LANDLORDISM IN THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume VII, Issue 2263, 25 October 1889, Page 2

LANDLORDISM IN THE HIGHLANDS OF SCOTLAND.

(By A. tt. Wallace) Tbe general results of the system of modern landlordism In Scotland are not leas painful than the hardship and misery brought upon Individual sufferers. The earlier improvers wbo*drove the peasants | from the sheltered valleys to the exposed sea coast, In order to make room for aheep and sheep farmers, pleaded, however erroneously, the publio benefit aa the justification of their oonduot. They maintained that mora food and olothing wonld be prodaoed by the new system and that the people themselves would have tbe advantage of tha produoe of tbe sea as well as that of the land for their support. The results, however, proved tbem to be the opposite, for thenceforth the perennial ory of Highland destitution began to be heard, culminating at intervals In actual famines like tbat of 1836 37, when £70,000 was distributed to keep the Highlanders from death by starvation. Tbe evldenoe taken before the Seleot Committee on Emigration, Scotland, showed muoh the same state of ohronio poverty as prevails In Iseland — and from tbe very same causa — great landlords. And the only remedy our wise landlords* legislature oould find for this state of things was emigration 1 Jast as m Ireland, there was abundance of land I oapable of cultivation, but the people were driven to the coast and to the towns to ! make way for sheep and oattle and lowland farmers ; and when the barren and inhospitable tracts allotted to them beoame overcrowded, they were told to emigrate, consequently diminishing the people of tbat oountry by half, with increased poverty. The great lords of the soil m Scotland have for the last twenty years, or more, been systematically laying waste enormous areas of land for purposes of sport. At the present time more than 2,000,000 acres of Scottish soil are devoted to the preservation of deer alene, an area larger than the entire counties of Kent and Surrey combined. Glen Tilt Forest inoludes 100 000 acres ; the Blaok Mount (a sixty miles m oiroum'erenoe ; and Ben Auider Forest is fifteen miles long by seven broad. On many of these forests there is the finest pasture m Scotland, while the valleys would support a large population of small farmers. Yet all this land is devoted 'to the sport of tbe donothing wealthy ; farms being destroyed, houses pulled down and burned, the people banished to create a wilderness for the deer-stalkers.