“It is not easy to determine the number of persons employed in this way; but it may be safely affirmed that the horses, cows, sheep, and goats yearly stoln in that country are in value equall to £5,000; that the expences lost in the fruitless endeavours to recover them will not be less than £2,000; that the extraordinary expences of keeping herds and servants to look more narrowly after cattle on account of stealling, otherways not necessary, is £10,000. There is paid in _blackmail_ or _watch-money_, openly and privately, £5,000; and there is a yearly loss by understocking the grounds, by reason of theifts, of at least £15,000; which is, altogether, a loss to landlords and farmers in the Highlands of £37,000 sterling a year. But, besides, if we consider that at least one-half of these stollen effects quite perish, by reason that a part of them is buried under ground, the rest is rather devoured than eat, and so what would serve ten men in the ordinary way of living, swallowed up by two or three to put it soon out of the way, and that some part of it is destroyed in concealed parts when a discovery is suspected, we must allow that there is £2,500 as the value of the half of the stollen cattle, and £15,000 for the article of understock quite lost of the stock of the kingdom. “These last mischiefs occasions another, which is still worse, although intended as a remedy for them--that is, the engaging companys of men, and keeping them in pay to prevent these thiefts and depredations. As the government neglect the country, and don’t protect the subjects in the possession of their property, they have been forced into this method for their own security, though at a charge little less than the land-tax. The person chosen to command this _watch_, as it is called, is commonly one deeply concerned in the theifts himself, or at least that hath been in correspondence with the thieves, and frequently who hath occasioned thiefts, in order to make this watch, by which he gains considerably, necessary. The people employed travell through the country armed, night and day, under pretence of enquiring after stollen cattle, and by this means know the situation and circumstances of the whole country. And as the people thus employed are the very rogues that do these mischiefs, so one-half of them are continued in their former bussiness of stealling that the busieness of the other half may be necessary in recovering.”[1]