deeds done as if in darkness and a corner, are beginning,
after the lapse of nearly thirty years, to be proclaimed on the
house-tops. The experiment of the late Duchess was not intended to be
made in the eye of Europe. Its details would ill bear the exposure.
When Cobbett simply referred to it only ten years ago, the noble
proprietrix was startled, as if a rather delicate family secret was on
the eve of being divulged; and yet nothing seems more evident now than
that civilised man all over the world is to be made aware of how the
experiment was accomplished, and what it is ultimately to produce. It
must be obvious, further, that the infatuation of the present
proprietor, in virtually setting aside the Toleration Act on his
property, must have the effect of spreading the knowledge of it all
the more widely, and of rendering its results much more disastrous
than they could have possibly been of themselves.

In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or
the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which
the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of
Sutherland, is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile.
In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners, and
old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat
formidable,--sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in
an unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the
class who would be able in such circumstances to urge it with most
effect. It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts
and reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of the argument
runs somewhat thus.

Under the old Celtic tenures--the only tenures, be it remembered,
through which the lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their
lands--the _Klaan_, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of
the soil: 'the whole of Sutherland,' says Sismondi, belonged to 'the
men of Sutherland.' Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute
monarch he was. 'He gave the different _tacks_ of land to his
officers, or took them away from them, according as they showed
themselves more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a
military sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in
the least the property of the clan itself;'--he was a chief, not a
proprietor, and had 'no more right to expel from their homes the
inhabitants of his county, t