property, must have the effect of spreading the knowledge of it all the more widely, and of rendering its results much more disastrous than they could have possibly been of themselves. In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of Sutherland, is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile. In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners, and old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat formidable,--sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in an unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the class who would be able in such circumstances to urge it with most effect. It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of the argument runs somewhat thus. Under the old Celtic tenures--the only tenures, be it remembered, through which the lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their lands--the _Klaan_, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of the soil: 'the whole of Sutherland,' says Sismondi, belonged to 'the men of Sutherland.' Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute monarch he was. 'He gave the different _tacks_ of land to his officers, or took them away from them, according as they showed themselves more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a military sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in the least the property of the clan itself;'--he was a chief, not a proprietor, and had 'no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of his kingdom.' 'Now, the Gaelic tenant,' continues the Frenchman, 'has never been conquered; nor did he forfeit, on any after occasion, the rights which he originally possessed;'--in point of right, he is still a co-proprietor with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law of property as it has existed among us, in even the Highlands, for the last century, and everywhere else for at least two centuries more, the view may seem extreme; not so, however, to a native of the Continent, in many parts of which prescription and custom are found ranged, not on the side of the chief, but on that of the vassal. 'Switzerland,' says Sismondi, 'which in so many respects resembles Scotland--in its lakes--its mountains--its climate--and the character, manners, and habits of its children--was likewise at the same period parcelled out among a small number of lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg, of Hapsburg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English laws, they would find themselves at the present day precisely in the condition in which the Earls of Sutherland were twenty years ago. Some of them would perhaps have had the same taste for _improvements_, and several republics would have