to fish, manly to keep cattle, or tend flocks
of sheep. It is necessary to plant potatoes
and some odds and ends for household
purposes; but it is slavish work to dig, to
carry burdens of manure from place to place,
to drive a plough—slavish and troublesome.
So they believe, not because they are idle;
they enjoy toil that suits better to their
taste. Nations have predilections. John
Bull prefers porter to eau sucrée; the Gael
loves flocks better than furrows.

Once upon a time, and it is now a time
that has become rather remote, the people of
the Hebrides were tolerably prosperous. The
land was divided into crofts, each of which
was under the joint care of several families.
The system of joint occupation having been
generally abandoned, these crofts were fairly
parcelled out among their occupiers; so that
there was left to each family its own little
tract of rented land in sole possession. This
innovation was necessarily disastrous; but
political economy has taught them nothing
about division of labour; each crofter
builds for himself the house he lives in,
and furnishes it after his own heart; for he is
his own upholsterer. His mansion is rather
spacious than convenient; spacious enough
to contain the cow, the few sheep or other
creatures, which used to be well-known as
members of his family. Now they are rare
visitors: they generally, also, come to make
a very short stay. We are not talking,
however, about the present, but about the past.
The crofter was a tolerably comfortable
fellow: he built a pretty spacious dwelling,
and hospitably entertains one or more beasts
under its roof; he had certain tools and
implements of some trade—husbandry for
one, and fishing for another, we should say,
if we were called upon to specify. There
was a Skye full of potatoes then. Cholera
morbus had not found a partner in its dances
among the mealy beauties of the vegetable
kingdom. The crofter had abundant right
of grazing upon hill-side land; he had a boat
by means of which he could get many a row
among the herrings, and make sales of what
he caught. The crofter was also rascal
enough to make whiskey in defiance of
revenue laws, and the illicit stills quietly
helped to still the cravings of his pocket.
Finally, kelp was, what it is not now, a great
article of commerce, and the crofters, as a
commercial people, made their profit by its
manufacture. But the trade and commerce
of the Hebrides have been knocked down by
a long series of blows.

The crofters used to be so very comfortable
that they could sit upon their stools and spread
their legs abroad with a luxurious sense of
lordly superfluities, giving a benediction upon
marriage to their sons or daughters, and a
portion of their land as heritage or dowry.
The young couple scampered after stones, and
helped each other to erect a nest upon the
space allotted to them, primitive as doves
themselves in fetching sticks and straws to
make a place where they might coo together.
As long as there was an inch to spare, there
was an inch to give away to children wanting
it. Children and all clung to the soil. It
was very touching, very natural, very
demonstrative of the warm feelings of humanity.
But the warm feelings of humanity, in
common with all virtues, demand in their
possessors self-control. The earth cannot
afford to let the heavens blaze eternal
sunshine. Clouds are dampers, and political
economy is a damper. But damp is a handy
servant, necessary to the housekeeping of
nature. The people of the Hebrides wanted
political economy when they were choking
one another for the want of room, from
motives of unlimited affection.

Crofts, therefore, were subdivided. Standing
in one name on the rent-roll, they often
were occupied by two, three, or four families.
"While I have a potato, I will share it with
you," says the warm-hearted Celt. While he
has a potato-field, he shares it with his family.
Perhaps if he were allowed to go on till he
left himself no more than space for one potato,
he would make arrangements for the sharing
of that when it had ripened, in complete
justification of his phrase, " While I have a
potato, I will share it with my friend."

More educated people, landlords who had
seen a little of the working of this system
elsewhere, and knew that wet blankets and
cold water cure were necessary remedies,
then prohibited the building of an additional
house on any croft. " It does not matter, my
dear," then said the Highland father to his
son; " marry, and take your share of land;—as
for the house, why, you shall live with me."
Matters were not mended. Then, when
attempts here and there were made to check
this practice also, it was so revolting to the
feelings of all parties to part parent and child,
to interfere with home arrangements made
under the shelter of the paternal roof,
that it became necessary to give up the
contest. The evil was submitted to, and still
exists.

While as a domestic people they were
stabbing one another with love from within;
as a commercial people their prosperity, just
as unwittingly, was stabbed at from without.
The reduction of the duty on foreign alkali,
in 1823, gradually put an end to the demand
for kelp. It was discovered that a cheaper
alkali might be got out of common salt. This
was an agreeable fact for the world in general;
but a disastrous fact for the poor people who
were striving to pick up a living on the
Hebrides. Kelp is now only made in order
to extract from it its iodine, and for this
purpose sea-weeds are used which grow in deep
water, and are only to be picked up in the
form of drift-weed, after storms. The kelp
thus got, will hardly repay, when sold, the
cost of manufacture. Fiscal changes, and
increased repressive energy, have almost put an