London to John O Groat's. 393 



of human conditions. Plant your theodolite here ; 

 wipe the telescope's eye -with your handkerchief; look 

 your keenest in the line of the lineage of these evicted 

 thousands. Steady, now ! while the most tranquil light 

 of the future is on the pathway of your eye. This 

 first reach of your vision is the life-track of the fathers 

 and mothers unhoused among these mountains. Look 

 on beyond, over the longer life-line of their children; 

 then farther still under the horizon of the remotest 

 future to the track of their children's children. Can 

 you make an anglo of a single degree's subtension in 

 the hereditary conditions of these generations, or a 

 dozen beyond ? Can you detect a point of departure 

 by which the second generation would have diverged 

 from the first, or the third from the second, and have 

 attained to a higher life of comfort, intelligence, social 

 and political position had they remained in these 

 mountain cottages, grubbed on their cottage farms, 

 and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of 

 oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from 

 time immemorial ? Can you see, among all the hopeful 

 possibilities of Time's to-morrows, any such change for 

 the better ? You can sight no such prospect with your 

 telescope in that direction. Turn it around and sweep 

 the horizon of that other condition into which they 

 were thrust, weeping and wrathful, against their will. 



