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Proceedings of the Eoyal Society 
grapes in tlxe olden time, and the teeth of the children have been 
set very much on edge by the operation. 
But the landlords are not the only survivals of those on whom 
the poor of the ancient times were dependent; as stated by Mr 
Innes, and as illustrated by many a stirring tale of old, others besides 
the landlords were made to contribute to the necessities of the noble 
peasantry of the glens. When in 1856 and in other years, as now, 
the successors of the douce provosts of olden times invite us to 
contribute to relieve the urgent necessities of the suffering Highland 
poor, they are only putting into modern language the levy their 
predecessors would have made upon us to pay the black mail the 
clans would have exacted when their domestic means of subsistence 
failed, as they have done. At no time within modern history, since 
population began to grow beyond very narrow limits, have several of 
the poorer districts of the Highlands been able to supply their own 
needs ; there has never been a time when the plenty of one period 
has there sufficed to meet the scarcity of another ; whether the levy 
has been by war, or by tax, or by charity, extraneous aid has always 
had to contribute its quota. As the Duke of Argyll has recently 
reminded us, nature in old times, when population outgrew its bounds, 
asserted her inexorable laws by sending plague, pestilence, and 
famine to clear off the surplus ; our modern civilisation has curbed 
these powers, as well as repressed the social characteristics which 
accompanied and assisted them, and thus is presented to us the 
same problem, though within far narrower limits, which is pressing 
on the Government of India — the growth of a population at a rate 
far in excess of that in ancient times, bringing on our modern 
economy and social science burdens due to their own beneficence. 
The suggestion so frequently made of late that the poorer cottars 
and crofters of the Highlands are the inheritors of ancient tribal 
rights in the land is, as I have already shown, quite fallacious ; the 
relation of dependence in which that class unquestionably stood not 
only in feudal times to the later lords and chiefs, but in still earlier 
days to the original freeholders of the tribal organisation, did not 
permit of their having any rights ; the exclusive system of the tribe, 
the restriction of all rights to the freemen, forbid the possibility of 
any rights in the land having been held by those who were below 
that rank ; and there can be no doubt that the freemen of the tribe 
