end to the illicit stills. Poverty—a sad cattle-
lifter—has driven off a large number of cows and
sheep, and has robbed numbers of their boats.
The herring fishery has declined. Finally,
since 1846, potatoes, the main food grown on
the island, have been subject to that general
break-up of the constitution, from which
effects have followed that will occupy a most
important page in the world's history, of
which only posterity will duly recognise the
true significance. Poverty, therefore, has
increased with great rapidity among the people
of the Hebrides, many of whom hungrily
pick cockles from the shore for a subsistence.
Poverty has grown, and population has grown
with it. In much less than the last hundred
years the population of the poorest islands in
the Hebrides has doubled.

Can there be any help for misery like this?
Has any been attempted?

Certainly there has. In many islands the
great owners have spent more than the whole
income of their local property in efforts to
relieve the people. All kinds of farm teaching
have been tried in sundry places, but the
people really seem to have best thriven when
left most to their own resources. The poor
have a reserve guard of ways and means,
which they bring to the rescue as a forlorn
hope, and which they leave in ambush when
they are receiving external aid; and it is
really true that this reserve guard, when they
are compelled to use manœuvres, and to bring
all forces into play, drives them to plans and
labours which produce for them, as a
community, far more relief than can be artificially
administered upon the most gigantic scheme
of charity. True charity enables men to help
themselves; unties the knots by which their
limbs are bound, but carefully abstains from
dictating the movement of the liberated hands.
We often err, when we desire to teach the
poor to do good to themselves, by labouring
to make them act a play of our composing, in
the manner of the puppets. Certain absurd
rudiments of knowledge, in all civilised society,
men have a right to demand that their neighbours
should receive. States, that do not
profess to be quite savage, have a right to
demand—for the preservation of their own
health, if not out of any higher motive—that
no citizen shall be without that modicum of
education by which he is raised above the
brute, and made less apt to prey upon his
fellows. Without prescribing forms of dress,
the law will suffer no man to go absolutely
naked; without prescribing forms of opinion,
the law should suffer no man to be
absolutely ignorant. But when we seek the
physical well-being of the poor, we must be
careful how we reject their experience of
life, and teach them to walk according to
our theories.

The experience of life in Skye at present is,
as we have said, somewhat bitter. The island
contains four thousand three hundred and
thirty-five families. Of these, no less than one
thousand eight hundred and eighty-eight are
small crofters, holding rarely enough land for
their maintenance. Of the remaining families,
one thousand seven hundred and sixty-five
belong to mere cottars, having no land to
support them, and relying for subsistence on
their labour. But there is in Skye, itself, no
market for labour. When these cottars can
procure the necessary seed, they hire potato
ground of neighbouring crofters, who next
year receive the benefit of the manure put
with the potato crop. The people of Skye
are all familiar, from their infancy, with sheep
and cattle; they can build their own houses,
roof and thatch them; they can make nets,
cut peats, and wait upon themselves. As
emigrants upon a virgin soil, they would
require but little help; no men could have
been better educated to a system of rude self-
dependence. With aid of the herring fishery,
the Isle of Skye is able to support its own
population for about seven months in the year.
If the natives would not live seven months
with food and five without—supposing that
arrangement possible—they are compelled to
go abroad for means of making up the difference.
They travel, therefore, in the summer,
to the mainland. They busy themselves
in the south of Scotland upon railroads,
drains, and harvest fields; but when winter
returns, they all go back to their dear
homes, and take their earnings in among
the mists. Upon these earnings, and what
store they may possess, they live in idleness
during the winter. Often, the earnings of
the absentee will suffice only when he returns,
to pay for the meal eaten by his family while
he was absent. In that case, he looks to God
to help him through the winter. He receives
parish help, and he has received help from the
Highland Destitution Fund, formed after the
potato failure. Dependence upon charity has
hurt his character, and has applied no relief
whatever to his ills. In a recent number of
the " Quarterly Review " it is proved, by
figures, that every penny of the money taken
thus in charity, has gone to increase the
consumption of whiskey. The additional quantity
of whiskey taken has been equivalent to the
additional sum spent in relief. That gin-
drinking and whiskey-drinking grow as
distress grows, is a very old fact, and depends
upon causes which are no reproach whatever
to the people. A physician and a moralist
would form a right committee to draw up the
report explaining them: but the present
instance seems to prove that figures are not
always facts. The " Quarterly " is not responsible
for any error, but the Inland Board of
Revenue owns to the commission of a slight
mistake. In the Portree division of the Isle
of Skye, in the returns alluded to, the
consumption of whiskey was inadvertently put
down, by some clerk who may have been in
love, at four thousand eight hundred and
ninety-six gallons, instead of three hundred
and ten.