, who was a
learned antiquarian, mentioned as a commonplace on revolutionary
platforms the statement that in the Highlands no such beings as the
private landlord existed prior to the rebellion of 1745, on the
suppression of which the government stole their communal rights from the
clansmen, turning them into tenants at will, whom the chieftains, now
absolute owners, could evict and expatriate as they pleased. No fiction,
said Father Grant, himself a crofter's son, could be more absurd than
this. It was absolutely disproved, he said, by a mass of medieval
charters, in which were assigned to the chieftains by the Scottish Crown
the fullest territorial rights possible for lawyers to devise.[1]

At the same time my informants admitted with regret that landlordism in
the Highlands was liable to special abuses, an instance of which had
come to the fore recently. This was the long lease acquired by a rich
American of enormous areas which he converted into a single deer forest,
evicting certain crofters in the process with what was said to have been
signal harshness.

All this information was to me extremely interesting; but I left
Scotland wishing that it had been more extensive and methodical. It had,
however, the effect of stimulating me in the work to which I was now
addressing myself--that is to say, the elaboration of some formal and
militant treatise, in which I might not only discredit by analysis the
main fallacies common to all the social revolutionaries of the day, but
also indicate the main facts and principles on which alone a true
science of society can be based. This work took the form of a short
treatise or essay, called _Social Equality, or a Study in a Missing
Science_. The science to which I referred was the science of human
character as connected with the efforts by which wealth and all material
civilizations are produced. A French translation of it was soon issued
in Paris. I was also asked to sanction what I had no right to
prohibit--namely, translations of it into Rumanian and Spanish. My main
object was to show that, as applied to the process in question, "social
equality" was a radically erroneous formula, the various efforts to
which wealth is due being not only essentially unequal in themselves,
but only susceptible of stimulation by the influence of unequal
circumstances. The Radical doctrines to the contrary, which were then
being enunciated with reckless bitterness by Bright, were taken to
pieces