The book Arran; - Cook Clan

212 THE BOOK OF ARRAN
The peasantry bad failed to appreciate the maxim that the
interests of the owner and of the cultivator were substantially
one, that both stood to profit by a more scientific use and
management of the land. There were unfortunate happenings
in mainland and islands that hindered such appreciation.
But the forces of change were not to be denied. While
the new agriculture was sweeping over the rest of the country
like a reviving flood, even though it sometimes carried away
communities in its improving course, Arran could not long
expect to remain in a backwater. Some principles by which
it was guided required no little independence of mind to
understand. It was not easy to understand why the full
economic use of land should mean the amoimt of produce
and cattle it could raise without reference to the number
of human beings thereby occupied ; ^ why, indeed, greater
productiveness should mean fewer producers ; why, too,
redeeming waste land on the one hand should go along with
turning cultivated land into pasture on the other, so that
the net result should be less under tillage than before the
improvements had begun. For, when all is said and done,
' apparently more land was formerly cultivated in the olden
times. In the Millstone Point district there were at one
time fourteen families residing at Cock, Cuithe, Lagan, and
Lagantuin, where there are now but a farmer and a shepherd.
In North Glen Sannox there was once a large popula-
tion where is now but a solitary shepherd's house. Several
deserted farmsteads in the high fields above Corrie, at North
High Corrie, and elsewhere, tell of former cultivation where
all is now pasture land.' ^ The same tale is to tell of other
' There were two economic principles in vogue at the time ; one was that increase
of rent was a cause of improvement, because it was the high-rented farms that were
the best worked—to pay the rent you had to improve ; the other that a tax on wages,
by lowering returns, produced better work and so greater results. Idleness was
alleged to be a fault of workers both on the land and in factories, in England as in
Scotland.
^ Memoirs ofOeol. Survey (21), p. 150.