sful, a failure in the potato crop, or in the expected return
of the herring shoals, at once reduces them to starvation. The grand
difference between the circumstances of the people of the Highlands in
the better time and the worse may be summed up in the one important
vocable--_capital_. The Highlander was never wealthy: the inhabitants of
a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are. But
he possessed, on the average, his six, or eight, or ten head of cattle,
and his small flock of sheep; and when, as sometimes happened in the
high-lying districts, the corn-crop turned out a failure, the sale of a
few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord,
and enabled him to purchase his winter and spring supply of meal in the
Lowlands. He was thus a capitalist, and possessed the capitalist's
peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an
accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want,
though not between him and positive hardship, and which enabled him to
rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of
throwing himself on the charity of his Lowland neighbours. Nay, in what
were emphatically termed "the dear years" of the beginning of the
present and latter half of the past century, the humble people of the
Lowlands, especially our Lowland mechanics and labourers, suffered more
than the crofters and _small_ farmers of the Highlands, and this mainly
from the circumstance, that as the failure of the crops which induced
the scarcity was a corn failure, not a failure of grass and pasture, the
humbler Highlanders had sheep and cattle, which continued to supply them
with food and raiment; while the humbler Lowlanders, depending on corn
almost exclusively, and accustomed to deal with the draper for their
articles of clothing, were reduced by the high price of provisions to
great straits. There took place, however, about the beginning of the
century, a mighty change, coincident with, and, to a certain extent, an
effect of, the wars of the first French Revolution. The price of
provisions rose in England and the Lowlands, and with the price of
provisions, the rent of land. The Highland proprietor naturally enough
set himself to determine how his rental also was to be increased; and,
as a consequence of the conclusion at which he arrived, the sheep-farm
and clearance system began. Many thousand Highlanders, ejected from
their snug holdings, em