terfering with the
rights of the crofters. They appropriate land and possess and pasture
stock, but pay no rent, obey no control, and scarcely recognize any
authority. The dwellings of this class and of some of the poorer
crofters are wretched in the extreme. A single apartment, with walls of
stone and mud, a floor of clay, a thatched roof, no windows, no chimney,
one low door furnishing an entrance for the occupants and a means of
ventilation and of escape for the smoke which rolls up black and thick
from the peat fire, furniture of the rudest imaginable sort, the
inhabitants--the human beings, the cows, the pigs, the sheep, and the
poultry--all crowded together in the miserable and filthy hut, make up a
picture which the most romantic and poetic associations can hardly
render pleasing to one accustomed to the comforts and refinements of
modern civilization. Of course many of the crofters live in greater
comfort, and some of the cottages are by no means unattractive. But the
Royal Commissioners say that the crofter's habitation is usually "of a
character that would imply physical and moral degradation in the eyes of
those who do not know how much decency, courtesy, virtue, and even
refinement survive amidst the sordid surroundings of a Highland hovel."
An Englishman who, on seeing these "sordid surroundings," was disposed
to compare the social and moral condition of the people to "the
barbarism of Egypt," was told that if he would ask one of the crofters,
in Gaelic or English, "What is the chief end of man?" he would soon see
the difference.

With such a history, such traditions, grievances, conditions, and
hardships, it is not strange that the crofter should be ready to join an
agitation that promised a remedy. Some of his grievances and claims have
been so similar to those of the Irish tenant that the legislation which
followed the violent agitation in Ireland has led him to hope for
relief-measures similar to those enacted for the Irish tenantry. The
Irish Land Act of 1870 recognized the tenant's right to the permanent
possession of his holding and to his improvements, by providing that on
being turned out by his landlord he should have compensation for
disturbance and for his improvements. It did not, however, secure him
against the landlord's so increasing his rent as practically to
appropriate his improvements and even force him to leave his holding
without any compensation. The Land Act of 1881 secured his inter