people of the Highlands, and placed them in circumstances of prostration too extreme to leave them any very great chance of recovering themselves, or rather in circumstances from which, in the present state of the country, recovery for them as a people is an impossibility.

Such seems to be the present state of the Highlands. Where are we to look for the proper remedies? Alas! in the body politic, as in the natural body, injuries may be easily dealt, for which it may be scarce possible to suggest a cure. In travelling over an extensive Highland tract last autumn, we had a good deal of conversation with the people themselves. Passing through wild districts of the western coast, where the rounded hills and scratched and polished rocks gave evidence that the country had been once wrapped up in a winding-sheet of ice, we saw the soil for many miles together, where the bare rock had any covering at all,— composed of two almost equally hopeless ingredients. The subsoil was formed of glacial debris,-the mere scrapings of the barren primary rocks; and over it there lay a stratum, varying generally from six inches to six feet, of cold, wet, inert moss, over which there grew scarce even a useful grass, except perhaps the "deer's hair" of the sheep-farmer. yet, on this ungenial soil, representative of but vegetable and mineral death, the dead ice-rubbish and the dead peat,-we saw numerous cultivated patches, in which the thin green corn or sickly-looking potatoes struggled with aquatic plants, -the common reed and the dwarf water-flag. No agriculturist, with all the appliances of modern science at command, would once think of investing capital in such a soil; and yet here were the poor Highlanders investing at least labour in it, and their modicum of seed-corn. And we are not to wonder if the tillers of such fields be miserably poor, and fail to achieve independence. There was a locality pointed out to us, in a barren quartz-rock district, in which the in

And

destructible stone, that never resolves into soil, was covered by a stratum of dark peat, where the proprietor had experimented on the capabilities of the native Highlanders, by measuring out to them amid the moor, at a low rent, several small farms, of ten or twelve acres a-piece. But in a moor composed of peat and quartz-rock no rent can be low. No farmer thrives on a barren soil, let his rent be what it may; and so the speculation here had turned out a bad one. The quartz-rock and the peat proved pauper-making deposits; and while the tenants paid their rents irregularly and ill, the demands made on the poor-rates by the hangers-on of the colony came to be demanded very regularly indeed, and were beginning to overtop the nominal rent in their amount. "How," we have frequently inquired of the poor people, “are you spending your strength on patches so miserably unproductive as these? You are said to be lazy. For our own part, what we chiefly wonder at is your great industry. Were we at least in your circumstances, we would improve upon your indolence, by striking work, and not labouring at all." The usual reply used to be," Ah, there is good land in the country, but they will not give it to us." And certainly we did see in the Highlands many tracts of kindly-looking soil. Green margins, along the sides of long-withdrawing valleys, which still bore the marks of the plough, but now under natural grass, seemed much better fitted to be, as of old, scenes of human industry, than the cold ungenial mosses or the barren moors. But in at least nineteen cases out of every twenty we found the green patches bound by lease to some extensive sheep-farmer, and as unavailable for the purposes of the present emergency, even to the proprietor, as if they lay in the United States or the Canadas.

So far as we could see, the effects of recent emigration had not been favourable. The poor-rates were heaviest in the districts from which the greatest numbers had emigrated.

Unless emigration be so enforced as to become a sort of indiscriminate banishment,-and in these days of poor-laws it would not be easy so to enforce it, even in the Highlands,— it will be the more vigorous and energetic portion of the community that will seek for a home in other countries, and the feeble in mind and body that will be left behind. We were much struck by the casual statement in a newspaper paragraph, that of several hundred emigrants from Lewis who arrived in Canada this season, there was scarce one who was not under thirty. It was the elite of the island that went, while its pauperism staid behind. The pauperism of the Highlands will not willingly cross the Atlantic: it would be going from home much more emphatically than the vigorous emigrant. There are poor-laws in Scotland, but none in the back-woods. But on a subject at once so extensive and so difficult we can do little more than touch. We regretted to find, during our late visit, that the military spirit is at present so dead in the Highlands, that the recruiting party of one of the most respectable Highland regiments under the Crown succeeded in enlisting, during a stay of several months, only some ten or twelve young men, in a county charged with an unemployed and suffering population. In Popish Ireland as many hundreds would have enrolled in the time; and this disposition on the part of the Irish has crowded the British army with a preponderating proportion of Roman Catholics, who, in the event of such a religious war as may one day break out to convulse Europe, could be but little depended upon on the side of Protestantism and the Queen. We fain wish we saw a revival of the old military spirit of the Highlands, both on their own account and on that of the country. The condition of the British army is at the present time one of comfort and plenty, compared with that of the general population of the north-western parts of Scotland; the prospect of retirement with a snug pension some

one-and-twenty years hence, is a better prospect than any poor Highland crofter or cottar can rationally entertain; and we would much prefer seeing some twenty thousand of our brave countrymen enrolled in the army, as at once its best soldiers and best Protestants, than lost for ever to the country in a colony that in a few years hence may exist as one of the States of the great North American republic.-September 20, 1851.

THE SCOTCH POOR-LAW.*

WE have never yet been able to see any foundation for the assertion of Paley, that "the poor have the same right to that portion of a man's property which the laws assign to them, that the man himself has to the remainder." Right cannot be created by law where right did not exist before; and in the poor-laws, as now administered in England, we have a striking illustration of the fact. No law can give to one man a right to take another man, guilty of no crime save poverty, and in debt to no one, and shut him up in prison. Poverty

A poor-law edict indeed "become inevitable for Scotland!" but, alas for its consequences! One who was session-clerk for fourteen years in a parish as large as three or four of the smaller English counties, tells me that in all those years, the proprietors, four in number, gave just one . five pounds in all to assist the poor. Now they give about five hundred a-year, while the people are taxed to the amount of other five hundred. This would be little matter, if the condition of the poor were improved ; but it is unmistakeably and undeniably a hundred times worse. Nothing like the thousand pounds named finds its way into their pockets: collectors, inspectors, law-expenses, &c., swallow up a great part of it. But, worse than all, the kindly charities of the poor towards the poor are quite frozen up. Formerly paupers were assisted with a little milk, potatoes, and fish: now the industrious poor, irritated by the poor-law tax, will contribute nothing towards the support of their poorer neigh

is surely not so grave an offence as to merit a punishment so severe. And yet certain it is, that a legal right of this character exists in England at the present day. It exists as surely as the other legal right asserted by Paley; nor does it in the least alter the state of the case that the prison is called a workhouse. If the poor, simply in their character as poor, had any such right to a portion of the property of their more fortunate countryfolks as that which their more fortunate country folks themselves have to the remainder, no legislator, Scotch or English, would dare clog that right with so degrading a condition. The labouring man has a right to be paid for his labour. Where is the despot who would venture to affirm, that in order to make that right good, the labouring man would require to go into prison? His right was made good when he completed the stipulated work; and it is the lack of all such solid right on the part of the pauper, in his character as a pauper, that enables British legislators to attach conditions to the fulfilment of his ill-based claims, which even Turkish or Persian despots would not dare to attach to the claims of the creditor who demanded some debt

bours. The cry is, Go to the Poor's Board. Even the sympathies of children towards their parents are dried up. This is universally spoken of as a new and shocking phase of things. It is not uncommon for young people to get married on the very day their parents go to the poor-house. In towns the state of matters is, if possible, worse. The assistance rendered by the Poor's Board becomes an absolute premium on vice. No hand is stretched out towards the struggling poor, because character is made of no account; but vice and improvidence urge their claims unblushingly, and they dare not be disregarded. This is very disheartening to well-disposed individuals of the better classes who take an interest in the condition of the poor; the more so that the poor themselves are so well aware of it. "Ah! we will get no help," say those who strive to maintain a little outward decency; "but let us first get drunk, and then sell everything that is left to us, and then we shall be sure of it!" It is easier to create evils by unwise legislation than to cure them. Nevertheless, some checks upon such an unwholesome state of things ought to be devised. L. M.