ! Tht-n, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent, A virtuous populace may rise the while, And stand a wall of fne around their much lov’d Isle. Z'' Printed at the Mail Office, Tyne-street, Oamaru, N.Z. ✓