ring hard to little purpose. Again, a fishing under average,
from the eccentric character of the fish, is found almost always to
benefit a few, and to ruin a great many. The average deficiency is
never equally spread over the fishermen; one sweeps the board--another
loses all. Nor are the cases few in which the accustomed shoal wholly
deserts a tract of coast for years together; and thus the lottery,
precarious at all times, becomes a lottery in which there are only
blanks to be drawn. The wealthy speculator might perhaps watch such
changes, and by supplementing the deficiency of one year by the
abundance of another, give to the whole a character of average; but
alas for the poor labouring man placed in such circumstances! The
yearly disbursements of our Scottish Fishery Board, in the way of
assistance to poverty-struck fishermen, unable even to repair their
boats, testify all too tangibly that they cannot regulate their long
runs of ill luck by their temporary successes! And if such be the case
among our hereditary fishermen of the north, who derive more than half
their sustenance from the white fishery, how much more must it affect
those fishermen of Sutherland, who, having no market for their white
fish in the depopulated interior, and no merchants settled among them
to find markets farther away, have to depend exclusively on their
herring fishing! The experiment which precipitated the population of
the country on its barer skirts, as some diseases precipitate the
humours on the extremities, would have been emphatically a disastrous
one, so far at least as the people were concerned, even did it involve
no large amount of human suffering, and no deterioration of
character.

One of the first writers, of unquestioned respectability, who acquainted
the public with the true character of the revolution which had been
effected in Sutherland, was the late General Stewart of Garth. He
was, we believe, the first man--and the fact says something for his
shrewdness--who saw a coming poor-law looming through the _clearing_ of
Sutherland. His statements are exceedingly valuable; his inferences
almost always just. The General--a man of probity and nice honour--had
such an ability of estimating the value of moral excellence in a
people, as the originators of the revolution had of estimating the
antagonist merits of double pounds of mutton and single pounds of
beef. He had seen printed representations on the subject--tissues of
holl