88 THE APPRENTICE. 



effects upon men? So far as it has extended, it has 

 substituted two classes of character which may be 

 regarded as opposite extremes equally removed from the 

 intermediate line of excellence, for a class which occupied 

 the proper medium. It has given us, for a wise, moral, 

 and religious peasantry, gentlemen farmers and farm- 

 servants ; the latter in too many instances a class of 

 debased helots of the character described ; the former a 

 body of men too often marked (though certainly with 

 many exceptions) by a union of the worst traits peculiar 

 to the opposing classes of country gentlemen and 

 merchants, the supercilious overbearing manners of 

 the one class, the unfeeling speculative spirit of the 

 other.' 



To the same effect is the later statement of his views 

 on the subject. ' The deteriorating effect of the large farm 

 system/ he wrote, 'is inevitable. . . . Farm-servants, 

 as a class, must be lower in the scale than the old tenant- 

 farmers, who wrought their little farms with their own 

 hands ; but it is possible to elevate them far above the 

 degraded level of the bothy ; and unless means be taken 

 to check the spread of the ruinous process of brute- 

 making which the system involves, the Scottish people 

 will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, 

 from being one of the most provident, intelligent, and 

 moral in Europe, to be one of the most licentious, reck- 

 less, and ignorant/ 



If two men ever lived who knew the Scottish people, 

 and were able to give an intelligent opinion concern- 

 ing them, those two men were Robert Burns and Hugh 

 Miller; and their joint authority in favour of the old 

 system and against the new, viewed in relation to the 

 capacity of each to produce upright, independent, self- 

 respecting men, will hardly be outweighed by the con- 



