Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

ROW DILL. 165
sentatives who exist only that they may watch, as they do
not, over the interests of their constituents. There are
no collectors appointed to receive the taxes ; although
there is no deficiency in the distribution of the usual
warnings, or in that accuracy in exacting which must be
expected in every financial system. Hence the contribu-
tors are obliged to pay them to the proper officers in
their respective county-towns, placed at such enormous
distanfces as Inverness and Dingwall ;
and thus they are,
not only charged with the tax itself, but with the diffi-
culty and expense of agency and correspondence and
transmission, for sums which seldom exceed a few shil-
lings, and which, however small, are important to persons
whose annual rents do not often exceed four or five
pounds. Errors, always unavoidable, are here necessa-
rily frequent ; while the unfortunate contributor is thus
subjected to a correspondence which may exceed his
tax, and to surcharges from which he cannot appeal.
No lenity of administration can remove this grievance;
as the irritation of a tax seldom bears any proportion to
its actual value, and as a few instances of vexation are
sufficient to overwhelm a thousand acts of mildness or
forbearance. It is said in defence of this, that the taxes
would not pay the expense of collecting. There are
politicians who would answer, that they ought not there-
fore to be collected at all : but it does not appear very
difficult to find an expedient, by placing the collection
in the hands of the excise officers, who are present
everywhere.
Rowdill, though a small village, is the capital and
sole town of this mountainous and rugged district, which
contains so little arable land as to be very sparingly in-
habited elsewhere. In past times, it is said to have been
the seat of a monastery for Regular Canons, founded by