"Of course, they live most wretchedly. Potatoes are the usual food, for oatmeal is considered a luxury, to be reserved for high days and holidays, but even potatoes are not raised in sufficient abundance. The year's stock is generally exhausted before the succeeding crop is ripe, and the poor are then often in a most desperate condition, for the poor-law is a dead letter in the North of Scotland, and the want of a legal provision for the necessitous is but ill supplied by the spontaneous contributions of the land-owners."--_Ibid_. 76.
At the moment of writing this, the journals of the day furnish information that famine prevails in the Hebrides, and that "in the Isle of Skye alone there are 10,000 able-bodied persons at this time without work, without food, and without credit."
The condition of these poor people would certainly be much improved could they find some indulgent master who would purchase them at such prices as would make it to his interest to feed, clothe, and lodge them well in return for their labour.
In the days of Adam Smith about one-fifth of the surface of Scotland was supposed to be entailed, and he saw the disadvantages of the system to be so great that he denounced the system as being "founded upon the most absurd of all suppositions--the supposition that every successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth and all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation should be retained and regulated according to the fancy of those who died perhaps five hundred years ago." Instead of changing the system, and doing that which might tend to the establishment of greater freedom of trade in land, the movement has been in a contrary direction, and to such an extent that one-half of Scotland is now supposed to be entailed; and yet, singularly enough, this is the system advocated by Mr. McCulloch, a follower in the foot-steps of Adam Smith, as being the one calculated "to render all classes more industrious, and to augment at the same time the mass of wealth and the scale of enjoyment."
The effects of the system are seen in the enormous rents contracted to be paid for the use of small pieces of land at a distance from market, the failure in the payment of which makes the poor cultivator a mere slave to the proprietor. How the latter use their power, may be seen by the following extract from a Canadian journal of 1851:--
