Blair Collection > Celtic magazine > Volume 4

396 THE CELTIC TklAGAZTNE.
and so clumsily various, should coutain only three classes of men — Low-
land shepherds to attend to Lowland sheep, English lords and million-
aires to run after Highland deer for two months in the autumn, and High-
land gamekeepers to look after the deer when the south-country Nimrods
are not there. No person, of coiu-se, will imagine that in these remarks I
wish to run-a-muck against such a native and characteristically Highland
sport as
STALKING THE DEER,
It is in the school of deer-stalking that our best military men and
great geographical explorers have been bred. It is only when deer-stalk-
ing is conducted on commercial principles that it interferes with the pro-
per cherishing of population in the country, and is to be looked upon with
suspicion by the wise statesman and the patriotic citizen. Certain exten-
sive districts of the Higldands are the natural habitation of the deer, and
no man objects to finding them there or shooting them there. But when
extensive tracts of country are enclosed and fenced round, and sent into
the market as deer forests, the State has certainly a right to enquire whe-
ther this is done in such a way as not to interfere with the well-being of
the human j^opidation who have for centuries inhabited happy dwellings,
along the green fringes and sheltered nooks which belong to these wild
districts. JS'ow, the fact I am afiaid is, that under the action 'of commer-
cial principles the human kind are sometimes sacrificed to the brute kind,
and a whole district, once dotted with a happy population, systematically
cleared of men, that it may be plentifully stocked with deer. Eor it is
impossible not to see that the professed deer-stalker is the natural enemy
of the human population on his borders ; and, if he has paid down some
£2000 or £3000 a year for the monopoly of shooting stags within a cer-
tain range, he wiU think himself fairly entitled, on the mercantile prin-
ciple to demand from the proprietor, that as many of the poor tenantry as
hang inconveniently on the skirts of his hunting ground shall be ejected
therefrom as soon as possible, and no new leases granted ; while, if he is
the proprietor himself, he will gradually thin out the native crofters (whom
a patriotic statesman like Baron Stein woidd rather have elevated into
peasant proprietors), and plant a few big farmers at a sufficient distance
from tlie feeding ground of liis antlered tavourites. This is the fashiou
in which a materialistic economy, division of labour, and aristocratic sel-
fishness may combine to empty a country of its just population, carrying
out logically in practice the anti-social principles of Macculloch and other
doctors of that soidless science which measm-es the progress of society by
the mass "of its material products rather than by the quantity and quality
of its human producers.
rUACTICAL REMEDIES.
Let us now enquire what liopc there may be of recovery from these
errors, and what legislative measures in these reforming days may help us
to restore the social equilibrium of our agrarian classes which has been so
one-sidedly deranged. First of all the spokesmen of public opinion in the
press and the pulpit, and every man of any social influence in his place
should set themselves to preach on the housetojjs an altogether difi'erent
gospel from that which the economists have made fashionable — the very