General Stewart, objecting to the new farmers’ association, seems not to have observed that blackmail and ‘Highland Watches’ were old-fashioned associations for protecting property.’ Complaints are made by him of ‘cutting down farms into lots,’ as if the old Chiefs had not infinitely subdivided the soil.[193] The old extreme poverty is left out of notice by General Stewart, with the old tippling, loafing, ‘sorning,’ thieving, ‘thigging’ habits. Much land could be and was cultivated, he says, which is now pasture, the harvest only failing ‘in cold and wet autumns.’[194] These not being unknown in the Highlands, but, on the other hand, very common, famines followed often, notably in 1782. If the Lowlanders, the English, and the Anglified Highlanders, like Culloden, paint too gloomy a picture of the good old times, General Stewart may be regarded as erring in the opposite direction. His charge against the new Chiefs and landlords is the callous hurry with which they seized their pecuniary advantage, ‘which proved ruinous to their ancient tenants.’[195] This is also Scott’s opinion, in his _Quarterly Review_ article of 1816. He, too, a Tory of the Tories, condemns the heartless greed of evicting landlords.[196] General Stewart records cases of delicate consideration and honourable sagacity on the side of the landlords. But often we find either a well-meaning hurry to make sweeping ‘improvements,’ and benefit people in a way they detest and do not understand (as by giving them leases), or a mere hasty desire to save such a ruined estate as war had left to Glengarry, by raising rents, causing, with the aid of frequent famine years, wholesale emigration. This policy was, indeed, far unlike what Burt reports: ‘the poverty of the tenants has rendered it customary for the Chief, or Laird, to free some of them every year from all arrears of rent; this is supposed, upon an average, to be about one year in five of the whole estate.’ These habits vanished with the change in the Highlands; the old ‘arts of popularity’ were no longer practised by the Chiefs: clan affection became clan hatred. If we may believe a tithe of our Whig or Lowland information, it should have done so long before 1745. Cattle, sheep, red-deer, grouse, now occupy the place of the swords of the North: the banker, brewer, or upholsterer shoots the Chiefs game, or misses it.