As to rents, payments to chief or tacksman, how did things fare? Conservatives, like Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott, have written about the chiefs ‘degenerating from patriarchal rulers to rapacious landlords.’ The Duke of Argyll, on the contrary, speaks of the sub-tenants, in the good old times, as ‘holding at the will of the lease-holders or tacksmen, and complaining bitterly of the oppressions under which they laboured.’ This is on the evidence of Sheriff Campbell of Stonefield, speaking of Mull, Morven, and Tyree, in 1732.[171] ‘It was only beginning to be felt these poor people that even a bare subsistence could not be secured when plunder had been stopped, and before industry had begun.’ What were the ‘oppressions,’ not including, of course, such exceptional outrages as those of Barisdale? Well, Burt tells us that a tenant’s improvements, in 1730-1740, meant an instant rise of rent. ‘What would the tenant be the gainer of it’ (enclosures and improvements on his farm), ‘but to have his rent raised, or his farm divided with some other?’[172] The division would serve to recruit another swordsman for the Chief. The writer of a MS. of 1747, in the possession of Graham of Gartmore,[173] says, ‘The practice of letting many farms to one man’ (the tacksman, say Lochgarry or Barisdale), ‘who, again subsetts them to a much greater number than these can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can afford to pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys.’[174] In the good old days, something like the iniquitous Truck System existed, we learn from the same authority, on some Highland estates. ‘Some of the substantial Tacksmen play the merchant, and supply the common people.... As the poor ignorant people have neither knowledge of the value of their purchase, nor money to pay for it, they deliver to these dealers (the tacksmen) ‘cattle in the beginning of May for what they have received; by which traffick the poor wretched people are cheated out of their effects for one half of their value.’ This is a mournful aspect of the good old times. The MS. 104 confirms the statements, and describes the thriftless agricultural methods.