Of his statements on the Highland clearances he withdrew none; of course mountains were unsuitable for agriculture, but the glens were capable of tillage and the hillsides of afforestation. As to the Sutherland clearances he cited Sir Walter Scott, Hugh Miller, and a recent book by Mr. Sage, an Established Church minister, to show the suffering caused, and denounced the Duke of Sutherland (A. R., 1913, p. 262) for trying to get money out of the proposed redress of the wrong done by his ancestors. As to the discrepancy between the offer and the valuation for death duties, "there had never been such a case since the days of Ananias and Sapphira." In 1748 the Duke of Sutherland had claimed compensation for the abolition of the right to hang his subjects; he asked for 10,000_l._ and got 1,000_l._ This was an instance of the patience with which the people had endured great injustice. Outside the Highlands hundreds of thousands of men were working for a wage barely keeping their families above privation, seeing their children die for lack of light, air, and space; in the cities there were quagmires of fermenting human misery; but the chariots of retribution were drawing nigh, and there would be elbow-room for the poor. This speech incidentally led to a sharp controversy between the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Duke of Montrose, who pointed out that the land sold by him to the Corporation was sold at a price awarded on arbitration, and covering many items besides the value of the land, and that he had no interest in the Cathcart School or its site. Two days earlier, the Earl of Derby, speaking at Liverpool, had elaborately and effectively rebutted attacks made by the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the management of the Bootle estate, and, in view of a statement by Baron de Forest in a memorandum attached to the Land Report (A. R., 1913, p. 212) that the value of the site of Bootle had risen from 7,000_l._ in 1724 to three or four millions in 1913, he had offered the estate to Baron de Forest for 1,500,000_l._ The Baron accepted, on condition that the transfer should include all sums realised since 1724 by sales, fines, or mortgages--a condition which terminated the negotiations, though not the epistolary controversy.