Government Report which is commonly known by the name of _The New Domesday Book_. I had heard of this work before, but had never till now seen it, nor had I realized the nature of its contents. _The New Domesday Book_ was the result of an official inquiry undertaken some ten years previously into the number, the extent, and the rental value of all the landed properties of Great Britain and Ireland. Here, I thought, was at least a large installment of the kind of evidence of which I had felt the want, and during the rest of my visit to Ardverikie I devoted every possible moment to a study of this volume. Without going into details, it will be enough to mention the broad and unmistakable facts which _The New Domesday Book_ disclosed, and which formed a direct counterblast, not to the oratory of the Highland agitators only, but also to the wider assertions of Henry George and of Bright. Henry George, whose statistical knowledge was a blank, had contented himself with enunciating the vague doctrine that in all modern countries--the United States, for example, and more especially the United Kingdom--every increase of wealth was in the form of rent, appropriated by the owners of the soil, most of whom were millionaires already, or were very quickly becoming so. Bright, in dealing with this country, had committed himself to a statement which was very much more specific. The number of persons, he said, who had any interest as owners in the soil of their mother country was not more than 30,000--or, to put the matter in terms of families, thirty-four out of every thirty-five were "landless." _The New Domesday Book_ showed that the number of proprietary interests, instead of being only 30,000, was considerably more than a million; or, in other words, the number of the "landless" as Bright stated it was greater than the actual number in the proportion of thirty-three to one. Here were these facts accessible in the thousand or more pages of a great official survey. They had doubtless received some attention when that document was issued, but the agitators of the early "'eighties" had forgotten or never heard of them; and Bright, so far as I know, never retracted his own monstrous fallacies. How, then, I asked myself, should the actual facts of this particular case be driven into the heads of the public in a politically effective form? And how should other cognate facts, such as the profits of the business employers, Bright himself being one of them, be dragged effectively into light, compared with the rental of the landlords, and be in a similar way brought home to the public consciousness? Such were the questions which came to possess my mind when luncheons were being eaten among heather by the pourings of some hillside brook, or when deer at the close of the day were being weighed in the larders of Ardverikie.