the Highlands of Scotland, which from its peculiar nature and conformation, not only prevented the adoption of any other mode of life, but at the same time prescribed the division of the people into separate families or clans. The other system, being of a defensive character, was necessary to a population occupying a fertile but open country, possessing only a rude notion of agriculture, and exposed on all sides to aggressions on the part of neighbours or enemies. But the common tendency of both was to obstruct the administration of justice, nurse habits of lawless violence, exclude the cultivation of the arts of peace, and generally to impede the progress of improvement; and hence neither was compatible with the prosperity of a civilised nation, where the liberty of the subject required protection, and the security of property demanded an equal administration of justice. The peculiarities of clanship are nowhere better described than in Burt’s _Letters from an Officer of Engineers to his Friend in London_.[121] “The Highlanders,” he says, “are divided into tribes or clans, under chiefs or chieftains, and each clan is again divided into branches from the main stock, who have chieftains over them. These are subdivided into smaller branches of fifty or sixty men, who deduce their original from their particular chieftains, and rely upon them as their more immediate protectors and defenders. The ordinary Highlanders esteem it the most sublime degree of virtue to love their chief and pay him a blind obedience, although it be in opposition to the government. Next to this love of their chief is that of the particular branch whence they sprang; and, in a third degree, to those of the whole clan or name, whom they will assist, right or wrong, against those of any other tribe with which they are at variance. They likewise owe good-will to such clans as they esteem to be their particular well-wishers. And, lastly, they have an adherence to one another as Highlanders in opposition to the people of the low country, whom they despise as inferior to them in courage, and believe they have a right to plunder them whenever it is in their power. This last arises from a tradition that the Lowlands, in old times, were the possessions of their ancestors.