of England is crowded in cities,
and there they are left 'to soak and blacken soul and sense in city
slime.' In Scotland the same forces have been at work with the same
result. Parishes of soil as fertile as is in the world are to be found
in the occupation of half a dozen farmers, some of whom hold two or
more farms. Land which might hold hundreds of families, if the land
were available for the people as in France, is empty save for a handful
of farmers and their servants. Though great markets are at the door
waiting the produce of intensive cultivation, the small holder is
crowded out. Denmark pours into our cities the produce which the
monopoly in land prevents being supplied at home. Holland feeds us in
time of peace and our enemies in time of war. That the Danes and the
Dutch may have stores wherewith to feed our foes, the fields of England
are laid waste. {65} The only life now left in the country is the ebb
and flow of the overflow from the cities. Germany and Austria have
withstood a two years' blockade, because the land is there kept under
cultivation and yields the necessaries of life. Our enemies have not
been blind to a nation's true riches. Did we lose the command of the
sea for a few weeks, there would be no escape from destruction. For we
have sacrificed our bread supply to the production of Brummagem wares.

But there has been in Scotland an additional element of tragedy in the
rural situation which has not been manifested in England, at least on
so large a scale. Whole parishes have in the Highlands during the last
century been laid waste by wholesale ruthless evictions. Behind the
processes which have made the glens and mountain slopes desolate of
men, and which have massed a million of human beings into a city of
restricted area such as Glasgow, piling them, family on the top of
family, in noisome tenements, there lies {66} perhaps the greatest
tragedy of the nineteenth century. And that tragedy is all the more
poignant in that it has been wrought in silence, none paying it any
heed. Glens filled with men have been transformed into desert places
filled with sheep or deer, and that at the will of one man, while
statesmen paid no heed and the world took no cognisance.[1] For were
not these things done beyond the Grampians? And what happened there
was of no consequence.

It is almost incredible that, during the last century, glens and
countrysides in Scotland were stripped bare of huma