Mr. Lloyd George made his long-expected land campaign speech at
Bedford last Saturday. There seems to be a pretty general agreement that the reforms suggested, which were no doubt carefully settled by the Cabinet, did not give satisfaction to Mr. Lloyd George's extreme supporters, but on the contrary have depressed them. Mr. Lloyd George began by the pre- posterous declaration that a landowner could devastate the countryside and sweep every cottage away and convert it into a wilderness. If people said these were purely imaginary powers, he pointed to the Highlands, where people would find millions of acres which formerly maintained the sturdiest, bravest, most gallant race under the sun, now reduced to a desert. That is, of course, a purely imaginary description of what happened in the Highlands. The Highlanders, though brave, were not physically a sturdy race, and certainly did not flourish upon agriculture. Their prosperity, whenever they achieved it, was due to successful raids upon their neighbours in the Lowlands. When the Lowlanders were strong enough to prevent this, the Highlanders gained a precarious livelihood by stealing each other's cattle. Fighting and famine and, later, enlist- ment in Highland regiments to some extent kept the population down, but at the close of the great war their condition was pitiable—worse than that of the inhabitants of the congested districts in Ireland twenty years ago. There were, in fact, more people trying to live on the soil of the glens than could possibly get a living out of it.
