not felt to any serious extent. If the 'buses working on one service are delayed. by a rush of passengers, the 'buses working on the other services merely pass on in front of them.

Now let us consider only the vehicles working on one particular service, upon which there is at the moment a great demand. If railed vehicles are used, the waiting passengers will all attempt to board the front vehicle, because it must necessarily remain in front. Thus, the front vehicle suffers the maximum delays due to taking up and setting down passengers, and all the following vehicles are held up accordingly. If flexible road vehicles are employed, there is no such tendency for would-be passengers to concentrate upon any one of them. The vehicle that is in front at a given moment is not necessarily the one to arrive first at its destination. If there is a rush of passengers upon it, then the following vehicles will pass it and do the bulk of the business at the next stopping-point. Thus the delays inseparable from a rush period are more equally shared among all the vehicles concerned; and no one vehicle incurs delay merely on account of the business that is being done by another vehicle.

One is, in fact, led to the conclusion that the flexible road vehicle should be preferred, particularly wherever traffic is extremely dense and loads unusually heavy at certain rush hours. There have been many vague statements made to the effect that the motor 'bus cannot deal with such traffic. Such statements have been merely assertions unsupported by proof or logical argument. If argument has been used at all, it has amounted to little more than a statement to the effect that the vehicle of the larger capacity can deal with the larger volume of traffic. In point of fact, fewer and shorter delays are suffered by the public if the facilities provided consist of a very large number of comparatively small units. The small unit may be, and probably is, more costly to operate per passenger carried; but the mere fact that the time taken to fill or empty the small unit is shorter is in itself proof that its employment leads to a reduction in intermediate delays. The most convenient type of service is that which is the most frequent. The smaller the unit, the more frequent is the service required, and

consequently the shorter is the time that has to be spent waiting for the arrival of a vehicle.

To sum up the general argument, the following are the points to which it is desired to draw special attention:

1. In devising a system of traffic we must consider the total cost to the community and not merely the cost to the passenger carried or to the proprietor of the vehicle used. Our purpose should not be to enable one person to benefit at the expense of another, but rather to serve the convenience of the public as a whole. This can be best done by employing vehicles as little obstructive as possible.

2. To reduce obstruction it is desirable to standardise traffic units so far as possible. For the transport of goods, road motor vehicles are essential; and therefore it is desirable to employ somewhat similar road motor vehicles also for the carriage of passengers.

3. So far as the carriage of passengers is concerned, our aim should be to provide a practically continuous service rather than an intermittent service by large units.

4. The use of flexible road vehicles results in a saving of road space and an increase in the efficiency of existing roads. It is therefore advantageous to the general public.

5. The provision of means of transport working at the minimum operating costs is not consistent with the provision of means of transport imposing the lowest possible cost upon the community. The selection of a system should therefore not be decided, solely or even principally, on the ground of balance-sheets showing the obvious financial results obtained by the proprietors or managers concerned.

HORACE WYATT.

Art. 9.-THE ECONOMIC FUTURE OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS.

1. Statistical Account of Scotland. Ed. Sir John Sinclair. Edinburgh, 1791-99.

2. New Statistical Account of Scotland.

Blackwood, 1845.

Edinburgh:

3. History of the County of Inverness (Mainland). By J. Cameron Lees. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1897. 4. Scotland as it Was and Is. By George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887.

5. General View of the Agriculture of the County of Argyle. By John Smith. London: Richard Phillips, 1805. 6. General View of the Agriculture of the Hebrides. By James Macdonald. London: Richard Phillips, 1811. 7. Report of the Rural Transport (Scotland) Committee,

1919.

8. Report of the Sub-Committee on Afforestation of the Royal Commission on Reconstruction, 1918.

9. Report of the Sub-Committee on Agriculture of the Royal Commission on Reconstruction, 1918.

10. Interim Report of the Water Power Resources Committee (Board of Trade), 1919.

ONE hundred and seventy-two years have passed since the last of the Stuart risings crumbled to ruin on the moor above the Highland capital. The battles of Sheriffmuir and Culloden, that ended respectively the meanest and the most glorious of those risings, mark an epoch in the history of the Highlands. That wide and almost unexplored district was thenceforth open to the influences of civilisation, and became for the first time, in fact as well as in name, a part of the United Kingdom. How far can the period that opened in 1746 and is closing now be called a success or a failure? How far in the period that is now opening can the success be repeated and the failure avoided? These are the questions that it is proposed to consider.

The new conditions were not long in coming into evidence after Culloden. Indeed in one important respect they were already in evidence before 1745. The rising of 1715 had shown the military commanders the

necessity for the opening-up of communications. The celebrated roads which immortalise the name of Wade were constructed between 1726 and 1737. They were primarily intended to open the Highlands to the civilising influences of artillery; but all the other civilising influences were bound of necessity-if by slow degreesto follow. No change has been more remarkable or more widely felt than the change brought by the development of communications in these remote regions, of which Wade's roads were but the first step. Wade's roads led on directly to better roads all over the country; and, while the roads improved steadily, other improvements of communications were also carried out. The Crinan Canal cut the narrow isthmus between Loch Fyne and the Atlantic, once the frontier between the Picts and the Dalriadic Scots; and in 1822 the great engineering enterprise that opened Glenmore to water traffic was completed. The advent of steam heralded the disappearance of the sailing packets which had been the sole link between the Hebrides and the mainland; piers were built; and for the first time the Hebrides were brought into touch with the markets. This was accompanied by a vast improvement in the postal arrangements. A writer on the Hebrides in 1811 pointed out the absurdity of a system under which a letter addressed from Arisaig to South Uist-a distance of sixty miles-was carried to Edinburgh and thence by Aberdeen, Inverness, and Dunvegan to North Uist by most precarious roads and ferries, and reached its destination after a month or six weeks, having made a journey of 722 miles. And after the steamship came the railway, which paid its tribute to General Wade by following the line of his road in its pioneer effort.

Roads and bridges, canals, steamships, posts and telegraphs, and finally railways slowly revolutionised the conditions of life. It is difficult to realise the sweeping character of the revolution; but, if we consider that a person in the 18th or early 19th century with interests in two parts of the Highlands might well be in a position as difficult as, and in some respects more difficult than, a person who, in the 20th century, has interests in England and Australia, we can grasp the importance of these innovations.

These epoch-making changes were gradual. Another which was equally far-reaching in its effects was wrought by a stroke of the pen in 1747 the heritable jurisdictions were abolished. The clan system, which had now played its part and outstayed its period of usefulness, was swept away. Henceforth the Highlander enjoyed freedom and security; the Sheriff's bag-wig took the place of the Chief's eagle feathers, and the King's law began to run in the land. We enter at a stride the period of leases and contracts; arbitrary jurisdiction was, nominally at least, at an end. Of the repressive action of the Government and the thoroughly German measures by which the costume and customs of the people were prohibited by law it is unnecessary to speak; the law prohibiting the Higland costume was in force for a generation; it was only repealed in 1782. The cruelty of the administration and the barbarity of the military is well vouched for, and was of doubtful wisdom. A recrudescence of rebellion was in any case unlikely; and the most conspicuous result was a sullen dislike of the English which lingered in the Highlands for generations, and which is probably not yet wholly extinct.

The great question, of course, was how the population-already congested and subject to periodic visitations of famine, and now no longer exposed to the periodic blood-lettings of the clan period, precluded also from replenishing its slender larder by depredationswas to find means of subsistence. Improvements in communications, abolition of heritable jurisdictions, and suppression of the philabeg, offered no solution of these pressing questions, which from 1746 to our own times have constituted the great problem of the Highlands.

The population in clan times is thought to have been large; it was probably not so large as has been supposed. Large or small, the fact remains that from 1746 to about 1846 it steadily increased. This is the remarkable and even menacing feature of the period; and on that feature everything else depended. The congestion of the population was a constant danger; and on several occasions the Highlands were brought to the verge of a great catastrophe. There were intermittent periods of great misery and want. Always on the verge of famine and every few years suffering the horrors of starvation '-such is