been expelled from the Alps, to make room for flocks of sheep.' 'But while the law has given to the Swiss peasant a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird that it has extended this guarantee in the British empire, leaving the peasant in a precarious situation.' 'The clan--recognised at first by the captain, whom they followed in war and obeyed for their common advantage, as his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals, then as his farmers--he has come finally to regard as hired labourers, whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them.' Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalizing remedy along with it. Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by means for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance, in the history of the Irish massacre. But though the interior of the county was thus _improved_ into a desert, in which there are many thousands of sheep, but few human habitations, let it not be supposed by the reader that its general population, was in any degree lessened. So far was this from being the case, that the census of 1821 showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more than two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland exceeds, by a thousand, its population before the change. The county has not been depopulated--its population has been merely arranged after a new fashion. The late Duchess found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances;--she left it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering, that fringes the county on its eastern and western shores. And the law which enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The evil of a poor-law can be no longer averted from Scotland. However much we may dislike compulsory assessment for the support of our poor, it can be no longer avoided. Our aristocracy have been working hard for it during the whole of the present century, and a little longer; the disruption of the Scottish Church, as the last in a series of events, all of which have tended