THE FREEDOM OF THE HIGHLANDS.
SCOTTISH business does not very often get postponed to English business, in spite of the lamentations so often uttered by Scottish Members ; but there is one grievance
North of the Tweed which has not till now claimed its fair share of attention. Parliament is pretty familiar by this time with the strength of the case against enclosures, and against the needless injuries to beautiful scenery, which are from year to year projected by Railway Companies. Whenever a Lake Valley or a Surrey Common is threatened, there is, at least, a stout fight made against the invader ; and if victory does not always declare herself on the right side, it is seldom that the proposed mischief is allowed to attain its full proportions. In Scotland there is no such readiness on the part of the public to stand up for their own rights, and as Parliament, however well disposed it may be, does not ordinarily help any but those who help themselves, a greater wrong than has ever been inflicted in the South still remains without a remedy in the North. When a railway company tries to destroy Borrow- dale or Ennerdale, it is done with at least a pretence of public spirit. The plea set up for depriving the landscape of that which makes it best worth looking at, is always the importance of bringing it within the reach of a larger number of sight- seers. The promoters are shocked that there should be any place in the district which is more than a mile or two from a railway station. In Scotland, the enemy resorts to no such expedients. His antagonism to the public is undisguised. This is not the only difference between the two cases. In Scotland the scenery is not destroyed, it is simply stolen. Natural beauties are left uninjured, but only the owner is allowed to set eyes on them. It is not enclosure that has to be watched, the process that is continually going on there partakes of the very opposite nature. There is no danger of land becoming too profitable to be left waste, but rather of land which was once profitable being made waste. This, how- ever, is not the side of the question that we wish now to touch upon. We shall not say a word about the eco- nomical merits of deer forests. Let it be conceded, for our present purpose, that these are indisputable. The clients whose cause we have at heart are not dispossessed cotters, or farmers who are now raising sheep in Australia, because they are no longer allowed to raise them in Scotland. When all that we are now contending for has been done, the position of these two classes will be precisely what it is to-day. But besides a dispossessed peasantry, Scotland has a dispossessed public, and whatever compensation the former may have received in the way of a larger expenditure of money, the latter has received no compensation at all. Not very long ago, Scottish moors and Scottish mountains were, in a sense, a national possession. The ownership of the soil and the rights of sporting were vested in individuals, but these carried with them no privileges which in any way interfered with the enjoyment of these same moors by every traveller whose way happened to lie across them. Of vast tracts of the finest mountain land in Scotland this can no longer be said. For the traveller, this land does not exist. There are no "enclosures," indeed, in the technical sense.
None have been made, and none are contemplated. The land remains as wild and as waste as it was fifty years back. If there be any change, it is that land which was once cultivated has been suffered to become waste once more. But upon these vast tracts of moor and mountain no one, save the proprietor, the friends who come to share his sport, and the keepers who see that the sport is there to be shared, is permitted to set foot. The Moors, which stretch to the horizon on each side of the wayfarer, are not his in the sense in which they once were. His portion is the high-road, and he is expected to esteem himself fortunate that he has a high-road left him. It is very doubtful, indeed, whether there is any law which authorises the owner of a moor in warning every human being off it. The intruder is at worst a trespasser,—even if he be that, which is most doubtful,— and the Scottish conception of trespass is not, we believe, a severe one. But, be- sides the natural dislike that most men have for going in the teeth of prohibitions which professedly embody a legal right, the physical consequences of disregarding them may be unpleasant. The apparition of a couple of armed gamekeepers may alarm even conscious innocence, supposing that it has nothing better to appeal to than a reading of the law of tres- pass, which, after all, may not turn out to be the one most in favour with the Courts.
Mr. Bryce's Bill provides a remedy for this wrong, without interfering with either the ownership or the enjoyment of the Moors in question. The preamble recites that, whereas until late years the Queen's subjects enjoyed the right of walking upon uncultivated mountain and moor land, much of this land is now stocked with deer, and access to it wholly denied. The enacting clauses provide that, "No owner or occupier of uncultivated mountain or moor lands in Scotland shall be entitled to exclude any person from walking on such lands, for the purposes of recreation, or scientific or artistic study, or to molest him in so walking ;" and further, that it shall be a sufficient defence to any action of trespass "that the lands referred to were uncultivated mountain or moor lands, that the respondent entered thereon only for the purposes of recreation, or of scientific or artistic study, and that no special damage resulted from the alleged trespass." Ample pre- cautions are inserted to ensure that the rights thus secured to the public shall not be abused. No protection is given to any person going upon land in pursuit of game, or to take eggs, or with a dog. Neither the surface of the land, nor anything growing or erected thereon, nor any sheep or cattle, must be disturbed or damaged. Nor is the Act to apply to any parks or pleasure- grounds, or to plantations of young trees. Mr. Bryce has wisely dissociated the Bill from every question, save the one with which it immediately deals. He challenges no single right claimed by the proprietors of deer forests, except the right--which, as now exercised, has probably no existence in law—of excluding the wayfarer from unoccupied and un- cultivated land. The need for such a Bill has latterly become urgent. Either the Highlands must change their character, and cease to be the paradise they have long been for the lover of scenery, of solitude, of Nature in her grandest and wildest aspects ; or the present disposition to exclude the public from districts as big as counties, in no part of which is
there any cultivated land to be injured, must have a sharp check imposed on it. The only plea that can be urged in
defence of the practice of treating moors and mountains which have been immemorially free to all as though they were so many fenced paddocks is, that deer are very sensitive to human neighbourhood, and that a stray traveller may divert the course of a whole herd, and spoil a day's sport. But the right of walking on these lands is of older date than the prohibition by which they are now
guarded ; and if a pleasure which can be enjoyed only by a
few very rich men cannot coexist with one that can be enjoyed by the whole community, it is the pleasure of the few, not that of the many, that should go to the wall. Those who do not wish to see sport rudely interfered with will do well to support Mr. Bryee's Bill. It is directed not against sport, but against a late abuse of sport, and its defeat will only lead to the imposition hereafter of more stringent and less justi- fiable restraints.
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