Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

92 HIGHLAND PASTURAGE.
has had the effect of enabling the farmers to take the
greatest advantage that could be derived from the sum-
mer pastures :
balancing the inequality by a due manage-
ment of the flocks, so as to ensure greater gains and
lighter losses than from any possible mode of managing
herds of black cattle. The other advantages which have
been experienced from it, are dependant on causes of
another nature; connected with the system of dividing
and allotting lands, and of occupancy : respecting which,
more political myopism and folly have perhaps been
broached, than on any one in the whole range of national
economy. The case was however the same in the south
of Scotland when first the same system was introduced :
it was once the same even in England ; nor can any anger
be much hotter or any lamentations more pathetic, than
those of the English political writers of that day, on the
substitution of sheep for men. This question I shall how-
ever defer for the present.
Nothing in the ancient system was more remarkable
than the great superfluity of horses once common in this
country, and even yet, far from suppressed to the degree
which would be most advantageous for the tenants them-
selves. If considered as a branch of pasturage, it was a
source of loss rather than profit ; as they were not reared
for systematical sale or exportation. As a present branch
of rural economy, the people pay little or no attention to
it ; though in Jura, and occasionally elsewhere, a few
are bred for a market. A few also are sold out of
Sky and Mull to Irish dealers, who come in boats to
purchase ; but I believe these are merely the re-
mains of those which, in consequence of the new ar-
rangement of the farms, had become superfluous. Some
excess of this kind is likely to continue till the country
has entirely settled into the new system.
Although generally small, the breeds of Highland