scarce, and the people have been thirled to the landlords and the tacksmen, and enslaved by the truck system.

.

It thus happens that a Shetland family may be industrious in all its branches-farming, and fishing, and knitting to the best of their ability-and yet it will be constantly behindhand, dependent upon their superior, and never perhaps handling a pound note from year's end to year's end. It has been said that the very boys, when they begin to work for wages, get no money, but are supplied with clothes, including specially a coat to go to church in ; and thus they get very early into the mer... chant's books, so that perhaps it is not much of an exaggeration to say that a Shetlander is under truck from his cradle to his coffin.'1

The prevailing methods of cultivation have, consequently, been of a hand-to-mouth character. In many places the soil has been stripped off, leaving the rock bare and the land permanently barren. The 'run-rig' system, which has not yet disappeared, still characterises the style of agriculture. Yet the soil is of a variable and often improvable quality, and the climate is mild. There is only one-tenth, however, of the total area cultivated; so that the farmer of thirteen acres of arable land, which is the average size of farms, possesses, or possessed till lately, nearly ten times that area of 'scathold,' or waste land, upon which his domestic, or rather wild, animals range at large during the most part of the year.2

The Orkney Islands possess a better soil, often a rich clay land; and within the last twenty-five years a great improvement has been effected in the condition of these islands from the introduction of new proprietors with

1 Opening Address of the President of Section F (Economic Science and Statistics) of the British Association for the Advancement of Scieuce, August, 1871, by Lord Neaves, one of the Lords of Session.

2 See a paper On the Agriculture of the Islands of Shetland, by Henry Evershed, in the Highland and Agricultural Society's Journal, vol. vi. 1874.

capital, some of whom occupy and farm their own estates. The great majority (2,360 out of 3,668) of the farmers are, or were till very lately, tenants-at-will, holding their farms from year to year at a rental under 10l.; and among the various hindrances to the progress of agriculture, Mr. Thomas Farral mentions six-three of which are want of capital, want of leases and insecurity of tenure, and lack of compensation for unexhausted improvements. That opportunity of improvement which the possession or the secure tenure of the soil would give to the inhabitants, therefore, has never been created, and is very far indeed from being realised, and the most improvident systems still hold their ground. Nineteen years' leases, indeed, have been, within a few years back, introduced into Orkney by Colonel Balfour, which may possibly in time create a greater desire for agricultural improvement amongst the people; but, as yet, these leases appear to be confined to the larger farmers. Where, however, the time of the men is necessarily passed more or less at sea, the labours of agriculture must be entrusted in some measure to the women; and what appears to be required is the institution of small landed properties, by which the trade of fishing would contribute to assist that of agriculture by supplying funds, while the land would form a secure and most trusted bank; a conjunction. similar in character to many which exist, and which, we shall see further on, have produced populations the most. industrious, thrifty, and well-doing in the world.

But we shall revert to our examination of the condition of the population of the outlying districts of Scotland. In the insular portions of Ross and Cromarty, the births were to the deaths, in 1873, as 2.312 to 1, and the rate of excess of births over deaths to the population was 184 per cent., while the population had increased only from 21,056 to 23,483 in the years between the latter two

censuses- -a rate little more than half as great as that due to the natural increase.

In the insular part of Inverness, again, eight out of nineteen islands could boast of a birth rate exceeding the death rate as 2 to 1, yet the population had decreased from 1861 to 1871 respectively from 14,335 to 13,586; and the total population of the nineteen islands had decreased, in the same period, from 36,068 to 34,646.

Upon the mainland we find that the northern counties are constantly losing numbers, notwithstanding a large natural rate of increase, and in the five northern counties there are 113 females to every 100 males.

In the midland counties, and more particularly in the iron and coal districts, the numbers of inhabitants have rapidly increased, and the disproportion between the numbers of the sexes is less than it is for the whole of England. Thus in Renfrew and Lanark there were found to be, in 1871, respectively only 681 and 691 per cent. of the Scotchmen native born.

The result of such an extraordinary increase to the wealth and population of the central districts of Scotland, is manifested in the condition of agriculture in these regions. Farmers having nineteen years' leases partake, during a period of extraordinary manufacturing, mining, or mercantile prosperity, of the benefits which are always possessed by proprietary cultivators, for they then find that portion of the increased value of the land, derived through the increased prices of its productions, is reaped by them during the currency of their leases. The consequence is that they do not, at any rate during the early part of their leases, stint their farms. They supply to the utmost extent of their resources those constituents to the fields and to the live stock, and even sometimes to those permanent improvements of the property from which they can hope to derive nothing after the termination of their

leases, abundant capital, and the result of greatly increased crops and much improved cattle necessarily follows. This improvement and increased supply is a mutual benefit, for the community gains by the increased supply of abundant and cheap food, and the farmer profits by his improvements, in having for a defined term an increased produce to dispose of, which is gained at a relatively less cost where the rent of land and buildings is a sum common to any amount, and the manure and feeding stuffs are greatly less costly than the surplus produce they afford.

We therefore find that in the Lothians and in Fife, for example, the produce of the land has increased in a considerably greater ratio than it has in England during the last twenty-five years. In East Lothian the produce of wheat now is estimated to be from 35 to 40 bushels per acre, of barley from 48 to 56, and of oats from 56 to 64. In Fife, again, the average yield of wheat per acre is estimated to be from 28 to 52 bushels, that of barley from 32 to 64, and that of oats from 36 to 72, the heavier crops being produced on the richer lands which border on the sea. These rates, when compared with those estimated officially in 1854-55, show an increase respectively on the average of from 20 to 30 per cent. for the first county, and from 30 to 50 per cent. for the second.1 During the period referred to the soil has been drained, and scientific farming has become general.

A complete contrast to the social and material condition of Britain generally, and more particularly of the rural parts of it, exists in the Channel Islands. In Jersey and Guernsey we find that the cultivators are generally the proprietors of the soil, and everyone who has visited

1 Compare results given in papers on the Agriculture of East Lothian, in Transactions of the Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland for 1873, and on the Agriculture of Fife in the same Journal for 1876, with the results of official estimate given in the Journal of Agriculture for January, 1856.

these thriving and luxuriant islands can testify to the gratifying aspect of solid comfort which everywhere meets the eye. Of the latter island, Mr. Wm. Thomas Thornton says: In thirty-nine years population had increased fifty-eight per cent., while wealth had increased one hundred and seventeen per cent. It should be added that the largest augmentation of property had taken place in the country parishes, while two-thirds of the increased number of inhabitants belonged to the town; and it, moreover, seems probable that the increase of population, both in town and country, was produced principally by immigration, for at the census of 1841 the number of inhabitants not natives was not less than 6,517, equal to the whole addition made to the population since the year 1818, when settlers from Great Britain first began to resort to the Channel Islands. If no other example could be given, this alone might be accepted as a decisive proof that peasant proprietorship has no tendency to create a redundant and poor agrarian population, but is rather calculated to make each succeeding generation wealthier than that which immediately preceded it.'1

Since the above was written, if further decisive proof were required, it is afforded by the returns of the Registrar-General, for we find that the ratio of births to deaths in Guernsey has declined from 130'5 per cent. in the five years ending 1865 to 100 per cent., or equality, in the four years ending 1874. In Jersey the ratio of births to deaths is also diminishing, and it is at present 1217 per cent. The value of the diminutions in the ratio of births to deaths becomes the more apparent when we take into account the very important fact that during the last twenty-five years the death rate has declined six per cent. in both islands.

1 A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, by William Thomas Thornton, C.B., New Edition, London, 1874, pp. 101-2.