moorlands, mountains, streams, lochs, heather, bracken, peat, and bog; the patches of cultivable soil would bear a scanty crop of oats, and perhaps clover, barley, or potatoes.[410] This description applied to a large half of entire Scotland; and we must bear it in mind to understand the saying of Malthus in 1803: “Scotland is certainly over-peopled, but not so much as it was a century or half a century ago, when it contained fewer inhabitants.”[411] The highlands are over their whole extent what the lowlands are as regards their hills, fit only for sheep. Sutherland has about thirteen inhabitants to the square mile now, and Midlothian seven hundred and forty-six; but Sutherland and not Midlothian may be over-peopled. Sutherland as compared with her former self, when she had thirty or forty to the square mile, may be more or she may be less over-peopled than she once was; we cannot tell till we know what her wealth was and how it was distributed. Under the patriarchal government[412] of early times the wealth of the country consisted literally in its men. If a chief were asked the rent of his estate, he would answer that it raised five hundred men; the tenant paid him in military service. Adam Smith remembers that in the Jacobite Rebellion, which disturbed his country at the time he was studying at Oxford, “Mr. Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in [the west highlands of] Scotland, whose rent never exceeded £500 [English] a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with him.”[413] Subdivision of land meant more retainers and greater honour; and so the highlands were peopled not to the full extent of the work to be done, but actually to the full extent of the bare food got from the soil.[414] On the establishment of a strong government and the abolition of their hereditary judicial privileges,[415] the chiefs soon became willing to convert the value in men into a value in money, exchanging dignity for profit. They no longer encouraged their tenants to have large families; and yet they made no efforts to remove the habits, which the tenants had formed, of having them.[416] It was this change that gave Sir Walter Scott the materials for his most powerful pictures in _Waverley_ and other novels. But it is the distress of the chiefs that is tragic to him, rather than the misery of the clansmen. The clansmen for their part had under feudalism been brought up to be farmers or cattle-dealers and nothing else; there was as little variety of occupation in the highlands then as in Ireland now. Undoubtedly too they had that customary right of long possession, which law so often construed into a legal title in the case of more influential men. It was true also that, if the native highlanders would not cultivate that poor soil, no strangers would, and, if it was politically desirable that the country should remain peopled, the only way to secure this was to prevent the native exodus.[417] No such