314 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



if they choose to complete what they have begun, and 

 turn more fields and meadows into hunting-grounds, our 

 existing law permits them to do so ; while no amendment 

 of the law as yet proposed by Liberal politicians would 

 place the slightest check upon this iniquitous power. 



The reader who wishes to know how the brave 

 Highlanders have been treated by those who owe every- 

 thing to them, and who should have been their protectors 

 — their hereditary chieftains — should read Mr. Alexander 

 Mackenzie's interesting work The History of the Highland 

 Clearances^ or the outline of the main facts in my own 

 work Land Nationalization. Let us now see what are the 

 conditions under which the Highlanders live, and consider 

 whether under such conditions anything but poverty, 

 discontent, and famine is possible. We learn from the 

 various reports that have appeared in the daily papers, 

 confirming the testimony of all previous impartial writers, 

 that the Highland crofters are confined to miserably small 

 holdings — the largest croft in Skye, for example, being 

 seven acres ; that the land is poor and the rent very high ; 

 that the landlords have continually encroached on the 

 commons and mountains the use of which for grazing is 

 essential to the crofter's existence. These have been 

 usually taken from them, without compensation, to make 

 either large sheep-farms or deer-forests ; and in many 

 cases they suffer without redress from the incursions of the 

 deer which eat their crops, while they are not allowed to 

 keep dogs to mind their own sheep (when they have any) 

 for fear of disturbing these sacred deer, whose well-being 

 and due increase are carefully attended to, even though 

 it entails starvation on men and women. 



Then, again, these great estates, often as large as con- 

 tinental kingdoms or dukedoms, are managed b}^ agents 

 and factors who represent an unknown and unseen 

 landlord, and who are really despotic rulers, carrying out 

 their own decrees under the penalty of eviction — a 

 penalty as severe as that imposed by the law of England 

 on hardened criminals. It was stated in the Daily News, 

 a paper which is celebrated for the careful accuracy of its 

 information, that on one estate (a generation back) a 



