Considering the moral and material plight of the masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At Dalkeith he had written _A Plea for Temperance_, in which, while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the teetotallers down on him for that; and still more for a speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicating the working classes from the charge of drunkenness. The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, raising his glass, ‘the beaded bubbles winking at the brim,’ and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying grace!
For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general development of Christian life. He was not apt to quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like the mother of ‘wee Davie,’ in ‘acts _out of_ Parliament,’ Yet he could exclaim, ‘O selfish pride! O society, thou tyrant!’ and when his foot was on his native heath he was a regular Radical.
‘You don’t mean to say that you would turn away those people?’ asked Kate with astonishment.
‘What people do you mean?’ inquired M’Dougall.
‘I mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan--your small tenants there!’
‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’
‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’
‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, where I have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’
‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.