[Sidenote: 1714—Lowland agriculture]
Glasgow, in the Clyde valley, ranked next to Edinburgh in importance among Scotch towns. More than twenty years later than the time of which we treat, the author of a pamphlet called "Memoirs of the Times" could write, "Glasgow is become the third trading city in the island." But in 1714 the future of its commercial prosperity, founded upon its trade with the West Indies and the American colonies, had scarcely dawned. The Scotch merchants had not yet been able, from want of capital, and, it was said, the jealousy of the English merchants, to make much use of the privileges conferred upon them by the union, and Glasgow was on the wrong side of the island for sharing in Scotland's slight Continental trade. Still, Glasgow was fairly thriving, thanks to the inland navigation of the Clyde. Some of its streets were broad; many of its houses substantial, and even stately. Its pride was the great minster of St. Mungo's, "a solid, weel-jointed mason-wark, that will stand as lang as the warld keep hands and gunpowther aff it," to quote the {87} enthusiastic words of Andrew Fairservice. The streets were often thronged with the wild Highlanders from the hills, who came down as heavily and as variously armed as a modern Albanian chieftain, to trade in small cattle and shaggy ponies.
At this time the average Englishman knew little about the Lowlands and nothing about the Highlands of Scotland. The Londoner of the age of Anne would have looked upon any traveller who had made his way through the Highlands of Scotland with much the same curiosity as his descendants, a generation or two later, regarded Bruce when he returned from Abyssinia, and would probably have received most of his statements with a politer but not less profound disbelief. It was cited, as a proof of the immense popularity of the Spectator, that despite all the difficulties of intercommunication it found its way into Scotland. George the First had passed away, and George the Second was reigning in his stead, before any Englishman was found foolhardy enough to explore the Scottish Highlands, and lucky enough to escape unhurt, and publish an account of his experiences, and put on record his disgust at the monstrous deformity of the Highland scenery. But the Londoner in 1714 was scarcely better informed about the Scotch Lowlands. What he could learn was not of a nature to impress him very profoundly. Scotland then, and for some time to come, was very far behind England in many things; most of all, in everything connected with agriculture. In the villages the people dwelt in rude but fairly comfortable cottages, made chiefly of straw-mixed clay, and straw-thatched. Wearing clothes that were usually home-spun, home-woven, and home-tailored; living principally, if not entirely, on the produce of his own farm, the Lowland farmer passed a life of curious independence and isolation. To plough his land, with its strange measurements of "ox-gate," "ploughgate," and "davoch," he had clumsy wooden ploughs, the very shape of which is now almost a tradition, but which were certainly at least as primitive in {88} construction as the plough Ulysses guided in his farm at Ithaca. Wheeled vehicles of any kind, carts or wheelbarrows, were rarities. A parish possessed of a couple of carts was considered well provided for. Even where carts were known, they were of little use, they were so wretchedly constructed, and the few roads that did exist were totally unfit for wheeled traffic. Roads were as rare in Scotland then as they are to-day in Peloponnesus. An enterprising Aberdeenshire gentleman, Sir Archibald Grant, of Monymusk, is deservedly distinguished for the interest he took in road-making about the time of the Hanoverian accession. Some years later statute labor did a little—a very little—towards improving the public roads, but it was not until after the rebellion of 1745, when the Government took the matter in hand, that anything really efficient was done. A number of good roads were then made, chiefly by military labor, and received in popular language the special title of the King's highways. But in the early part of the century there was little use for carts, even of the clumsiest kind. Such carriage as was necessary was accomplished by strings of horses tethered in Indian file, like the lines of camels in the East, and laden with sacks or baskets. The cultivation of the soil was poor; "the surface was generally unenclosed; oats and barley the chief grain products; wheat little cultivated; little hay made for winter; the horses then feeding chiefly on straw and oats." "The arable land ran in narrow slips," with "stony wastes between, like the moraines of a glacier." The hay meadow was an undrained marsh, where rank grasses, mingled with rushes and other aquatic plants, yielded a coarse fodder. About the time when George the First became King of England, Lord Haddington introduced the sowing of clover and other grass seeds. Some ten years earlier an Englishwoman, Elizabeth Mordaunt, daughter of the Earl of Peterborough, and wife of the Duke of Gordon, introduced into her husband's estates English ploughs, English ploughmen, the system of fallowing up to that time {89} unknown in Scotland, planted moors, sowed foreign grasses, and showed the Morayshire farmers how to make hay.
[Sidenote: 1714—Famines in Scotland]
As a natural result of the primitive and incomplete agriculture, dearth of food was frequent, and even severe famine, in all its horrors of starvation and death, not uncommon. When George the First came to the throne the century was not old enough for the living generation of Scotchmen to forget the ghastly seven years that had brought the seventeenth century to its close—seven empty ears blasted with east-wind. So many died of hunger that, in the grim words of one who lived through that time, "the living were wearied with the burying of the dead." The plague of hunger took away all natural and relative affections, "so that husbands had not sympathy for their wives, nor wives for their husbands; parents for their children, nor children for their parents." The saddest proof of the extent of the suffering is shown in the irreligious despair which seized upon the sufferers. Scotland then, as now, was strongly marked for its piety, but want made men defiant of heaven, prepared, like her who counselled the man of Uz, to curse God and die by the roadside. Warned by no dream of thin and ill-favored kine, the Pharaohs of Westminster had passed an Act, enforced while the famine was well begun, against the importation of meal into Scotland. At the sorest of the famine, the importation of meal from Ireland was permitted, and exportation of grain from Scotland prohibited. But, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the famine had but just subsided, a Government commission ordered that all loads of grain brought from Ireland into the West of Scotland should be staved and sunk.
The empire over which King George came to rule was as yet in a growing, almost a fluid condition. In North America, England had, by one form of settlement or another, New York, but lately captured; New Jersey, the New England States, such as they then were, Virginia—an old possession—Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania—settled {90} by William Penn, whose death was now very near.
Louisiana had just been taken possession of by the French. The city of New Orleans was not yet built. The French held the greater part of what was then known of Canada; Jamaica, Barbadoes, and other West Indian islands were in England's ownership. The great East Indian Empire was only in its very earliest germ; its full development was not yet foreseen by statesman, thinker, or dreamer. The English flag had only begun to float from the Rock of Gibraltar.
{91}