Blair Collection > Celtic magazine > Volume 4

THE CELTIC MAGAZINE. 395
money in the pockets of the few, but the money well distributed and
fairly circulating through the pockets of the many, in which the real well-
being of a district consists. If in one district, with a rental say of
£10,000, we were to find a population of two hundred families, small pro-
prietors or small tenants, all resident on the spot, applying themselves
assiduously with their own hand to the cultivation of the sod, forming a
pleasant society among themselves, and spending their money mostly in
the district, or not very far from it ; and if in another district of the same
rental we found one wealthy laird with only half-a-dozen big farmers,
does any person imagine that the latter represents a more natural or a more
desirable condition of agrarian life than the other ? In all likelihood the
proprietor with such surplusage of cash will begin to think himself too
mighty to live quietly with quiet people in the country ; he must go to
London and spend his money in idle luxury, slippery dissipation, and
perilous gambling there ; or he may go to Florence and buy pictures ; or
to Eome and traffic in antiquities ; or to Frankfort and swallow sove-
reigns for a brag in the shape of large draughts of Johannis Berger — all
ways of spending money, for which British society is little or nothing the
better, and the district of which God made the spender the natural head
and protector, certainly a great deal the worse. And in case you should be
inclined to think that my advocacy of small farms is the talk of an un-
practical sentimentalist, I refer you to the solid and serisible remarks of
the Earl of Airlie on the same theme, in the current number of the
Fortnifjlxtlij Revieio. So much for the lamentable results of the commer-
cial spirit which, substituting the love of money for the love of men as
the alone bond of connection betAveen the different classes of society, has
culminated in that antagonism of tendencies and hostility of interests
which are so frequently seen in the Highlands between the lord of the
land and the cultivator of the soil. Another inadequate principle adopted
by the proprietor from our doctrinaire economists is the
DIVISION OF LABOUR :
a principle well-known to Plato and Aristotle, and which, within certain
limits, is essential to all progress of human beings in the utilities and the
elegancies of life, but which, when allowed full swing according to the
favourite fashion of our economical materialists, makes us pay too dearly
for the multiplication of dead products by the deterioration and degrada-
tion of the living producer. To create and perpetuate a race of men who
can do nothing but make pin heads, is no doubt a very excellent arrange-
ment for the pin heads^ but a very bad arrangement for the heads of the
men who make them. Apply this to the Highlands and see how it works.
The old Highlander was a man who could put his hand to anything, had
always a shift for every difficulty, and has proved himself the foremost
man in any colony ; but the existence of such a shifty fellow being con-
trary to the universal application of the doctrine to which modern society
owes the infinite multiplication of pin heads, dolls' eyes, brass buttons,
and other glorious triumphs of modern art, we must improve society in
the Highlands by his extermination, or certainly by his expatriation ; for,
according to the great principle of the division of labour scientifically ap-
plied to the Highlands, that part of the world once so absurdly populous