r country was not more than 30,000--or, to put
the matter in terms of families, thirty-four out of every thirty-five
were "landless." _The New Domesday Book_ showed that the number of
proprietary interests, instead of being only 30,000, was considerably
more than a million; or, in other words, the number of the "landless" as
Bright stated it was greater than the actual number in the proportion
of thirty-three to one.

Here were these facts accessible in the thousand or more pages of a
great official survey. They had doubtless received some attention when
that document was issued, but the agitators of the early "'eighties" had
forgotten or never heard of them; and Bright, so far as I know, never
retracted his own monstrous fallacies. How, then, I asked myself, should
the actual facts of this particular case be driven into the heads of the
public in a politically effective form? And how should other cognate
facts, such as the profits of the business employers, Bright himself
being one of them, be dragged effectively into light, compared with the
rental of the landlords, and be in a similar way brought home to the
public consciousness? Such were the questions which came to possess my
mind when luncheons were being eaten among heather by the pourings of
some hillside brook, or when deer at the close of the day were being
weighed in the larders of Ardverikie.

To these questions a partial answer came sooner than I had expected. On
leaving Ardverikie I paid another visit to the Lovats. On joining the
train at Kingussie I learned that one of the passengers was Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, who was, as an advanced Radical, to make the following day
a great speech at Inverness. Needless to say, this speech turned out to
be mainly a vituperation of Highland landlords. I mention it here only
on account of one short passage. "The landlords," said Mr. Chamberlain,
"have made a silence in the happy glens which once resounded with your
industry"--as though every wilderness between Cape Wrath and Loch Lomond
had not so very long ago resembled a suburb of Birmingham. This is a
curious illustration of how readily even a man of most acute intellect
may be led by the need of securing applause at all costs into nonsense
which, in calmer moments, he would himself be the first to ridicule.

As an antidote to Mr. Chamberlain's propaganda another meeting was
planned under the auspices of a number of the great Highland
proprietors, who gathered toge