many points, both schools agree in holding that the progress of civilisation, broadly speaking, is characterised by the gradual supplanting of tribal or communal customs by individual ownership. Bentham and his followers based their Radicalism upon Individualism. Their ideal state was one in which every man would be at liberty to acquire property, and would be protected in his possession of it. How far modern Liberalism has departed from Philosophic Radicalism is obvious to the most superficial student of politics. For Bentham's fundamental principle of Security, modern Liberals, taking a retrograde step, have readopted the French Revolution policy of Equality. In other words, the ideal of modern Liberalism is not the Individualism of Bentham and the Evolutionists, but the Communism of Rousseau and the Revolutionists. For the moment property in land is made to bear the brunt of the attack. The landowner is held up to scorn and ridicule as a man who toils not neither does he spin, a man who lives in luxurious idleness on what is called the unearned increment, the holder of a monopoly obtained by the sweated labour of his fellows. Liberal legislators declare that the landowner must be made to disgorge his ill-gotten gains, all unconscious of the fact that they are reproducing the false political philosophy which brought about the French Revolution. The only difference is that the new gospel of spoliation is preached in the - name of Henry George instead of Rousseau: the unearned increment has taken the place of the Social Compact. As The only effective way of dealing with this spurious gospel is to bring it to the test of hard facts. This can well be done by calling attention to a forgotten chapter in Scottish history, a chapter the study of which shows conclusively that in Scotland landowners, so far from being useless members of society, were benefactors of their time, pioneers in the national development. In his day Rousseau, in his ignorance of history, sought to bring back an imaginary state of Nature when "wild in woods the noble savage ran." In like ignorance of history modern Liberals fancy an imaginary state of social bliss when all things will be held in common. regards land, this delusion has been fostered by the famous pronouncement of Ricardo that rent is the payment made by the cultivator to the owner for the original and indestructible powers of the earth these powers being quietly assumed to be inherent. Following on this we have J. S. Mill declaring "that the earth is the inheritance of the human race, and a large portion of that race has been disinherited." With such high-sounding phrases sounding in his ears, it is easy to understand how the modern Radical entirely misreads the history of land in Scotland. When political agitators read of kings conveying miles upon miles of land to favourite nobles, they see in the statement evidence of the disinheriting process mentioned by Mill, and with the help of Ricardo they see the beginning of the process by which in the hands of a few aristocrats the land of the country was converted into a colossal rentproducing machine. Political agitators do not stop to inquire into the condition of the land at that time, they simply see the beginning of a huge monopoly, the appropriation of the gifts of Nature by Court favourites and their descendants. What, then, was the condition of the land in those early days? "Everywhere in Scotland," we are told, "the largest part of the country was covered with natural forests, and with dense scrubby woods, which are even more difficult to clear and eradicate; whilst elsewhere little but moors and bogs varied the surface under conditions more intractable for agricultural operations." What could the people of whom Mill speaks so considerately do with an inheritance like that? In the face of historical fact the notion that the land was filched from the people by military force and cunning is the wildest of dreams. History shows plainly that the first step on the road to agricultural progress was made under the guidance of landowners. How great has been their influence can best be realised by recalling the splendid work they did in the latter half of the eighteenth century in laying the foundations of agricultural prosperity in Scotland. the Owing to the distracted state of the country in consequence of wars and internal strife, Scotland at the opening of the eighteenth century was in deplorable condition. Agriculture was at a low ebb. Farmers were quite unable to bear up against bad seasons, and famines were frequent, and when the barbarous methods of agriculture are considered the explanation of the widespread misery is not far to seek. The land as regards cultivation was all but neglected, most prolific products being weeds, moss, and thistles. The grain mostly sown was the very poorest, namely, gray oats, which "at its best only gave an increase of three seeds for one." Enclosures were unknown, and when the harvest was over the cattle wandered all over the land, which became a dirty, dreary common. The horses and oxen, being fed in winter on straw or boiled chaff, were so weak and emaciated that when yoked to the plough in spring they helplessly fell into bogs and furrows. The methods of tillage were primitive in the extreme, and the harrows were of a kind described by Lord Kames "as more fit to raise laughter than to raise soil." But the most serious obstacle to progress was the system of "runrig.' Under this system the fields were divided into separate ridges which were cultivated by different tenants. A farm of the rent of £50 might have eighteen tenants, and by auction or by lot the ridges, or "rigs" as they were called, were divided among them yearly. As the operations of ploughing and sowing were conducted on the collective principle, the result was endless friction and disputes. If one tenant ventured to cultivate a neglected patch he was denounced by the others. All individual energy was discountenanced, with the consequence that the land continued in a state of neglect. Yet, in spite of its absurdity, we are told the people were so devoted to the "runrig" that if twenty fields were allotted to twenty farmers, they would rather have a twentieth share in twenty fields than have one field each to himself. With land uncleared, undrained, unmanured, unenclosed, and unlimed, held on short leases and worked on the 66 runrig" method, is it wonderful that agriculture in Scotland was totally unable to support the people, and that in bad seasons famine was rampant? About the middle of the eighteenth century an era of reform was inaugurated. The system of long leases came into vogue. It was held that without security no progress was possible. Farms were let to substantial tenants, who came under agreement with a lease of nineteen years to carry out intelligent modes of agriculture with regard to liming, ploughing, sowing, the due rotation of crops, &c. The fields were enclosed, "runrig" abolished, and the latest improvements in farm implements adopted. The pioneers in the reform move ment were the landowners. The people, of course, had not the necessary capital, but what was more, they were not only devoid of initiative, but had no relish for improvement; indeed in some places they broke out in revolt against the new system of enclosures, and in bands went forth to break down the dykes and to mutilate the cattle of those who favoured the new ways. Perusal of the Reports to the Board of Agriculture in 1794-95 shows that improvement schemes were heartily gone into by almost all the great Scottish landowners. In the north, the family of the Duke of Gordon is remembered as the beginners of the work, stimulated, as it is said, so early as 1706 by an Englishwoman, daughter of the Earl of Peterborough, who was himself a great improver in the South. In Ayrshire, the Earl of Eglinton takes a high rank among the most energetic improvers of the country. In East Lothian the Haddington family were eminent; while the Tweeddales also remind us of those earlier Hays who were the improving tacksmen under the Abotts of Scone in 1312. In Fife the very ancient title of Rothes acquired a new eminence in the arts of peace. In Banff, an Earl of Findlater receives special honour from all contemporary accounts for his exertions both in agriculture and manufacturing industry. From the great county of Aberdeen, which terribly desolated by the years of famine at the close of the been previous century, and a large area of which had actually been abandoned and thrown out of cultivation, we are told that to enumerate all those to whom its recovery and the subsequent advance were due it would be necessary to give a complete list of all the gentlemen in the county.1 The landowners had the reward of their reforming zeal in the shape of largely increased rentals. One case is mentioned of an estate which in 1786 had a rental of £600, and twenty-five years later was sold for £100,000. If the theory originated by Ricardo, and propounded by Mill and Henry George, is sound, namely, that landowners in the shape of unearned increment grow rich at the expense of the country, we should expect to find the tenants of those days in a worse plight than ever. Instead, we find that increased rents were made possible by the increased profits of the farmers. In utter contradiction to the Ricardian and Georgian theories, wages, instead of being pushed to starvation-point by the rise in rents, were higher than in the period of low rents. In the words of the author of that valuable work, 'Social Life in Scotland in the Eighteenth Century' "The increase of population, the growth of towns in which the chief industries were centred, caused greater demand for provisions of all kinds, and the tenants easily requited themselves for bigger rents by bigger prices. Meanwhile the peasantry shared in the general prosperity, and by 1790 their earnings were exactly double what they had been in the middle of the century." The record of the work done for Scotland by landowners quite justifies the remarks of the Earl of Erroll in his recent letter to 'The Times' "In Scotland almost all the improvements to which the land owes its fertility to-day have been introduced by the landlords. A hundred years ago Scotland, especially the north-eastern portion, was a miserably culture was primitive in the extreme. poor country, and the system of agriThe poor holder scratched the ground, sowed one white crop after another, and when he had taken all the good out of it grew thistles. Since that time it is the landlords who have built and rebuilt the farms. They have put millions into drainage, and have turned bogs and morasses into smiling and productive valleys. All this has been done by landlords' capital, for which they considered themselves lucky if they got 24 per cent, and now they are told they have rendered no service to the community." In the words of the late Duke of Argyll "Everywhere in Scotland, on all the slopes of all the hills, on many of the great plains which were swamps and peat morass on every variety of surface which was covered with tangled thickets of alder, and birch, and oak, over large areas which had before been cultivated in spots and patches, the work of agriculture in Scotland has been the work of laborious and costly reclamation. . . . It was objected at the time to such improvements that they cost many times more than the Fee Simple' of the land; that other land of much greater extent and of better quality might be bought for less than quarter, often for less than a tenth part of the enormous outlay thus incurred. 1 Scotland as it Was and Is, vol. ii. pp. 182, 183. And all this was true. Such land was made, not merely inherited or bought. It was redeemed from absolute waste, and rendered contributory for the first time to the sustenance of man." Corroborative of the great outlay of landowners on their estates is a detailed statement given by the Duke in 'The Nineteenth Century' for August 1885, in which he says: "All agricultural improvement has been the work of little more than one hundred and forty years,that is to say, it began to be systematically pursued since the close of the Civil Wars in 1745. There was no change whatever then made in the farms, or in the essential conditions of tenure. The system of leases (generally for terms of nineteen or twenty-one years) had already been established for more than four centuries; and at each renewal since about 1720 the owners have been making both great outlays themselves, and also special stipulations with their tenants, all tending to substitute for ancient and semi-barbarous practices the newest and most improved methods of the time. Under this system no country in the world has ever made such rapid progress. Glens have been drained, bogs have been reclaimed, 'shaggy woods' have been grubbed up, and green crops and cereals have climbed the sides of innumerable hills. work has been essentially a work of reclamation, and where it has not been so literally-where the land had been long under some kind of cultivation-the work has been so heavy in buildings, in new drainage, and in new fencing, that it has amounted to reclamation. It has been a work of conquest over Nature in continuous operation. My own observation and experience are that this process was never in more active operation than during the last fifty years, and that ever since the seasons of agricultural depression began, the owners of land, instead of having been discouraged, have often dis The bursed more largely than ever on improvements. With these few words of preface I will give as examples the facts connected with the renewal of nine leases on one property in the West of Scotland, all of them being cases which have occurred since 1880. I give in each case (1st), the rent during the former lease; (2nd), the rent agreed under new lease; (3rd), total outlay by proprietor on buildings, drainage, and fencing; (4th), the number of years' rent thus sunk as fixed capital. Farm No. 1.-Former rent, £247. New rent, £207. Total outlay, New rent, £300. Total outlay, £2874. 9 years' rent. Farm No. 7.-Former rent, £100. New rent, £100. Total outlay, £1019. 10 years' rent. Farm No. 8.-Former rent, £180. New rent, £175. Total outlay, £2469. 14 years' rent. Farm No. 9.-Former rent, £161. New rent, £177. Total outlay, £2921. Above 16 years' rent." These figures speak for themselves. When regard is had to these highly suggestive statistics, how absurd is seen to be the remark of Mill that "the landowners grow richer, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking, or economising." Further, when regard is had to the great expenditure upon the land, which is being more and more & manufactured article, how preposterous is |