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of the population, aggravate the indigenous of an ordinary economic force which we squalor and lethargy which too much abound see producing the same results among already, and multiphy the contingencies of Continental peasant proprietors every day. destitution and famine which even now occur A new manufacture is brought to their from time to time, and are ever impending. door, and its ready money is sweet, and dispenses with the need of the old extent of land. In the Highlands the new manufacture was kelp, and while it throve it suited landlords and tenants alike that holdings should be subdivided. It is most important that peasant holdings of a size sufficient to keep a family in work and maintenance should not be subdivided beneath that size, but whether subdivision of laborers' holdings is an evil depends entirely on the amount of work to be got in the neighborhood. In Denmark, where the bonde is forbidden subdivision below a certain minimum, unlimited subdivision is allowed to the housmaend (cottar), and if the Highland fishing should grow so much as to entice the crofters deeper into it, it is possible it might lead to further subdivision before it led, as it has done at Buckie and Loch Fyne, to complete abandonment of crofting in favor of the more remunerative occupation. But as things at present stand, the Highland fisherman certainly requires a fair-sized croft, and to do justice to his croft while he has it, he requires the same conditions as other agriculturists.

A six-pounder's meat, it seems, is a four-pounder's poison, and a system of durable tenure which is to carry a fisherman with a big croft on to fortune is to force a fisherman with a small croft i.e., a croft he is better able to manage efficiently along with his fishing - to social wreck. And more inconsistently still, people who are believed to be so capable of self-government that they are to be created into a recognized village community, with a right to obtain more land, are declared in almost the same breath to be utterly incapable of managing the holdings that they already possess. The reasons given for this strange step do not make it more rational. The "indigenous squalor and lethargy" of the people are really, on the best testimony given to the commission itself, the fruit of that very insecurity which the commission invokes to remedy it, for, observe, there is this admitted and most puzzling perversity about the crofters' indolence, that it is exhibited nowhere neither in fishing nor navvy labor, nor anywhere else except in work on their own crofts, and the cause must there fore be rationally looked for in the discouraging conditions of that specific kind of work rather than in the nature of the worker.* And as for subdivision, that will surely be much better checked under the definite provisions of a lease or a judicial tenure than without them. In deed, without them it is not checked at allwe have a century's experience of that. And here it is right to say that it would be most unjust to lay all the subdivision that has occurred at the crofters' door. Much of it was caused, as was shown before the commission, by landlords themselves, who in clearing out the tenants of one township wedged them in among the tenants of another; but perhaps most of it was due to the operation

A strong confirmation of this has just been supplied by Professor Ramsay in his article in Macmillan on

the Highland Crofters in Canada. After speaking of to disappear in Canada.... They were all sanguine as to their future, energetic in their arrangements, and were eagerly doing things and using means of which they had no previous experience. It seemed as if the magic of property' had had its effect upon them, and drawn out the powers which too often lie dormant at home." These crofters had not been more than a year in Canada, and the magic of property" would work the same change on them as speedily at home. The magic of property is merely such a tenure as makes labor cheerful by securing to it the permanent posses

their inertia in Scotland, he adds: "But all this seems

sion of its own fruits.

The demand for more land, unlike the demand for sounder conditions of tenure, is one that is local to the Highlands, and that asks from the State intervention of a very exceptional character. The demand is based on peculiarities in Highland history, such as the clearances, which modern public opinion would no more tolerate than it would slaveholding, and the forcible deprivation from townships of hill grazings immemorially possessed, which is shown in the evidence to have been very common, and has naturally left discontent and distress behind it. Now, the proposal to restore these hill grazings, where they have been annexed to sheep-farms, is frankly admitted by the Duke of Argyll to be "a most reasonable proposition," and one he would willingly accede to; it was stated by various sheep farmers that such a loss of pasture would do no injury to their farms beyond the mere reduction of their size; and the crofters declare they are willing to pay as much per acre as the larger tenants, and in the present situation of sheep farming they are certainly likely to do so. The crofters' demand, therefore, involves nothing further than a transfer of land from one tenant to an other, and so far from being the convulsion which the Marquis of Lorne seems to

cause the hour is unusually favorable for such a project. The competition of the large sheep-farming system - the most fruitful cause of the crofters' long troubles — is for the time out of the way. Sheepfarms are either thrown on the owners' hands or let at half their former rents, because the price of wool has fallen hopelessly low, and the pastures have deteri orated till they cannot carry their old stock of sheep. There was a good deal of puzzling about this last point before the commission. The fact was admitted only one witness doubted it, and he did

think it, it is probably the smallest inter- have already been successfully established ference with the absolute rights of prop-in various parts of the Highlands. This erty that has ever taken place to remedy is the more worthy of consideration besocial distress that has been seething for more than half a century, that has called three times for official inquiry, and has repeatedly required government intervention, now by money and then by marines. The commissioners' proposals, therefore, are less likely to be criticised for the call they make on State interference than from general considerations of their efficiency for the well-being of the crofters, or of fairness to other parties concerned, and we are not surprised that this was the course taken even by one with such high views of private property as the Duke of Argyll. Their proposals are, first, to en-not-but what could have caused it? dow existing townships with a regular Some thought sheep cropped the grass constitution and a definite right of expan- closer than cattle, others that they fertil sion within certain limits - -a right to ized it less; but there is one fact for compel landlords to grant as much land which, though it was not brought before from contiguous sheep-runs as shall raise the commission, we have good documentthe average rent of the occupants of the ary evidence, and which throws much light townships to 15 a year, if the sheriff on the matter. Capt. Henderson states is satisfied that the applying township in his "Agriculture of Sutherland," writis really overcrowded, and that its occu- ten at the beginning of this century, that pants possess sufficient capital to stock in 1798 there were in that county fortythe new ground; and, second, with the nine thousand five hundred acres under consent of the proprietor, to settle new crop and permanent meadow; and in 1882, townships elsewhere, with a claim to as we learn from the agricultural returns, State loans for the requisite buildings, if there were only thirty one thousand six the sheriff is satisfied as before that the hundred and thirty-eight acres. In eightyapplicants have capital enough to stock four years, eighteen thousand acres, or the place. All that can be said for these more than a third of the green land of the proposals is that they would probably county, has gone back under heather — a allay the immediate discontent, and per- curious picture to place side by side with haps allay it better for the time than any the duke's noble, though unhappily unreother expedient. The township, however, munerative, exertions to reclaim heather though a convenient basis for immediate into green land. An official return given expansion, is certainly not a model indus- by one of his Grace's factors states that trial organization, because it has no com- the average price of reclamation in Suthmon management. The sheep of the erland is £31 an acre, so that it would careless tenant infect those of the careful now cost the duke upwards of £550,000 one; the delay of the lazy tenant keeps to undo what sheep farming has done, and back the work of the diligent, and the in- to restore the land again to the by no terests of the many smaller tenants are means advanced condition it was in before often set against those of the few larger. the clearances. If these things are so, it And this disunity is exaggerated under is plain that the old tenantry were sacrithe scheme of the commissioners, for some ficed to a huge economic blunder, and that of the tenants are to have the stimulus of Mr. Mackenzie of Kintail's remedy of giv a lease, and others perhaps the stilling the pastures long rest from sheep by greater stimulus of a freehold, while the turning them from farms into deer forests rest are to be left in their original help is an attempt to cure a great evil by giv lessness. Devised in the interests of staing it still greater and freer play. Under bility, the township is wanting in the first forest, the land would more and more conditions of stability. It is therefore a surely go back to a state of nature, and question whether the ends sought would landlord and public alike have an interest not be better served by some well-consid-in saying it shall go no further. The true ered plan of establishing crofters' club cure is coming to be seen to be a return farms, which are more consistent with to a more mixed system of farming — modern conditions, and with the possibil-pastoral and arable, cattle and sheep com. ity of progressive development, and which | bined - and to smaller sizes of holdings.

nearly two centuries ago, the Revocation | myself in the same atmosphere of damnaof the Edict forced its founders to flee tion and eternal salvation in which I was their native land. The name of the settle- brought up." The men and women presment is Friedrichsdorf, in the landgraviat ent not only chanted and prayed in French, of Hesse-Homburg, so called in honor of but looked French; and yet from the winthe landgrave Frederick II. This prince dows of the temple could be seen the gave the site of the village and some fields spires of Kiedorf and Seulberg, the one a to a number of refugees from Champagne, German Catholic, the other a Lutheran the Isle of France, and Languedoc, who village. M. Weiss found himself in the in 1687 arrived in the country, and craved presence of an ethnologic curiosity, — a his protection. Nor did his liberality end petrified piece of France, two hundred here. For ten years the settlers were to years old. But though the people of be entirely exempted from taxation; at Friedrichsdorf are of pure French blood, the expiration of that time they were to and cling so tenaciously to the customs of pay a land-tax of a florin an acre. They their ancestors, they are not the least were also allowed to organize themselves French in spirit. They know little or after their own fashion, to elect their own nothing of the land from which they came, mayor and aldermen, to manage their own and look upon Germany as their country, Jaw affairs — with the exception of one or the country for which, if need be, they two unimportant reservations and to would fight and die. Considering the exclude from the village anybody to whose treatment their forefathers received in presence they might object. These immu- France, the way in which they were driven nities have helped Friedrichsdorf, which out of it, and the welcome they received in now numbers about twelve hundred the land of their adoption, this is, perhaps, French-speaking inhabitants, to maintain not greatly to be wondered at, though M. almost intact the manners, customs, and Weiss evidently thinks it both strange language of their refugee ancestors. This and unnatural. On the other hand, these village, in the heart of Germany, is prob- people are both proud of the language ably a better sample of the France of they speak and the race to which they Louis Quatorze than anything that can be belong. They consider it derogatory to found in France itself. intermarry with their German neighbors; and though they are not in the least moved by a recital of the sufferings of France in 1870-71, they fire up at once if you hint that their men are in any way inferior in strength or their women in beauty to the Hesseners and Brandenburgers around them. Though living in the same country, educated in the same gymnasiums, and trained in the same regiments as their Teutonic neighbors, they are resolute to maintain the natural superiority of their breed. They esteem themselves both better and braver than the folks of Kiedorf and Seulberg; the women being especially proud of their origin and conservative of their customs. Their language is the quaint and beautiful French of the seventeenth century. Anybody who would know how French was spoken and pronounced in the grand siècle must go to this German village. In France itself the secret is lost. But while some of the villagers speak as Madame de Sévigné wrote, others use "vicious and vulgar phrases," which shows, in the opinion of M. Weiss, that the original immigrants were composed of two classes, one educated and refined, the other ignorant and uncultured. Sev eral of the phrases in common use, though obsolete in France, are expressive and convenient. For instance, they say vio lonner (to fiddle), souventes fois, une paire

An interesting account of Friedrichsdorf, the existence of which has been almost, if not altogether, forgotten in the mother country, appeared lately in a French periodical, from the pen of M. J. J. Weiss, a politician and writer of some note. Hearing at Homburg that there was a Huguenot village in the neighborhood, he was moved by curiosity to make a visit of inspection. As he neared his destination, he overtook a letter-carrier. "Wo bin ich, bitte?" he asked, and received the rather surprising answer, spoken in excellent French, "Vous pouvez parler Français." This opening naturally led to a conversation; but after a few more questions had been put and answered, the letter-carrier begged to be excused, on the ground that it was Sunday, and it was time to go to the Temple. This excited the visitor's curiosity still more, and he, too, went to the Temple. The pastor was in the pulpit, reading the Confession of Sin in French, from which were omitted none of the characteristic phrases of primitive Calvinistic Christianity, albeit in France itself two-thirds of them have long been obsolete. "I could have believed myself in the New Temple at Rochelle," says M. Weiss, "or in the Paris Oratoire, hearing a sermon from the stern old Pastor Grandpierre. I found