THE RURAL PROBLEM 



is therefore about £444,500, and an additional sum of about 

 £1,000,000 is spent in the grouse districts every year for 

 purposes of the sport. 



A third consideration is the fact that large tracts of 

 country are actually worth more for sporting purposes than 

 they are, or ever could be, for purposes of agriculture. It is 

 true 5,500 square miles in Scotland alone is reserved for the 

 pleasures of the rich. But it is also true that a large propor- 

 tion of this is probably useless for anything else but a deer 

 forest, and in the selection of waste land for cultivation good 

 grouse ground is the last that would be chosen by practical 

 agriculturists. The sporting rents of grouse moors average 

 between five and ten times the grazing rents, and are higher 

 than anything that could ever be paid for them for any 

 other purpose. 



The most frequently quoted example of the game evil is 

 afforded by the deer forests of Scotland. In the crofting 

 counties they have almost doubled their area in the last 

 thirty years.* The result has been a depopulation of the 

 rural districts, a most glaring instance of which is Courie, 

 where the extension of shooting acres was accountable, 

 during the last intercensal period,f for one of the biggest 

 decreases, farms being thrown out of cultivation and many 

 men deprived of the hope of subsistence on their native soil. 

 The extension is still continuing. But it is good to find 

 from the latest issued report of the Scottish Congested Dis- 

 tricts Board (now merged into the new Scottish Department 

 of Agriculture) that during the year ended March 31st, 1912, 

 portions of deer forest on the estates of the Countess of 

 Cromartie, the Duke of Sutherland, Mr. W. E. Gilmour, and 

 others were assigned for the extension of crofter holdings, 

 a reclamation from sport to agriculture of over 3,000 

 acres. But this is but a tiny fraction of the 3,250,000 acres 

 of Scottish land set aside for sport. 



In England game-preserving injures agriculture in three 

 distinct ways. First, too much is spent on it by landowners 

 of limited means, who let their farms suffer rather than 



* Parliamentary Paper, 220, 1908. 

 f Scottish Census Returns, 1911. 



H 2 



