swampy spots, for which they have been forced to exchange their former patches of cultivated land, now added to the huge farm of some tacksman upheld by cash credits from an acommodating Bank. I have seen the industrial efforts and scope of the humble tillers of the soil completely cramped by the vile system which actually extorts a higher, proportional rent from the struggling, starving crofter, than from the insatiable engrosser of a hundred crofts, sacrificed to swell his enormous holding. I have computed the rents paid for some mossy moor (at Lochalsh for example) and on conjoining them with the amounts exacted for miserable but indispensable grazing land, it was clear to me that the annual average was higher than the best land in Staffordshire-for the poor occupants being crushed into an inadequate space (thirty-two families upon sixteen acres of arable land), their necessities are laid hold of to demand rents utterly unjustified by any equivalent advantages. And yet Mr Lillingston, like Lord Macdonald, is a benevolent man-but also like your lordship, looking through the spectacles of some oppressive official, or sordid sub-agent, instead of exercising his own judgment, and practically exploring his own affairs. It is curious to observe how much of the pristine inequality between the superior and his dependants, still subsists in the Highlands, but stript of its ancient alleviations. The chieftain of the olden time reckoned on the ready claymores of his fighting and lifting followers; and his will was their law: but, in requital, the members of the clan were cherished, sustained, and regarded by their lord, to whom affable access was never denied. Now, the poor clansman, degenerated into a rent-paying serf, knows nothing of his landlord but through some deputy-assistant factor, armed with “missives" (like the Lochalsh code of impossibilities invented by mistaken Mr Lillingston), to compel a course of agriculture suited to the Carse of Gowrie, but utterly impracticable at Kintail. Still, there are pleasing exceptions to the rigorous rule of non-intercourse between landlord and tenant. I was gratified to perceive at Dunvegan, that even in his regretted fall, Macleod of Macleod commanded the affections of his condoling tenantry; and it is plain to every inquirer, that Mackenzie of Applecross studies the welfare, and enjoys the esteem, of his thriving dependants.

Your Lordship will now have gathered the grounds of my denial-that the Highlands are over-peopled. I maintain that the

people are not too many, but that their holdings are too smalltheir rents too high-their oppressions innumerable-their encouragements nil. Impounded in sterile spots, which even the tacksman forbears to envy; their industry checked by the total absence of all efficient incentives to exertion; they plod painfully the thorny path of hopeless penury, drenched in debt, which, at length, has its issues in ejectment and emigration. And all this accumulation of wrongs and neglect on the part of unworthy proprietors, is, forsooth, to be huddled out of thought and sight; and the whole evil to be accounted for by Malthus's infidel doctrine, denouncing early marriages, and progressive population—as if youthful brides should never gladden the lowly roof, and the law of increase should not be tolerated except at Armadale, or other august mansions fitted for connubial felicity! My Lord, I treat with the scorn it deserves the trashy theory with which the oppressors of the poor seek to cover their agrarian tyranny. If I were disposed to turn the tables by means of their own false principles, I could readily point out where a surplus population might probably be detected. What think you, O philosophers, of a surplus population of idle, improvident, or insolvent landed proprietors-men recklessly enforcing more than the rights of property, and shamelessly evading all the duties of property? What think you of absentee landlords grinding the faces of a poor Highland tenantry, in order to support a shabby splendour in London or Brighton? What think you of proprietors loaded with ancestral encumbrances, and the added fruits of personal extravagance, who "lie floating many a rood," sustained by private usurers, or by the still more deadly help of banking accommodation? Now, I ask your Lordship if it would not be desirable to check a population of this sort-not by the penal prohibition of honourable wedlock, but by instilling the great Christian principle, that the proprietors of the soil, and all owners of other property, have no rightful tenure but that which is derived from the sovereign pleasure of "the Most High God, the possessor of heaven and earth." Parchment grants, title-deeds, legal usages-these are but the external evidences of a proprietor's rights; his true tenure consists in the wise, liberal, and merciful management of the property entrusted to him, not for mere selfish indulgence, but for diffusive benevolence, flowing from the righteousness of God. When once a proprietor loses sight of his responsibilities and lives only for him

self, he becomes the pest, instead of the conservator of society. His domains wither under his baneful rule-the poor are harassed with all the subtle severities of petty despotism; to avert his just destruction, he summons ejectment and emigration to his aid; but all the trickeries of tyranny are vainly employed, and the lands of the oppressor know their ruined possessor no more!

And now, my Lord, lest my canvass should appear charged with too dark a picture, allow me to sketch a more agreeable theme. I have not the vanity to suppose that your Lordship would condescend to ask my advice, so I take the liberty of profferring it. My counsel has the weight that belongs to years and experience, instead of the immature importance of a stripling Commissioner and I venture to throw out good counsel gratuitously; whereas the Commissioner is no doubt amply remunerate for the worst possible advice. I recommend your Lordship not to wait until better times shall enable you to equip a yacht like Lord Cardigan's, but to take an early passage in the packetboat to Lochmaddy (the honest Captain will make you very comfortable), and at once enter upon an impartial, kindly investigation of the true state of your tenantry in North Uist. Your Lordship will require neither Sheriffs nor special constables, neither Inverness police truncheons, nor the gleam of bayonets coaxed from Sir George Grey. Visit Sollas, not for the purpose of forcing your dependants to emigrate to Canada, but with the nobler view of turning their industry to account in their loved native locality. See whether a poor crofter might not be made as useful and as happy upon a moderately-rented patch of ten. acres, as the Rev. Mr Macrae upon his gigantic farm, larger than many a German principality. Examine whether the proper manuring of their little lands is not hindered, by the witholding of the very sea-ware that lies rotting on the shore. Commune freely, as I, a stranger, did, with the elders of the rustic population, and your Lordship will find a clearness of mind and soundness of views, which would put to shame all the astuteness of Aberdeen advocates. In promoting the just interests of your tenants, your Lordship's own interests will infallibly be secured; you will return to Armadale with a satisfaction which never fails to cheer the conscience of an upright and generous landlord; and your Lordship will be all the more warmly welcomed by Lady Mac

donald, for having brightened the homes of the sorrowing wives and children of Sollas.-I have the honour to be,

Your Lordship's obedient servant,

Inverness, Sept. 29. 1849.

THOMAS MULOCK.

As I have adverted to the misapplication of the Highland Destitution Fund, I may as well notify my intention of bringing the whole of that subject fairly before the public. One of my earliest efforts will be, to show the fatal results of the muchlauded labour test enforced by the Committee's Inspector-General, Captain Elliot, of which the cruel and demoralizing principle has been, to exact a maximum of labour for a minimum of wages, thus destroying, instead of encouraging, the motives for industrial exertion. Captain Elliot's co-operative compacts with proprietors are equally objectionable, being, in fact, plans for relieving the rich, instead of relieving the destitute.

T. M.

LETTER III.-HIGHLAND DEPOPULATION-THE SOLLAS TRIALS.

To the Right Honourable Lord Macdonald.

MY LORD,-The second letter which I used the freedom of addressing to your Lordship was concludingly couched in (I fear) a somewhat poetical strain. I pictured your Lordship voyaging unostentatiously to North Uist, and revisiting, not as the prodigal son, but as the penitent, paternal proprietor of Sollas, that noted scene of enormities recently perpetrated, under colour of law, by your Lordship's ejecting agents, and emigration-compellers. I drew still more largely on my imagination, by pourtraying your Lordship as the benignant stiller of the late stormy state of things, retrieving yourself in the affections of your oppressed dependants, by doing justice, and loving mercy, and returning to Armadale as a peaceful conqueror, to be crowned with conjugal gratulations on the result of your Lordship's humane interposition in behalf of disconsolate wives and wailing children. But, alas for the evanescent delights of poetical creations! Poets and landed proprietors have nothing in common; and even the golden age would find no favour with the owners of the soil, except the muse would under

take to prove that the exorbitant rents, punctually paid in genuine sovereigns, constituted the real aurea atas. Therefore, I must descend from the heights of pleasing fiction, and commune once more with your Lordship on the sad realities of ordinary life and practical proprietorship; cheering myself, however, with the expectation that, in the course of my present communication, I may chance to throw out hints serving to show that justice is immutably blended with the permanent prosperity of men, and that when proprietors flagrantly violate the rights and injure the interests of their dependants, even-handed equity infallibly visits the wrongdoers by retributively uprooting their vaunted success and superiority.

It will tend to avert any misapprehension of my views, when I distinctly avow to your Lordship that I do not entertain the slightest objection to natural, wholesome, voluntary emigration— whether the movement is on the part of individuals, families, or associated bodies-free to choose their change of lot, and anxious to betake themselves to another hemisphere. I have no fault to find with the emigrating parties, and with themselves rest all the responsibilities of so grave a determination. But when a totally different class of cases is painfully presented to my observation; when I see all the arts of persecution employed to impoverish, degrade, and render miserable the smaller tenants of an estate, with the view of making them vacate their little lands to swell the grazing solitudes of some insatiable sheep-master; when I hear of ship-loads of these poor expatriated creatures departing from their native coast, stripped of their substance to pay the price of a compulsory passage-leaving land, and stock, and crop, in the clutch of an inexorable factor; and pursuing them to their despotic destination when I find them vomited out upon some unfriendly shore-harassed, hopeless, and penniless-can I hesitate in affirming that these results are the product of tyranny and covetousness excluding all semblance of free agency on the part of the unhappy victims of a ruthless and (as I trust subsequently to show) an utterly unwise system? That forced emigration was, until of late, deemed to be an abominable act in Scotland, is curiously enough attested by the published archives of the House of Culloden—a family which may well boast of having produced the most enlightened patriot that ever sprang from Scottish lineage—I mean, of course, the Lord President Forbes. Two days since, while per