The Express.
London, England, 1847-03-02 00:00:00

TO CORRESPONDENTS.

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pops of government with • view to relief
appear open to no cavil or objection. With regard
to the future we suspect there may havo been undue
timidity where boldness would have been service-
age, and sanguine anticipation where little good can
be done.
To all suggestions for permanently relieving the
distress of the highlands sad islands by migration to
the lowlands, where there is plenty of employment,
m by emigration to the colonies, discouraging
sowers have been returned. On the other hand, the
improvement of land by the instrumentality of the
Drainage Act has been held out as a panacea. We
much doubt the efficacy of the latter, and can give
good reasons for thinking well of the former remedial
In measures:
agncilltural improvement the soil is only one,
and often but a secondary, element : the climate, too,
most be taken into account. No matter how good
the soil, or how favourably circumstanced for drain-
leg and other operations, if the climate is ungenial,
the labour is thrown away. In the raw and moist
air of great part of the weir ern highlands and
Wands the produce of the most improved soil would
Dot always ripen. And, what is more, the soil in
Deist of the mountain straths is too scanty and
meagre to admit of being fertilised. Thorough
draining will improve the natural capabili-
ties of that pasture country for pastoral Four-
pores but cannot make a tillage country of it.
br. .MACKENZIE, writing to Lord JOHN RUSSELL,
till him, " I sin in the process of instructing the
poor cotters thoroughly in Belgian agriculture." Ile
cannot, even though he had the climate of Belgium.
The markets of the rich commercial cities of Belgium
taught the surrounding peasantry agriculture. If
Dr. :%lACKENZIE could create a Ghent or a Bruges in
the neighbourhood of Eileanach, he could thereby
teach his cotters to make, not perhaps a Belgium of
it, but something incalculably more productive than
it ever has been. He might work some such change
on the land as Glasgow has done upon the naturally
sterile lands in its neighbourhood, now in high and
productive cultivation. But what is there about his
country to attract commerce to its shores?
By position. soil, and climate, the western high-
lands and islands are destined to be the seat of pas-
toral industry, and for that they are over-peopled.
Captain POLE, writing to Sir E. COFFIN, says of the
island of Reese,- :—" The former heritor derived
half his rent from the success of his people in fishing,
which resource has lately deserted them in a great
degree." The Lord Advocate, with reference to the
whole of the distressed districts, says:—" The manu-
facture of kelp, while it lasted, created a surplus
population quite beyond the proper means and wants
of the district" These poor wretches, it is evident,
so long as kelp-making or fishing were remunerative,
paid the landlords high rents for hovels in which to
shelter themelves. The rents were not proportioned to
the fertility of the moil—they were not a remuneration
for the temporary use of its productive powers—
but the rents of habitations, paid out of
the tenants' earnings from other sources.
Wherever these other sources have failed, there has
been a protracted struggle between landlords and
tenants : the one striving to keep as much of what
they wrest from the niggard soil us possible for sus-
tenance, the other to extort as much of it as possible
in the name of rent.

This points to migration and emigration as the
sine qua non of any efficient system of permanent
relief. Experience corroborates the inference. The
earliest emigrations of Highlanders to Canada were
often compulsory and harsh ; but their descendants
are prospering beyond the Atlantic, and the straths
and glens which their departure lett untenanted are
being filled up with a new race, prosperous and mul-
tiplying, as their herds and flocks increase. Again,
the establishment of the New Lanark mills drew
many Highlanders from a state of starvation in their
native glens to earn independence in the lowlands.
The excessive drafts of a new branch of industry
on the labour of the lowland district attracted High-
land emigrants, relieving those they left behind, by
diminishing the pressure of a surplus population,
almost as much as themselves.

The present time is favourable to relieving the
Highlanders both by migration and emigration.
The railways in the course of construction in Scot-
land have created an extra demand for labour in the
lowlands that will be permanent. When the rail-
ways at present making are completed, others will
be begun, and the impetus they give to all branches
of productive industry will create a dema.4 for more
hands. Again, a growing sense of the benefits
of emigration is visible among the highlanders. Young
men of the better clam have contracted an
adventurous desire to try their fortune in the
colonies. Clergymen of the Secession, the Free
Kirk, and others, are momentarily roused to a state
of enthusiastic self-devotion, that renders them ready
to cast in their lots with young colonies. By judicious
and kindly encouragement. little communities of
neighbours—" gentle and simple," as they say in
Scotland—might be induced to cluster round their
"ministers," and plant new parishes in strange lands.
Thus, by a little active benevolence, the population of
these straths, where poverty is perennial, might be
reduced to an amount commensurate with the means
of subsistence they offer.
But a gentle stimulus will be requisite. These
people are strangely apathetic and unenterprising.
They have not even been able to keep the hold of
a labour market they once poeaessed. Within
the memory of many scarcely pest middle-age, the
harvests of the South of Scotland were reaped by
bands of Highlanders and Islanders: the Irish
have now fairly jostled them out of that employ-
ment. Could we believe that apathy and in-
dolence were inherent in the Celtic race, their case
must be regarded as hopeless : but the truth is, that it
is difficult to decide whether certain inflated orators,
who would make the Celts all that is great and good,
or some pragmatical scribblers, who write them down
a race doomed to go to the wall before the Teutonic,
are the greater coxcombs. Cukulus non tacit mums-
chum : a Mos or an 0 does not make a Celt. There
is many a genuine Celt hid under a Saxon patro-
nymic, and many a Sassenagh dubbed with
an un-euphonious Celtic denomination. There are
more descendants of the Norsemen than of the Celts
among the western Highlanders and Wanders.
Their sluggish apathy is the result of position and
circumstance. They have been brought down to a ve-
getating state of existence. Transplantment to new
scenes is requisite to shake them out of their apathy ;
the invigorating influence of collision with strange
men and manners is necessary to improve the tone of
their morals, and better food, the produce of a lees
churlish soil, to strengthen their physical man.

FRENCH and English are engaged in making
simultaneous efforts towards a reform of convict dis-
cipline. Oar neighbours have at home, at their own
doors, a more awful system of demoralisation, arising
oat of their penal legislation, than we have in Van
Diemen'.. Land or Norfolk Island. They have their
Bagnes or Galleys, in which the mere end of utilis-
ing the labour of convicts by rigour and coercion, has
produced a set of more ferocious and accomplished
ruffians than any other country has yet bred. Hun-
dreds and thousands, liberated or escaped from this
government university of crime, find their way to the
capital, and to every town in France, where their
deeds and example terrify and pervert the
rest of the population to a degree almost incon-
ceivable and intolerable in a civilised country.
The French, however, are slow and considerate in
making a change. That proposed at first was the
more severe system of cellular confinement practised
in America. The hum me repudiated it, not only as
over-rigid, but as peculiarly unfitted for the restless
and sanguine temperament of the people of a southern
dime. On the other hand, there is a strong desire to
abolish the punishment of death; and to do this
without providing some substitute equally intimi-
dating, or somewhat satisfying the popular feeling of
the justice and necessity of retribution, as well as of
security, is impossible.
The French legislature, therefore, hesitated to adopt'
the bill proposed to it; whilst the French ministry
also hesitated to enter upon the enormous outlay of
rebuilding and remodelling all the prisons, until some
certainty was obtained as to the precise system which
was finally to prevail. The bill, accordingly, which
was voted by the Chamber of Deputies in 1844, and
rejected or adjourned by the Peers, has been referred
to the judges of the Supreme Criminal Courts, as well
as to the prefects, magistrates, and law-officers of most
experience. It has now come back, and was presented
the other day to the Chamber of Peers, modified to
suit the views and objections of so formidable and
!eighty a body of legal and administrative audio-
nties.