However impartial or fair a traveller may be his statements are not to be accepted without due caution. He narrates that which most forcibly attracts his attention, being ever careful to search out that which he desires. Yet, to a certain extent, dependence must be placed in his observations. From certain travellers are gleaned fearful pictures of the Highlanders during the eighteenth century, written without a due consideration of the underlying causes. The power of the chiefs had been weakened, while the law was still impotent, many of them were in exile and their estates forfeited, and landlords, in not a few instances, placed over the clansmen, who were inimical to their best interests. As has been noticed, in 1746 the country was ravaged and pitiless oppression followed. Destruction and misery everywhere abounded. To judge a former condition of a people by their present extremity affords a distorted view of the picture. Fire and sword, war and rapine, desolation and atrocity, perpetrated upon a high-spirited and generous people, cannot conduce to the best moral condition. Left in poverty and galled by outrage, wrongs will be resorted to which otherwise would be foreign to a natural disposition. If the influences of a more refined age had not penetrated the remote glens, then a rougher reprisal must be expected. The coarseness, vice, rapacity, and inhumanity of the oppressor must of necessity have a corresponding influence on their better natures. If to this it be added that some of the chiefs were naturally fierce, the origin of the sad features could readily be determined. Whatever vices practiced or wrongs perpetrated, the example was set before them by their more powerful and better conditioned neighbors. Among the crimes enumerated is that some of the chiefs increased their scanty incomes by kidnapping boys or men, whom they sold as slaves to the American planters. If this be true, and in all probability it was, there must have been confederates engaged in maritime pursuits. But they did not have far to go for this lesson, for this nefarious trade was taught them, at their very doors, by the merchants of Aberdeen, who were "noted for a scandalous system of decoying young boys from the country and selling them as slaves to the planters in Virginia. It was a trade which in the early part of the eighteenth century, was carried on to a considerable extent through the Highlands; and a case which took place about 1742 attracted much notice a few years later, when one of the victims having escaped from servitude, returned to Aberdeen, and published a narrative of his sufferings, seriously implicating some of the magistracy of the town. He was prosecuted and condemned for libel by the local authorities, but the case was afterwards carried to Edinburgh. The iniquitous system of kidnapping was fully exposed, and the judges of the supreme court unanimously reversed the verdict of the Aberdeen authorities and imposed