A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 135 



ries of life, might be procured ; but in the entire prospect not 

 a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The 

 landscape was one without figures. I do not much like ex- 

 termination carried out so thoroughly and on system; it 

 seems bad policy ; and I have not succeeded in thinking any 

 the better of it though assured by the economists that there 

 are more than people enough in Scotland stilL There are, I 

 believe, more than enough in our workhouses, more than 

 enough on our pauper-rolls, more than enough huddled up, 

 disreputable, useless, and unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys 

 and typhoid courts of our large towns ; but I have yet to 

 learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be drawn 

 from facts such as thesa A brave and hardy people, favour- 

 ably placed for the development of all that is excellent in 

 human nature, form the glory and strength of a country ; 

 a people sunk into an abyss of degradation and misery, and 

 in which it is the whole tendency of external circumstances 

 to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness and its 

 shame ; and I cannot quite see on what principle the omi- 

 nous increase which is taking place among us in the worse 

 class, is to form our solace or apology for the wholesale ex- 

 patriation of the better. It did not seem as if the depopula- 

 tion of Rum had tended much to any one's advantage. The 

 single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so many 

 had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the 

 island : the proprietor, his landlord, seemed to have been as 

 little fortunate as the tenant, for the island itself was in the 

 market ; and a report went current at the time that it was 

 on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, 

 who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. How strange 

 a cycle ! Uninhabited originally save by wild animals, it 

 became at an early period a home of men, who, as the gray 

 wall on the hill-side testified, derived, in part at least, their 

 sustenance from the chase. They broke in from the waste 



