solid, vigorous, useful kind of moral standard;' and he goes on to show that this morality will have a poetic side, will affect the imagination and the heart by becoming idealised, and issuing in enthusiasm as well as conviction. O upright Judge! O most learned Judge!

I ask no more than this. The Religion of Humanity means to me this solid, vigorous, useful moral standard, based on the belief that sincere and devoted affection is the chief pleasure of life, cultivated and idealised till it produces enthusiasm. Only I insist that it will need the whole force of education through life, all the resources which engender habits, stir the imagination, and kindle self-devotion, in order to keep this spirit alive in the masses of mankind. The cultivated, the thoughtful, and the well-to-do can nourish this solid morality in a cool, self-contained, sub-cynical way. But to soften and purify the masses of mankind we shall need all the passion and faith which are truly dignified by the name of religion-religious respect, religious sense of duty, religious belief in something vastly nobler and stronger than self. They will find this in the mighty tale of human civilisation. They will never find it in the philosopher's hypothesis of an Infinite Unknowable substratum, which cannot be presented in terms of human consciousness,' of which we can know nothing and can conceive nothing. Nor do I think they will ever find it in the common-sense maxim that this is a very comfortable world for the prudent, the lucky, and the strong.'

6

FREDERIC HARRISON.

POSTSCRIPT.

I have found no space to notice Mr. Wilfrid Ward and some of my other critics. I do not find that Mr. Ward has added much to the controversy except the rather mess-room remark that Mr. Spencer and myself are both mad. I am the less called on to examine his views, inasmuch as his own religious standpoint, I believe, is Catholicism in its most Ultramontane form-the Syllabus and the Papacy. But in whatever form he may care to present it, Catholicism is not, in my opinion, within the field of serious religious philosophy. And, if the thinking world is not yet ready to accept mine, it has so long ago decided to reject his, that the question need hardly be revived in the Nineteenth Century.

To all that he and others have said, as to the same difficulties and weaknesses confronting the idea of Humanity as meet that of the Unknowable, I could have little trouble in showing, that as we claim for Humanity nothing absolute, nothing unreal, and nothing ecstatic, no such difficulties arise. It is a strength and a comfort to all, whether weak, suffering, or bereaved, to feel that the whole sum of human effort in the past, as in the present, is steadily working, on the whole, to lessen the sum of misery, to help the fatherless and the widow, to assuage sickness, and to comfort the lonely. This is a real and solid encouragement, proved by all the facts of progressive civilisation. If it is not the comfort offered by promises of ecstatic bliss, and supernatural intervention, it has the merit of being true and humane; not egoist and untrue. If it is not enough, it is at least all that men and women on earth have. Resignation and peace will be theirs when we have taught them habitually to know that it is all-when the promises of the churches are known to be false, and the hopes of the superstitious are felt to be dreams. -F. H.

STORM-CLOUDS IN THE HIGHLANDS.

"If it were not that the people themselves are essentially a good, and on the whole a sensible, people, the condition of Skye just now would be that of simple anarchy.' Such was the remark made to me a few days ago by one of the largest factors in the island.

So far as disputes affecting land are concerned, public law and authority do not exist in Skye. The sheriff's officers, for instance, have written formally to say that they decline to serve further summonses upon the crofter population unless supported by troops. Unarmed police, they aver, would be useless, and from the executive officials of the county I learn that the number of soldiers they ask for as necessary to re-establish public authority in Skye is four hundred. Over half a dozen cases of undoubted deforcement and assault committed upon officers of the Crown while in the execution of their duty have been allowed to remain unpunished, and although duly reported to the central Government, the necessary permission to prosecute on behalf of the Crown has not been accorded. The inability of the local authorities to effect the arrest of the offenders is known, but the Government apparently shrink from sanctioning the employment of troops.

Thus, to all intents and purposes, immunity from punishment for agrarian offences has been accorded to the peasant population of the Highlands, and the strongest possible hint is given to them that, if they wish their grievances attended to, they must ring louder that chapel bell' whose notes are crime, intimidation, and lawlessness, but whose tolling has done so much for their Celtic cousins in Ireland.

But how is it that the people refuse to accept the invitation thus held out to them? How is it that Skye and the Highlands generally do not lapse into that state of anarchy which usually elsewhere is the result of a failure to enforce the public laws, or that the peasants continue in almost all districts to pay their rents as best they can, even although they see their landlords cannot command the power to secure collection? They know that the cry for a public inquiry as to their condition was persistently disregarded until the heads of half a hundred policemen were broken in Skye. Then only the Royal Commission

was ordered to assemble. So how is it that now, when the Commission has done its work, and there seems no prospect of any result ensuing, the people do not again take the law into their own hands? Why, for instance, do they not reoccupy the lands of which their race only a generation ago were dispossessed, and disperse the deer and the sheep to make room for which their own fathers and grandfathers were dispersed?

In one or two remote districts that, although on a small scale, has actually been done, and no retribution has overtaken the offenders. Government refuse to sanction the armed force that alone could secure their arrest.

But if there has been no general agrarian movement such as that which answered so well in Ireland, it is because the people, as the Skye factor said, are a good and a sensible people, who prefer to abide by the laws under which they live, and who hope even yet that their wrongs may be redressed by peaceable and constitutional methods.

The members of the Royal Commission, disagreeing almost on every other point, were at least unanimous on this—that amongst the Highland population very great grievances do most assuredly exist, grievances which, as a matter of public policy, if not of public justice, require immediate removal. Of the Highland peasant of the present time they are obliged to testify that through past evictions he has been confined within narrow limits, sometimes on inferior and exhausted soils; that he is subject to arbitrary augmentations of money rent; that his habitation is usually of a character which would almost imply physical and moral degradation in the eyes of those who do not know how much decency, courtesy, virtue, and even mental refinement, survive amidst the sordid surroundings of a Highland hovel; that he suffers from insecurity of tenure, want of compensation for improvements, high rents, defective communication, withdrawal of the soil for the purposes of sport;' and so on, in a catalogue of wrongs and oppressions compared with which the grievances of the Irish tenant, even in his worst days, sink into insignificance. But with that catalogue more than confirmed by the evidence, and with the examples of Ireland and Skye before them, is it wise to trust too much to the forbearance of the people, or to hope that their goodness will continue to deter them from adopting a course which, if less in accord with their law-abiding predilections, past experience has proved to possess greater probabilities of success?

The Report of the Royal Commission was very coldly received by Parliament, by Government, and by the English press. The latter in most cases even treated its recommendations with derision; the leading articles, in almost every instance, being written by gentlemen who evidently had not taken the trouble to read the

document they criticised. The leading journal,' while not attempting to deny the case made out for the Highlanders, or the hardships under which they labour, dismissed the subject by pointing out that legislation was necessary in Ireland because there we were threatened with civil war, whereas no such danger existed in the Highlands. In other words, until the crofters of Scotland adopt the lines of Irish agitation there can be no hope of relief for them! And so in beginning this article I am induced, as the most likely method of insuring the attention of Englishmen, to quote the remark of the factor-that anarchy threatens Skye and to refer to the Procurator Fiscal's requisition for four hundred troops for that island. If we have not civil war, the appeal for half a battalion to arrest six men in Glendale is at least a promising beginning.

But, notwithstanding the goodness and the sense of the people, and although as yet the agitation has not assumed a very active form, it is evident to all who take the trouble to look below the surface of Highland politics that the existing condition of things cannot continue. At present the crofters are having a good season. The sea and the land are both yielding bountiful harvests, which the people are busily engaged in gathering; but with the first breath of adversity the fight between the occupants and the legal owners of the land will assuredly be renewed-a fight we must all hope that will not lead to blood once more being shed on the Highland hills. Yet that beyond doubt is a distinctly possible contingency-some of the Skye officials already look upon it almost as a necessity-and it accordingly behoves us Highlandmen to see that our English fellowsubjects shall clearly comprehend the questions at issue, which at present it is to be regretted not one in a thousand of them do. We who ask for relief for our suffering fellow-countrymen cannot believe, if the case for them was fairly understood, if the sad although in many respects glorious history of our race since the days of Culloden were generally known to the generous English public, that legislation would long be delayed, or that the mere announcement of the Ministry, without further promise of redress, that the condition of the Highlands was having their attention,' would be accepted as sufficient.

True, we have had the Royal Commission; but unfortunately their work has been presented in cumbersome form, and the value of their Report impaired by the dissent of one or more members from the more important of its recommendations. They have failed utterly to present some simple practicable scheme of reform that all could understand, and indeed have added complication, instead of throwing light on that portion of their subject. On the other hand, the clear testimony they have given, and the note of warning they sound as to the danger to the nation at large of the present social condition of the Highlands, more than justifies the

trouble and expense that have been expended on their tour. So far as the crofters themselves are concerned, the result of the Commission's labours would almost justify resistance to the existing land laws, unless these be promptly reformed. I shall attempt in this paper to show in brief fashion how that dangerous social condition has been developed; to explain the salient features of the Highland land difficulty as it now presents itself and to indicate, if possible, the direction in which reform is most likely to be effective, and how it may be accomplished without undue interference with the rights of property.

Much of what I have to say with regard to the history of the land difficulty has already appeared in print in one form or another; but then the whole has been surrounded with so many confusing details and contradictory assertions having little or no bearing on the real questions at issue, except to obscure them, that I make no excuse for going over old ground. The figures, the examples, and descriptive matter which I shall submit were gathered during a visit paid to the Highlands some time ago in a journalistic capacity, and again the other day when I traversed the country collecting notes for the present article.

Few Englishmen even now seem to be aware, notwithstanding all that has been written on the subject, that not very long ago, in many instances within the memory of living men, most of the Highland counties were the scene of evictions on a wholesale scale, compared with which the forced emigration of the Irish peasantry sinks into insignificance. Entire communities, from the patriarch of two generations down to the newly-born babe, were banished en bloc to Canada, and thrown there on their own resources to establish new homes or to starve, as the case might be. And although the people, except in a few cases, submitted to expatriation quietly, if unwillingly, where they did manifest any reluctance to accept their fate their houses were burned down over their heads, and they themselves were turned adrift on the bleak hillsides and on the wild and inhospitable seashores of that northern region to seek subsistence as best they could. Until 1745, the year of Culloden, the clan system of land tenure prevailed in the Highlands, under which the ground belonged not to the chief alone, but to the community. A clansman could not be dispossessed of his holding by his chief. After 1745, however, the English system was introduced. The clans that had remained loyal to the Crown, as well as those that had thrown in their lot with Prince Charles, had their lands practically confiscated. The Highland chiefs, in short, were assimilated in position to English landlords. They were by the central government invested with the fee simple of the land which was once held by the laird and the clansmen in common, and so a great wrong, amounting to a national crime, was done to the Highland population.