2 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



will be admitted, I feel sure, that the principal cause of many 

 troubles was the absence of earning facilities and consequent 

 poverty. The present is an opportune time to end all strife — 

 to quicken the bonds of common interest by common sense for 

 mutual advantage — to begin anew by improved methods, and 

 primarily by assisting the small cultivator with an outlet for his 

 full productive strength. Every citizen should be fully and 

 usefully employed. The law governing land settlement in the 

 Highlands is the same as that for the Lowlands, although 

 it is acknowledged that the conditions are widely different. 

 The circumstances in the English counties of Northumberland 

 and Cumberland are similar to those in the Scottish Border 

 counties, and yet one law exists for England and another for 

 Scotland, which rather points to the want of a national policy 

 sufficiently comprehensive and elastic to be adapted to the 

 requirements of different regions. Right through the recurrent 

 and indifferent diagnosis and treatment of the ailments of 

 husbandry, we nevertheless find a universal recognition of the 

 ■enormous value of a strong and vigorous rural population which 

 forms the mainstay of the nation's healthy manhood. We have 

 also, fortunately, in that population a love of the country and 

 an intense and pronounced desire to dwell in it. But there 

 is not enough of good agricultural land to go round, and over 

 two-thirds of Scotland the people must apply their energies 

 to uneconomic subjects, that cannot keep them fully engaged. 

 To quote from the Report of the Royal Commission (Highlands 

 and Islands) 1892 — " The holding is mainly of use to the crofter 

 as a home, and he has to depend on money or wages otherwise 

 earned from fishing or labour for payment of his rent and the 

 support of his family." Time and again the experiences of 

 famine and of disease have brought home the precarious nature 

 of such an existence. In the Islands and along the coast the 

 fishermen prosecute their calling, not unaccompanied by un- 

 certainties and disappointments, but without the harvest of the 

 sea their condition would truly be unsatisfactory. But it is not 

 so much the condition of the fishing population which requires 

 attention, as the case of the people on the mainland away from 

 the sea. They must find employment, and as is well known, 

 they are the first to rush away from home and join in the ranks 

 of labour on any railway extension, or large public or private 

 undertaking. They go far afield for work, but such work at the 



