But the land could not maintain them! The younger gentry pushed their fortunes abroad as men of the sword or in commerce. But the commons were often at the starving point; we hear of famines. Glengarry writes of a great scarcity, when meal had to be bought in the Lowlands. Burt tells of no meal in Inverness. ‘A house, grass for a cow or two,’ and ‘as much land as will sow a boll of oats,’ rocky land, needing spade culture, was a cottar’s ‘only wages of his whole labour and service,’ says the Gartmore MS. The author reckons that there is not in the Highlands employment for more than half the population, even when land has been remorselessly sub-divided. Many earned a harvest wage in the Lowlands. Others ‘sorned’ on their kindred. Armies of tramps were supported by the generosity of the poor; nay, Lowland beggars came North, allured by the open hands of the Highlanders. Whisky shops were everywhere; here men sauntered and drank. Plunder was habitual; a captain of a ‘Watch’ like Barisdale was at once thief and thief-taker. ‘They live like lairds, and die like loons,’ says Franck, speaking not of all the Highlands (as Macaulay quotes him), but chiefly of Lochaber. ‘Upon this fund’—blackmail—the Captain ‘employed one half the thieves to recover lost cattle, and the other half of them to steal.’ Lochiel laboured to reform his clan in this respect. The exactions of tacksmen, ‘sub-letting farms to a much greater number than they can maintain, and at a much higher rent than they can pay, obliges these poor people to purchase their rents and expences by theifts and robberys,’ of cattle; for the Highland honesty about portable property is extolled by Burt. As to the moral iniquity of cattle robbing, all morality is local, and a man who does not sin against the local standard is no extreme criminal. The Macdonalds held a simple creed of communism. ‘They say that the Cattle are God’s creatures, made for the use of man, for which the earth yields grass and herbs in plenty, without the labour of man, and that therefore they Ought to be common’—that is, ought to belong to the Macdonalds.[186] The same ideas had prevailed on the Border: If every man had his ain cow, A richt poor clan Buccleugh’s wad be. Dr. Carlyle shows that Border cattle thieves, though not encouraged by the gentry, were a powerful class about 1740.