of defence or revenge. The priceless treasures of national independence and liberty of conscience only had been preserved to them. Every energy and every penny had been spent in securing these, the foundations of modern national greatness, -and so Scotland, in 1707, was alike without commercial spirit and industrial skill, the artist's creations and the philosopher's triumphs;-known only, like some other mountain-lands, as the nurse of rugged, uncompromising natures.

IV.

One other aspect of the Physical condition of Scotland at this time remains to be shown; an aspect, the special force of which the reader will feel as exhibiting the state of its agriculture and commerce, and as affecting the common weal of its people.

If the demands of the commerce of the country as to shipping were few, its demands as to roads were still fewer. Roads as we know them, and as the Romans knew them, had no existence either in fact, or in the imagination of the people in any portion of Great Britain in the eighteenth century. Nothing, in the altered state of things in which we live, would more astonish the men of those days than our roads, our bridges, and our modes of travelling; and nothing is more likely to escape us when trying to form a correct idea of olden times, than the fewness of roads then in existence and the frightful state in which they were always kept. They were roads only by courtesy. They were in no instance the work of the surveyor, the engineer, and the surfaceman. They had no regard to directness or to level. Marked out in most cases from the forest by the hoofs of the cattle that for generations had tramped over them, and worn in later times by the pack horses which journeyed painfully through them, and left to the drought of summer and the storms of winter, they were, as they could not but be, simply abominable either with dust or mire. Occasionally the bed of a river was the only road between two places; most of the roads, however, were cattle tracks and nothing else. A week's rain in summer made them miles of sloughs which no foot-passenger could wade through

and no horseman would long brave; while a wet winter all but put an end to trafficking and travelling. If such was the general condition of the roads and lanes in the south down till the middle of the century, and if even Kensington, as Lord Harvey tells us, was separated sometimes from London by an impassable gulf of mud, in Scotland they must have been a good deal worse, if that was possible. The roads in Perthshire, says Penny, were in a miserable state. Many were mere hilly tracts, on which carriages could not venture, and were totally unfit for foot-passengers.* That is, they were no better than our worst field and farm roads, ruts and ditches. through which no one could pass unless on horseback, and not even then without discomfort and danger. In Tweeddale it was the same. Somerville assures us that 'the parish roads even to the church and to the market towns were unfit for wheel carriages, and in bad weather were altogether unpracticable. There were few bridges over the rivers. The Tweed throughout its whole length was crossed by only two;'† and these, the one at Peebles and the other at Berwick, were sixty miles apart. There were no main, well-kept highways piercing the country from point to point and joining the cross lanes; there was not a single turnpike in broad Scotland." There were no carriage-ways out of sight of the capital. The great post road between Edinburgh and London was little better than a track; and although it was the main communication between the two kingdoms, its northern half was notoriously unfit for carriages, for in 1746 while the Duke of Cumberland contrived to reach Durham in a coach and six, so bad were the roads north of it he was compelled to go forward on horseback.

Strange as it may appear, no one knew how to make roads; and mending those which did exist meant filling up the biggest ruts with stones of any size and shape, and the smaller ruts with mire or clay. Nor was there any right system of assuring even this amount of repair. Statute Labour was

* Traditions of Perth, p. 131-2. See the whole passage.

the legitimate mode of doing this, but Statute Labour was disliked by all and shirked by many. Each farmer was bound to give so many men, and each tenant so many days, to the repairing of the parish roads. But there was no uniform and convenient system of employing this; it was left to interest and caprice; and in many cases the peasant was required to contribute his share of labour when he could least afford to give it. At the best, Statute Labour like some other forms of direct taxation, was an objectionable arrangement, and amid the general indifference of town and country to the necessity for good roads, came to be looked upon as a vexation and a thing to be evaded. Road-making, in fact, like agriculture, was both unknown and unheeded. Turnpikes were nearly a century distant. Telford and Macadam, like Watt and

Stephenson, belong to our own day.

How unhappily then was Scotland placed as to Agriculture, and how completely were its food supplies controlled by circumstances! The country was one in a geographical sense, but many of its parishes were quite isolated, and in winter almost inaccessible. Its rural population was a series of groups or families, many of which had only intercourse with one another in the open months of the year. It could not be. otherwise. Twenty miles of moor, or an unbridged river, or a considerable range of hills were insurmountable natural barriers to intercourse. No means were at hand of overcoming them. Consequently there were towns in the same county far more widely sundered for all practical purposes than London and Aberdeen are at the present day. People knew little outside of the bounds of their own glen or parish, and the world beyond their narrow horizon was altogether unknown. From the same cause, namely, want of roads, the farmer had no means of improving his farm and had no motive to do so. Shut in upon himself and with no opportunity of enlarging his knowledge he could only be slovenly in his home, and slovenly and stationary in his mode of farming.

The inevitable result of this ignorance of national economics was Dearths and Famines. And so common were these, so often had they been experienced by the people, that they con

cluded, as people in the same stage of knowledge have always concluded, that they belonged to an order of things in nature over which they had no control or influence, an order which could be changed, not by their improved agricultural practice and better roads, but by their prayers, and their prayers only. The land was not cultivated; the farming which did exist was simply a scratching of the surface of the ground; the climate was a wet, unkindly one, and therefore it was always very likely that the harvests would be late and light. Dearths did happen; the crops did occasionally fail, and famine in consequence paralysed and blighted the land. And why? Because, in the first place, all the conditions necessary to agricultural prosperity were wanting; and in the second place, because there was no free trade in corn. It was impossible to better the climate, but it was possible to improve the soil. It was impossible to prevent late and bad crops, but it was possible to prevent famines. And if, therefore, in times of scarcity the situation of Scotland was deplorable,* it was chiefly because there were no means of reaching the distressed districts, and no conveyances to carry food to the starving and dying.

This state of things did not begin to mend until 1750, in which year the first Turnpike Act for Scotland was passed. From that moment a happy change crept over the face of everything; the stirrings of a new life thrilled along the numbed frame of the nation. County after county looked to its roads, opened up hundreds of miles of permanent way, and spent tens of thousands of pounds on these and new bridges. Road reform, in fact, as the statute book abundantly shows, became the question of the day, and along with agriculture, then pushed on with much earnestness by the Society of Improvers, completely absorbed the attention of the landed gentry till the end of the century.†

* Somerville, p. 305, 384. This writer puts the matter very clearly; he sees the causes and also the remedies.

† As an example of what was done, see Douglas's General View of the Agriculture in the Counties of Roxburgh and Selkirk, 1798, pp. 198, 200. Also Statistical Account, Vol. IX. p. 530.

Such was the outward aspect of things in town and country in Scotland at the Union. If such homesteads and farmsteads —if such a mean and poor condition of life—are not what we have usually associated with the last heroic period of Scottish history, it may be owing to our looking at everything belonging to it with the exaltation of feeling not unnatural to the interested spectator. Touched by the spectacle of our enduring sires, we may never have felt any call to look closely into the commonplace of their lives, and the rude details of their daily circumstances. And we have in consequence been fooled by the enchantments of vagueness, and blinded by the glamour and fantasies of romance. An acquaintance with facts like those here given should do much to put us right. They ought to make certain to us the particulars in which the Present differs from the Past, and enable us to mark the immense, the almost fabulous change which has taken place since then. Nor can there be in any but a strangely prejudiced mind a doubt as to whether the Union has been fruitful of blessings, and whether the Scotland of to-day is not a fairer country, and life more pleasant now than in 'the good old times.' If we could add to the foregoing facts the characteristic traits of the inner life of the town and country-if we could supplement this picture of the Country with a companion picture of the political and intellectual condition of the People (and this we may attempt on another occasion), we should be tenfold more impressed with both the change and the progress which our Fatherland has made since the days of Queen Anne, and should heartily endorse the opinion of Mr. Lecky, that No period in the history of Scotland is more momentous than that between the Revolution and the middle of the eighteenth century-for in no other period did Scotland take so many steps in the path which leads from anarchy to civilisation."*

* History of England in the 18th Century, Vol. II. p. 22.