Our evidence, as to the state of the Highlands, comes from various sources. We have Lowland, English, and Anglified witnesses. The Duke of Argyll cites a Highlander, Forbes of Culloden, but he was a Whig, and President of the Court of Session. Yet there was no juster, more fair, or more wise and tolerant man in the North. We have Captain Burt, author of ‘Letters from Scotland,’ written between the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Some modern Highlanders call him their foe: he certainly looks with English eyes, but he tries to be fair, and is far from unsympathetic. His tenderness for the poor is remarkable. We have the Gartmore MSS. (_circ._ 1748), which is Whiggish, and ‘MS. 104,’ in the King’s Library. It is, apparently, of 1749-50. All these witnesses agree as to the oppression of the people, their involuntary idleness, their dependence on tacksmen, chamberlains and factors, their destitution, while their liability to raised rents and evictions are, by some of these witnesses, insisted upon. But all are writing from the Whig point of view; their desire to improve the popular condition is part of their desire to reduce the power of the Jacobite Chiefs. On the other side is General Stewart of Garth, enthusiastically Highland, anxious to keep up population for military purposes, as well as from honourable sympathy, and decidedly inclined to overlook the poverty, plundering, enforced idleness, tippling, and blackmail of the good old times. We have also Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, who, while he delights to tell a story against Cluny, for example, maintains that there were no evictions before 1745. Unluckily, we have no authoritative treatise from the Jacobite and ‘old times’ side, written between 1747 and 1790. The best evidence might be found in Gaelic poetry, which, in general, proves one important point. Whatever the material condition of the Highland people, whatever their lack, in many parishes, of elementary education, they possessed, in legends, _Märchen_, traditional poems, and the living art of popular song, a native culture—rich, dignified, and imaginative—which newspapers merely destroy. This great element of happiness, where it survives, is the bequest of the good old times. Such is our evidence; and now, having described its nature, we may turn to the details.