ipate.

There is little of gaiety or enjoyment among the Highlanders of
Sutherland now. We spent a considerable time for two several years
among their thickly-clustered cottages on the eastern coast, and saw
how they live, and how it happens that when years of comparative
scarcity come on they starve. Most of them saved, when in the
interior, as we have said, a little money; but the process has been
reversed here: in every instance in which they brought their savings
to the coast-side has the fund been dissipated. Each cottage has from
half an acre to an acre and half of corn land attached to it--just
such patches as the Irish starve upon. In some places, by dint of sore
labour, the soil has been considerably improved; and all that seems
necessary to render it worth the care of a family, would be just to
increase its area some ten or twelve times. In other cases, however,
increase would be no advantage. We find it composed of a loose debris
of granitic water-rolled pebbles and ferruginous sand, that seemed
destined to perpetual barrenness. The rents, in every instance, seem
moderate; the money of the tenant flows towards the landlord in a
stream of not half the volume of that in which the money of the
landlord must flow towards the tenant when the poor-laws shall be
extended to Scotland. But no rent, in such circumstances, can be
really moderate. A clergyman, when asked to say how many of his
parishioners, in one of these coast districts, realized _less_ than
sixpence a-day, replied, that it would be a much easier matter for him
to point out how many of them realized _more_ than sixpence, as this
more fortunate class were exceedingly few. And surely no rent can be
moderate that is paid by a man who realizes less than sixpence a-day.
It is the peculiar evil produced by the change in Sutherland, that it
has consigned the population of the country to a condition in which no
rent _can_ be moderate--to a condition in which they but barely avoid
famine, when matters are at the best with them, and fall into it in
every instance in which the herring fishing, their main and most
precarious stay, partially fails, or their crops are just a little
more than usually scanty. They are in such a state, that their very
means of living are sources, not of comfort, but of distress to them.
When the fishing and their crops are comparatively abundant, they live
on the bleak edge of want; while failure in either plunges them into a
state of