Moved by the extreme wretchedness in which some Highland cotters seem to live, by the cry of ‘congested districts,’ by the laments of the evicted, and by the belief in ‘good old times’ behind the Forty-five, a Lowland observer naturally asks himself if the old times were really so good? In one respect, and that essential, they bear the palm: the people, as a rule, loved and revered their Chiefs, and the Chiefs adopted at least the airs of popularity among the people. Even Young Glengarry, not a model Chief, resented the oppression of tenants falsely accused, as he maintained, of being deserters.[160] Moreover, the poor did not live, generally speaking, in view of the luxurious rich. Clanranald and Glengarry had castles which must have been built at the expense of the undefined ‘services’ of their people long ago; but the warrior Glengarry of Killiecrankie discouraged refinement and delicacy of living. The smaller lairds lived plainly, even poorly. Occasional feasts were given to the Clan. Every man ‘was treated as a blood relation.’ Consequently, if destitution existed, it did not provoke social hatred and discontent. This, at least, is quite certain. On the other hand, the presence of extreme poverty, of famines, by no means rare, of exactions which Lowlanders considered tyrannical, and the occurrence of evictions, before 1745, seem equally well established. Ignorance was one safeguard against discontent, and in the absence of schools, in the rarity of the Presbyterian clergy, with their innate democratic ideas, ignorance flourished. Over-population was encouraged, by minute subdivision of lands, for the purpose of increasing the Chief’s military following. Thus poverty was artificially fostered, and, with it, idleness and habits of plunder and of tippling. This little picture of a Highland home is given in a book of 1747:[161] ‘I have seen in their Huts, when I have been walking, and forced to retreat thither for Shelter from the Rain, their Children, sometimes many in a Hut, full of the Small Pox and [at?] their Heighth, they having been lying and walking about in the Wet and Dirt, the Rain at the same time beating through the Thatch with Violence; so that I used to get from one End of the House to the other to keep dry; but it was all in vain, the Rain soon following me. These children at the same time seemed hearty, drinking Whey and Butter-milk, Wet and Cold with the Inclemency of the weather, and yet so well!’ This sketch was drawn somewhere in the country between Inverness and Fort William, after Culloden.