holidays, but even potatoes are not raised in sufficient abundance.
The year's stock is generally exhausted before the succeeding crop is
ripe, and the poor are then often in a most desperate condition, for
the poor-law is a dead letter in the North of Scotland, and the want
of a legal provision for the necessitous is but ill supplied by the
spontaneous contributions of the land-owners."--_Ibid_. 76.

At the moment of writing this, the journals of the day furnish
information that famine prevails in the Hebrides, and that "in the
Isle of Skye alone there are 10,000 able-bodied persons at this time
without work, without food, and without credit."

The condition of these poor people would certainly be much improved
could they find some indulgent master who would purchase them at such
prices as would make it to his interest to feed, clothe, and lodge
them well in return for their labour.

In the days of Adam Smith about one-fifth of the surface of Scotland
was supposed to be entailed, and he saw the disadvantages of the
system to be so great that he denounced the system as being "founded
upon the most absurd of all suppositions--the supposition that every
successive generation of men have not an equal right to the earth and
all that it possesses; but that the property of the present generation
should be retained and regulated according to the fancy of those who
died perhaps five hundred years ago." Instead of changing the system,
and doing that which might tend to the establishment of greater
freedom of trade in land, the movement has been in a contrary
direction, and to such an extent that one-half of Scotland is now
supposed to be entailed; and yet, singularly enough, this is the
system advocated by Mr. McCulloch, a follower in the foot-steps of