We are not particularly alarmed by Mr. Lloyd George's preposterously
unjust stories of the Sutherland clearances, clearances which, if . the truth be told, were made very much on the principle on which the Congested Districts Board acts. This principle, which cost the first Duke such a vast sum of money, was to bring the people down from the inaccessible and barren crofts in the interior to the better land on the coast—places where it was possible to get at and feed the people in times of famine, and where the ground was better worth tilling. We must repeat once more that it was the clearances which alone saved the Highlands from horrors like those of the Irish famine. In Ireland nobody bothered about clearances, and the people were allowed to starve and multiply on the land, subdivide it, overcrop it, and misuse it without let or hindrance. Then retribution came in the form first of en increase of popula- tion which a purely rural community could not support, and then of an appalling famine.
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