56 Notes and Sketches. 



The general conclusion of the meeting was expressed 

 in this wise " But when all this shall be done there 

 will still remain a frightful deficiency, which must in 

 one way or another be made up, or many of the poor 

 will inevitably perish for want." It was agreed to pe- 

 tition Government to give a bounty on importation of 

 grain; and other measures of purely local application were 

 adopted, including that of printing and circulating the 

 resolutions of the meeting, a step that appears to have 

 so far re-opened the question ; for at a meeting of Com- 

 missioners of Supply in January 31, 1783, with Sir 

 William Forbes as preses, Mr. Turner of Menie had 

 the question put formally " Whether or not the resolu- 

 tions of the said meeting, which had been printed and 

 dispersed, were not hurtful both to the town and county 

 of Aberdeen, and the fears of want therein exaggerated]" 

 A majority of votes decided the question in the affir- 

 mative ; but in order that the sense of the county might 

 be more fully ascertained, an adjourned meeting " of 

 landed gentlemen and freeholders " was held on 1 4th 

 February ; and they agreed " that the dread of so fatal 

 a want, as had been formerly suggested, was groundless, 

 but were sensible that the crop had proved remarkably 

 deficient, and therefore made no doubt that this would 

 become an object of most serious consideration and at- 

 tention to every gentleman in the county." 



Beyond question there was famine in the land ; and 

 there is abundant evidence that but for extraneous sup- 

 plies, death from want would have been far from an 

 uncommon experience. The estimate of crop, as we 

 have seen, gave less than a third of the crop of an or- 

 dinary year in quantity ; and in an ordinary year they 

 grew only enough to meet their own wants precisely 

 what the generation of a hundred years earlier had done. 

 And the quality of such crop as they had was bad, being 

 greatly lack ing in wholesomeness and nourishment. Well 

 might it be that, as put by one of the local chroniclers, 

 a man evidently exercised in the construction of sen- 



