Yet every time we were in the Highlands and in whatever shire, the old song, learned in childhood, came to mind--“O where, tell me where, has my Highland laddie gone?” Ross and Cromarty, now united in one and the largest of all the counties in Scotland, is the most thinly populated of all. In fact this great area has been “improved” by its landed proprietors promoting the emigration of its former inhabitants. There is only a fraction left of the Highlanders. The Celtic element is but a survival, a remnant, and the Gaelic tongue is like a flickering flame, almost ready to die out. What is the reason? Is it, in part at least, because nature is so niggardly? Again, is it not true that “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”? Did the traditional Highlands and Highlanders exist, or gain their place in romance and history, chiefly through the human imagination? Scottish history and poetry show that originally, even as a swordsman and fighter, the Highlander possessed no special superiority over the Lowlander, but in the seventeenth century, as in the modern days, which we of ’61, as well as of 1915, remember, and have seen demonstrated, the best prepared people, to whom arms are habitual, and to whom military training is a personal accomplishment, will, at the first beginning of war, at least, be pretty sure to get the advantage. In a prolonged struggle, it is resources that tell. Wars are not ended by battle, but by manifest reserves, with power to follow up victory. It was western Scotland, of azoic rock, a far-off corner of Europe, that had the singular fortune of sheltering the last vestiges of the Celts--that early race of people who, once placed upon the centre of the ancient continent, were gradually driven to its western extremities. A notion, held tenaciously by the Highlanders, was that the Lowlands had originally been their birthright. Many of them practised a regular system of reprisal upon the frontier of that civilized region, with as good a conscience as a Levant pirate crossed himself and vowed to burn candles of gratitude before the Virgin’s picture, if successful in robbery. To maintain this philosophy and practice, the use of arms was habitual and necessary among the Highlanders. While among the Lowlanders cattle-lifting and other methods of rapine were considered as the business of thieves and scoundrels, it was usually reckoned by the Highlanders to be an eminently honorable occupation, partaking of the prestige of a profession. How finely does Sir Walter Scott bring out this sentiment, when Roderick Dhu answers Fitz-James, who charges the Highland chieftain with leading a robber life.