fences, arterial, subsoil, and surface drainage. To these objects he contributes in various degrees by co-operative labour. In the case of the township, which here represents the individual farmer, the Report does not propose any claim for buildings of any sort, field fences, or subsoil or surface drains, while the prescribed extent of co-operation on the part of the township is much larger than that which is commonly granted in the case of the farmer. It may be objected that when outlay for improvements is made on a farm in the course of a current lease, an increase of rent is given representing interest on the sum expended, and that in all cases the arrangement is a free covenant between the contracting parties, while in the case of the township no interest is stipulated for, and the outlay is imposed on the landlord in conjunction with the tenant. The difference is more theoretical than practical. In these days the increased rental payable by the farmer for improvements is often absorbed by remissions, or if not it vanishes altogether at the expiration of the lease, while the freedom of contract between the two parties is more apparent than real, for the proprietor is now virtually at the mercy of the tenant. Although in the case of the township the proprietor is constrained to perform certain duties, they are moderate and equitable, and he is constrained to do nothing unless his people help him. It is idle to speak of the Highland crofters as free agents, competent to shape their own fortunes, uncounselled and unaided. The farmer is often a free agent, a capitalist, a stranger, who brings his money, his intelligence, and his labour voluntarily to a selected market; the crofter is as much the accident of nature and of time as the heath and rocks upon his mountain, or as the seaweed that drifts upon his shore. The man who inherits a Highland estate inherits the people and the obligations attached to them; the man who purchases a Highland estate purchases the people, subject to like conditions. Should the claim of the township to exact improvements be admitted, the danger is not that the proprietor would be compelled to do too much, but that he would not be asked to do enough.

When it is alleged that the recognition of the township stereotypes' or perpetuates a bad form of tenure, the argument implies either that the proposals of the Report countenance a return to the run-rig' system of arable cultivation, which means a redistribution of the soil at stated intervals among the township occupiers, or it implies that the system of common pasture is a bad form of tenure, or both these inferences. No one who reads the Report can entertain the first hypothesis for a moment. The Report assumes from first to last that the repartition of the township arable ground into permanent separate lots is the basis of all improvement; it contains specific provisions for the creation of durable divisions between the holdings and for long improving leases accessible to individual tenants. As far as arable cultivation is concerned, the suggestions of the Report aim

at the effacement of the last traces of communal tenure, which still exist in many places in the form of the common use of the arable area as grazing ground when the crop is secured. But the Report does not affirm, and I do not myself believe, that the use of wild mountain areas as common pasture is a bad tenure in relation to the very peculiar conditions of land and people on the western coast, in the Hebrides, and on the Long Island. In these regions the quality of the pasture is so poor that an immense superficies must be appropriated to a township, in order to secure to the several occupiers a substantial proportion of live stock. To divide the common pasture by fences into separate parcels, appropriated for summer or for winter use, would be absolutely impracticable, both in respect to expense and to the irregularities of the ground with which you have to deal. If the occupiers are to have any pasture it must be common hill pasture, and if they are to have no pasture they must cease to exist as occupiers of land, for the pastoral element is the progressive one in the crofters' living, the grain crop being little more than auxiliary to the support of cattle.

The last objection which I have to confront is one which proceeds from the crofters' side. The recognition, expansion, and improvement of the township, it is said, do not give any security to the individual occupier. The land is guarded for the people while they are there, but the people could be driven from the land one after another till all the crofts were merged in a single holding. The security of the township ought to be supplemented by the security of the croft. This objection is logically valid, and it opens a large question. Is it or is it not expedient in the interest of the crofters and of the country at large to give an absolute unconditional fixity of tenure to all the small occupiers of land in their present holdings? For my part I cannot think that it is. I believe that such a measure would have many fatal results. It would fix the people to the soil, discourage enterprise, industry, emigration, migration, and the consolidation of small holdings, facilitate subdivision and squatting, and deprive the proprietor of the exercise of all authority and of many incentives to beneficence. Unconditional fixity of tenure could hardly be granted without official rents and the faculty of selling the improvements and goodwill of the tenancy in the open market, innovations which would aggravate the evils enumerated above. Under these impressions the Commissioners have recommended security of tenure in a modified form, which has an ancient statutory sanction, and which is conformable to the custom of the country, in the shape of an 'improving lease,' under which competent occupiers would have a right to claim the tenure of the holding for thirty years at a valuation-rent, with obligations to improve, and with compensation for improvements. If, however, the contingency of the clearance of the township must be contemplated by legislation, it might be practically prevented by VOL. XVII.-No. 97.

I I

prohibiting the creation of tenancies in townships above a specified annual value.

I have discharged my duty in the preceding pages by repelling, to the best of my ability, certain imputations cast upon the Crofters' Commission by the Duke of Argyll, by exposing misconceptions into which he has fallen in the ardour of his attack, and by placing in à clearer light the motives and objects of one of the leading proposals in the Report. I would, however, far rather win the support of the Duke than resist his aggression, not only because he is a dangerous adversary, but because by personal gifts, inherited station and political position, he has a peculiar faculty of usefulness in this emergency. He speaks with authority to the whole proprietary body. By tradition and conviction a Whig, he is an able exponent of that political philosophy which is native to Scotland, and which still possesses a positive though waning ascendency among the higher class of Scottish Liberals. He unquestionably defends the rights of property with an eloquence and force which every Scottish Conservative can applaud, and which no Scottish Conservative can emulate. In a recent speech in the House of Lords he descended from the austere summits of economical doctrine, and placed himself publicly in contact with the wants and wishes of that humble class of his countrymen to whom his family owe as much of their historical greatness as is separable from intellectual distinction. On the occasion to which I refer, the Duke seemed to recommend an adjustment of rents by some impartial method of revision. He admitted the necessity for an enlargement of the common pasture of the poorer tenants, and professed his readiness to grant leases on terms more liberal than those defined in the Report as the basis of an official covenant. It is true that these overtures to the crofting class were presented rather in the way of voluntary action on the part of the proprietor than of statutory claim on the part of the tenant, yet such declarations constitute an advance upon any views enunciated by the Duke heretofore, as far as I remember, for we have been more familiar with him in an attitude of combat than of conciliation. It is surely not too much to hope that the Duke may be able now to embody his designs in a concrete form, to give them greater extensión, to associate them with legislative provisions, and to recommend them to those over whom he cannot fail to exert a salutary power. If any one should discover in such a course of action a want of gristle' or a want of pure muscle,' a derogation from the stiffness in which he gloried and a condescension to the flexibility which he blamed; if it should even be alleged that the Duke of Argyll was after all only the specious presentment of rigidity, 'un roseau peint en fer,' as the diplomatists at St. James's used to say of a former Secretary of State, he might regard such detractors with legitimate contempt, for by a timely compliance he would be rendering a material service to his order and his fellowcountrymen.

To the suggestions of the Secretary of State for the Home Depart ment, and to the mediation of Lochiel, we owe it that a meeting has been held of landowners in the North of Scotland for the purpose of promoting a friendly adjustment of the claims of the crofters. In this movement the Duke of Argyll has been, it is reported, an influential adviser, though he did not take part in the discussions at Inverness. It is, perhaps, better so, for he reserves a greater liberty of subsequent Parliamentary action. The concerted resolutions of the Highland proprietors are conceived in a generous spirit, and they are all consistent with true policy and the wishes of the people. In my judgment they are defective in the following respects: they contain no absolute security for the preservation of the existing crofting areas, no provisions for township improvements, no restriction on the future formation of deer forests, and no suggestions for the embodiment of the conclusions adopted in a statutory form. Nevertheless, an overture has been made which is honourable to its authors, and which in other hands may become productive of beneficial results. A larger measure of concession could not, perhaps, have been secured in connection with unanimous assent.

NAPIER AND ETTRICK.

GEORGE ELIOT'S 'LIFE.

IF it is true that the most interesting of George Eliot's characters is her own, it may be said also that the most interesting of her books is her Life. Mr. Cross has made known what is in fact the last workof the great Englishwoman. He possesses that art of concealing the artist, which is still the rarest quality of biographers, and, apart from a few necessary pages, gives nothing but letters, journals, and fragmentary memoirs written partly with a dim vision of publicity. The volumes will be read less for the notes of travel, the emphatic tenderness of the letters to friends often on a lower plane, and the tonic aphorisms devised for their encouragement, than for the light they shed on the history of a wonderful intellect. The usual attractions of biography are wanting here. We see the heroine, not reflected from other minds, but nearly as she saw herself and cared to be known. Her own skilled hand has drawn her likeness. In books variously attributable to a High Church curate and to a disciple of Comte the underlying unity of purpose was not apparent. For valid reasons they invite interpretation as much as Faust or the Paradiso. The drift and sequence of ideas, no longer obscured by irony, no longer veiled under literary precautions or overlaid with the dense drapery of style, is revealed beyond the risk of error now that the author has become her own interpreter.

The Life, while it illustrates the novels, explains what they do not indicate, the influences which produced the novelist. George Eliot ✓/was no spontaneous genius, singing unbidden with unpremeditated art. Her talents ripened successively and slowly. No literary reputation of this century has risen so high after having begun so late. The even maturity of her powers, original and acquired, lasted only thirteen years, and the native imagination was fading when observation and reflection were in the fulness of their prime. Mr. Cross's first volume describes the severe discipline of life and thought, the trials and efforts by which her greatness was laboriously achieved.

Marian Evans spent the first thirty years of her life in a rural shire, and received her earliest and most enduring impressions in a

George Eliot's Life as related in her Letters and Journals, arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. In three volumes. London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1885.