This is not a picture of a golden age, and Bailie Nicol Jarvie, in ‘Rob Roy,’ sums up this theory of what the age was really like. But, if we turn to Stewart of Garth,[187] we find the real condition of the Highlands in times past revealed in a rosy haze. Blackmail is only extorted from _Lowlanders_, as if Barisdale had Lowland neighbours![188] The game and fish were ‘free to all’—a palpable error as regards salmon, at all events, while one doubts if every clansman was made free of Cluny’s forest. We do not read of grouse and venison in cotters’ huts. ‘Cottagers and tradesmen were discouraged from marrying.’[189] Yet the surplus population was very large. A young amorous Highlander set himself up for marriage by ‘thigging’—that is, by begging among friends for cows, sheep, and seed-corn.[190] They did not discourage him. ‘The extinction of the respectable race of tacksmen ... is a serious loss to the people.’[191] Mr. Fraser Mackintosh, however, speaking of Skye, says, ‘large tacksmen ... could be relied on to assist (each other) or keep aloof, if the oppressed were below their class or set.’[192] The author of MS. 104 would reduce the power of tacksmen by making all tenants leaseholders for terms not under twenty years, and would pay off all wadsetts on forfeited estates, ‘because the gentlemen who had them were great oppressors of the Poor, and most of them, though they did not themselves take arms, were very active in forcing the people into the late Rebellion.’ An association had been made by Sutherland farmers in General Stewart’s time to suppress sheep-stealing. He objects to the new social state which made this association necessary. Previously ‘crimes had been so few that, from 1747 to 1810, there was only one capital conviction for theft.’ This may have been so in Sutherland, and the MS. Letter already cited makes it probable. ‘The Mackays of Lord Reay’s country,’ though previously reckoned ‘the wickedest clan,’ now ‘abhor thieving.’ But ‘the common people who dwell along the East Coast are next to the Caithness people for poverty, slavery, and dwarfish stature, while the people further up the country towards Strathnaver’ (where Franck found them bleeding their cattle for food) ‘live better.’ A third of the Earl of Sutherland’s levy ‘are mean, despicable creatures.’ Thus one county showed very different conditions: however, like the Mackenzies, the Sutherland men ‘abhor thieving.’ Elsewhere in the Highlands, hangings for theft occupy a good deal of the old _Scots Magazine_. Many pretty men ‘died for the law,’ as every one knows.