The Scottish Historical Review, which is putting the study of
Scottish history on a sotuid scientific basis, prints in its July number an instructive article by Miss Margaret Adam on " The Highland Emigration of 1770." The emigrants, far from being miserable crofters expelled by harsh landlords, were, it seems, the well-to-do " tacksmen " or large leaseholders, who had ground down the peasantry, and resented the efforts of the landlords to bring about a change for the better. " The tacks- men were superfluous middlemen who farmed badly, paid in- adequate rents, and by oppressive services prevented the under tenants from attending properly to their farms." They emi- grated with their followers to North Carolina or Nova Scotia in the fond hope that they could reproduce in the New World the feudal conditions which had become obsolete in Scotland. It is noticeable that, whenever the stories about oppressive Highland landowners of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are investigated by competent inquirers, they almost all prove to be untrue.
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