ve no ideal but the gratification of their desires.
The cruelties and the wrongs perpetrated in the Scottish Highlands on a
loyal and law-abiding people can only be paralleled by the atrocities
of the slave traders in Africa. They would be unbelievable were it not
that the State suffered the same processes in a gradual and less
dramatic form to accomplish the same ends in England. The only
difference was that the Scottish evictor concentrated in one day of
sword and fire the desolating work which in England and in Lowland
Scotland was diffused over many years. Whether the result be that of a
day or of {70} a hundred years, the folly and the guilt are the same.
The same fate as overtook rural England and Scotland has in even more
fateful degree overtaken Ireland. The vast majority of the Irish are
now outwith their native isle. In the Ireland of to-day only the
derelicts are left. Throughout the length and breadth of the three
kingdoms, the country places in which strong men were reared have been
made desolate that cities in which men decay might extend and enlarge
their slums.

III

In this devastation of the country places the abnormal process of
eviction played but a small part compared with the normal processes
which worked steadily for the emptying of the country and for the
growth of the city. A blinded legislature sacrificed everything to the
growth of an industrial civilisation. What the ruling classes wanted
was the increased prosperity of Glasgow and Birmingham; it mattered
nothing though the {71} country-folk perished. They had, however, some
consideration for the countrysides. They caused schools to be built
everywhere at the expense of landlords and tenants. But in these
schools they caused nothing to be taught but the dates of battles and
the names of rivers. In them there was nothing taught of the wonder of
growing life, of the miracle of earth pouring food into the lap of men,
of the glory and beauty of the greening earth, or of the dignity of
breaking up the fallow ground. I say, nothing of worth was taught in
these schools--nothing, except what roused an unhealthy craving for the
life that could be lived with unsoiled hands! And for the support of
these schools one lady who owned a large estate in the west had to sell
her jewels that she might pay the school rate, and tenants parted with
their stock for the same end. For the State had decreed that the
country places should pay for the