It is almost incredible that, during the last century, glens and countrysides in Scotland were stripped bare of human beings by wholesale eviction. The thought of these poor thatched houses burning {67} and the people driven away to find refuge where they could--in the slums of Glasgow or across the seas--is to our minds so intolerable that many will deny such crimes were ever perpetrated. Yet they were perpetrated. The hearthstones on which the peat fires unceasingly burned, which for generations had never grown cold, were left to the rain and the snow. Some parishes were laid wholly waste. In one such parish which I know, out of which sixty-one officers bearing their King's commission went forth to fight in the Napoleonic wars, there has gone forth hardly one officer to-day. Where hundreds were found of old in the day of need, a mere handful of ghillies or shepherds is found to-day who can take up arms. For that parish which gave Scotland the greatest family of preachers and leaders in religious and social movements was laid ruthlessly waste, and the parish minister, who held all the honours which his Church and country could bestow on him, was left in his manse solitary {68} amid the wilderness which greed created, to die of a broken heart. That most beautiful of islands--the Isle of Skye--sent forth 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600 commissioned officers, 10,000 soldiers to fight in the great wars for human freedom against the Corsican; to-day the Isle of Skye can scarcely muster 1000 in the greatest crisis of human history. One parish in the western sea-board which sent 200 men to fight for freedom in the Napoleonic wars to-day could only muster six; for the parish fell into the hands of a man who wanted a deer forest for the passing of his leisure hours. These figures are but representative of what has happened all over the British Isles. An old man, who was carried as a child in the corner of a plaid out of his native glen when the cataclysm of eviction burst on the unbelieving crofters and cottars, while cottage after cottage was given to the flames, when asked what he remembered about it, answered: 'I can see yet the smoke rising to heaven; and I can hear {69} the sound of weeping down the glen.' In my boyhood's days I heard an old man speaking of the townships of his youth being laid waste, and he said: 'I remember it as one remembers things seen in a dream.' There are many books in which those who may desire can inform themselves of the depths to which it is possible for greed and tyrannous power to bring men who have no ideal but the gratification of their desires. The cruelties and the wrongs perpetrated in the Scottish Highlands on a loyal and law-abiding people can only be paralleled by the atrocities of the slave traders in Africa. They would be unbelievable were it not that the State suffered the same processes in a gradual and less dramatic form to accomplish the same ends in England. The only