a very improper way of disposing of your family?' 'Yes, certainly,' was the answer; 'it is very improper in a Christian point of view; but what can we do until they build us better houses?'”

It were needless to expatiate on this picture; it is quite enough that we hold it up to the reader. There is much to militate against the character of the poor hind all over the country. His very situation is adverse, however comparatively favorable the circumstances with which it may chance to be surrounded. When aggravated by the horrors of the bothy system, deterioration is inevitable; nor can any one honestly or rationally hold that the gross cruelty which consigns him to situations such as the one described situations wholly subversive of that nice delicacy of feeling which is at once the safeguard and ornament of virtue does not furnish a necessary item in his degradation. Mark the effects. In an interesting report, on farm-servants, of the very reverend the Synod of Perth and Stirling, published in October last, we find the following astounding passage. It embodies a piece of moral statistics in connection with this hapless class, as furnished by the returns of thirty-nine parishes:

"Of the public scandals chargeable on farm-servants, the proportion varies considerably in different parishes; but in all of them, with three exceptions, the number chargeable on that class of the parishioners is larger-in some of them much larger-than on all the others put together, although in no one instance does that class constitute anything like a majority of the inhabitants. In those three cases where the scandals among the farm-servants are fewer than those among the other classes, the proportion of the whole number of farm-servants to the other, and especially the working classes, is exceedingly small. It requires to be particularly noticed, that in one parish, the scandals which have occurred of late among the farmservants are reported to be nine tenths of the whole."

"Where is thy brother Cain? — the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground." This surely is not one of the matters in which our aristocracy do well to study

a niggard economy. With all due respect, therefore, for the excellent and benevolent nobleman who advocated an opposite view of the case in the meeting of last week, we must be permitted to say, that it will not do to speak of forty-pound impossibilities and twenty-pound inconveniences, when the morality of the country is thus at stake. It will not do merely to propose premiums for introducing beds with woollen screens in front into the one miserable apartment of the poor neglected hind, or to incite him to task his ingenuity in partitioning the narrow area in which he is compelled to cram his family. Pecuniary sacrifices. must be made by the proprietary of the country, even should they have to part, in consequence, with one or two superfluous horses or a few supernumerary dogs. Mere alterations will not do. In the language in which Watts, in one of his less-known lyrics, describs the leprous house, they must

VII.

THE BOTHY SYSTEM.

Most of our readers must know what the bothy system is. A very considerable number of the farm-steadings of the country, built on the most approved plan, with roomy courts and sheds for the breeding of cattle, and stables constructed on the best possible principle for the horses, with all, in short, that the modern system of agriculture demands, — have no adequate accommodation for the la borers by whom the farms attached to them are wrought. The horses and cattle are well provided for, but not the men. A wretched outhouse, the genuine bothy, - furnished with a few rude stools, a few deal bedsteads, a few bowls of tin or earthen ware, a water-pail, and a pot, serves miserably to accommodate some eight or ten laborers, all of them, of course, single men. Here they kindle their own fire, cook their own victuals, make their own beds. The labors of the farm employ them from nine to ten hours daily; the grooming and feeding of their horses at least an hour more. The rest of their time falls to be passed in their miserable home. They return to it often wet and fatigued, especially in the briefer and stormier months of the year, just as the evening has fallen, and find all dark and chill: the fire has to be lighted, in some districts even the very fuel to be procured; the water to be brought from the well; the hasty and unsavory meal to be prepared. It is scarce possible to imagine circumstances of greater discomfort. The staple food of the laborer is generally oatmeal, cooked in careless haste, as might be anticipated in the circumstances, by mixing a portion in a bowl with

hot water and a little salt; and often for weeks and months together there is no change in either the materials of this. his necessarily heating and unwholesome meal, or in the mode of preparing it. The farmer, his master, in too many instances takes no further care of him after his labors for the day are over. He represents merely a certain quantum of power purchased at a certain price, and applied to a certain purpose; and as it is, unluckily, power purchased by the half-year, and abundant in the market, there is no necessity that it should be husbanded from motives of economy, like that of the farmer's horses or of his steamengine; and therefore little heed is taken though it should thus run to waste. The consequences are in most cases deplorable. It used to be a common remark of Burns, no inadequate judge, surely, that the more highly cultivated he found an agricultural district, the more ignorant and degraded he almost always found the people. Man was discovered to have deteriorated at least as much as the corn and cattle had improved. Now, in Scotland there has been a very obvious reason for this. The altered circumstances of the country rendered inevitable the introduction of the large-farm system, and broke down our rural population, composed almost exclusively of what we still term the small tenantry, a moral and religious race, ―into two extreme classes, gentlemen farmers and farmservants. The farmers composed, of course, but a comparatively small portion of the whole; nor, though furnishing many high examples of intelligence and worth, can we equal them as a body with the class which they supplanted. Hitherto they have lived less in the "eye" of the great "Taskmaster." They took their place, not in the front of the common people, but in the rear of the aristocracy: they passed, to employ the favorite proverb of the poet whose remark we are attempting to illustrate, from the "head of the commonalty to the tail of the gentry." The other and greatly more numerous class proved much more decidedly inferior. The tenant of from fifteen to fifty

pounds per annum necessarily occupied a place in which, in accordance with the distinguishing characteristic of the species as rational creatures, he had to look both before and after him. He had to think and act; to enact by turns the agriculturist and the corn-merchant; to manage his household, and to provide for term-day. He was alike placed beyond the temptation of apeing his landlord, or of sinking into a mere ploughing and harrowing machine. But, in many instances, into such a machine the farm-servant sunk. Still, however, there remained in his lot circumstances favorable to the development of the better parts. of his nature. There is much in having a home; nor was he placed beyond those ennobling influences of religion which are scarce less necessary for enabling man rightly to perform his part in this world than to prepare him for another. Chiefly, however, from motives of a miserable economy, the unnatural bothy system was introduced, and with the disastrous effects described. It promised to spare some of our landlords the expense of providing cottages; and some of their tenantry expected to have their farms more cheaply wrought by single than by married men. We have seen more than the mere outsides of bothies, and know from experience, that though they may be fit dwellings for hogs and horses, they are not fit dwellings for immortal creatures, who begin in this world their education for eternity.

Nearly twenty years ago, we lived for a short time in an agricultural district in the north of Scotland, on the farm of one of the first introducers of the bothy system into that part of the country. He has been dead for years, nor do we know that any of his relatives survive. He had been a bold speculator in his time, and had risen, with the rise of the large-farm system, into the enjoyment of a very considerable income; but. instead of regarding it as mere capital in the forming, the merchant's true estimate of his gains, he had dealt by it as the landed gentleman does in most cases with his yearly rental. His style of