SHEEP OR STAGS?
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Among Mr. Norman Maclean's condemnations of my ignorance and prose style, I can discern only one point on which he bases a defence of the Highland landlords. Many of them, he tells us plaintively, were forced to give over their lands to deer and shooting tenants when sheep-farming failed. No doubt. But who were the originators of the profiteering sheep-farming system, whereby the natural economy of the country was hopelessly thrown out of gear and the native population driven off the land, often in circumstances of horrible brutality ? Why, the Highland landowners, whose social record since the Forty-Five is by and large deplorable, and whose latter-day amiability is largely the product of discipline by statute.
I shall not waste your space dealing with Mr. Maclean as he deserves in the matters of humour and the appearance of deer he never saw. As to evidence of road-improvement being held up in the interests of plutocratic privacy, I repeat that it exists. and that it could be produced before the proper tribunal; but I am certainly not going to face several libel actions, even in the good cause of enlightening your correspondent. Again, to be sure, public control acting through the Ministry of Transport is dealing with this subtle device of privilege.—Yours, &c.,
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