GROUSE MOOES AND DEER FORESTS. 253 



We have noted the dissatisfaction often evinced by the 

 peasantry at the progress of Scotch sport, and the reasons 

 for it, so far as those reasons amount to more than vague 

 and formless discontent. There is no doubt that sheep 

 farms and grouse moors, in some parts of the Highlands, 

 occupy lands where in old time the crofter township drew 

 scant subsistence from unwilling soil ; there is no doubt that 

 game of all kinds, under the fostering care of wealthy sports- 

 men, has enormously increased, and that the crops bordering 

 on the great moorlands have suffered in consequence, while 

 most of the game, which in old time found its way to the 

 crofter's cottage, now goes to the city poulterer. Still, it must 

 not be forgotten that, under the changed conditions of life, a 

 crofter township, living as their fathers were content to live, 

 in hardship and poverty, dependent merely on their own 

 exertions to produce food, clothing, and shelter, is simply 

 an Utopian dream. If the game laws were to be repealed 

 to-morrow, the wild birds and beasts destroyed from off the 

 great game-haunted hills, till the grouse became as extinct 

 as the dodo, and the shooting tenants driven for their sport 

 to Norway or Sweden, or some country wise enough in its 

 generation to welcome them, can any sane man suppose that 

 the glens would be forthwith peopled, as Lochiel well says, 

 with " a happy and contented crofting peasantry, who would 

 immediately show their satisfaction at the prospect presented 

 to them of pastoral felicity and domestic comfort, by rush- 

 ing into the arms of the first recruiting sergeant they might 

 chance to meet ? " On a moment's thought it must be 

 obvious that, whatever platform-spouters may say, the 

 existence of small crofting peasants depends on high prices 

 of the produce they grow, combined with a simplicity of life 

 and love of home, rendering them content with poverty and 

 hardship, so only that they might stay in the land of their 

 forefathers. These conditions are gone, never to return ; 

 only the love of home, deeply ingrained as it is in the Celtic 

 nature, remains in a modified degree, and even that is now 



