tortures, for the women slavery and degradation. Yet the bloody tale is full of those extraordinary instances, not of mercyfor the Red man was frankly devoid of that amiable characteristic-but of caprice which spared and even cherished an occasional captive. Enoch Ardens figured in frequent incidents of the frontier, where an unwritten law gave the woman her choice between the first husband and the one in possession. Such religion as survived among these descendants of the Covenanters was nominally Presbyterian, and there were even a few log churches. But there was no exaltation of the occasional wandering preacher. On the contrary, in his rousing exhortations he had to be careful of the amour propre of his touchy audience lest peradventure he should find himself in the brook!

Nor, again, was there much left of the technical observances, the scriptural searchings, the ardent theological controversies and hair-splittings which distinguished their covenanting forefathers, or their own North British kinsmen. But they retained the designation of their creed, at any rate, and in later days of peace and plenty their descendants mostly resumed their position within its orthodox fold. Sunday seems to have been observed, when convenient. There were a good many Bibles, too, and even a few secular books on the frontier, and the rudiments of education were fairly well maintained. There seems to have been, on the whole, a certain rough-and-ready sense of religion, curiously mingled with a secular truculency that the strain of such an existence naturally fostered. Morality took care of itself, as in the respectable classes of the Southern States, where a detected breach of it was avenged to the death if there were any male relatives to take the part of the woman. Rough justice was meted cut to the thief, from death in the case of a horse, to a flogging for a bag of meal. The women and children were treated with kindness and affection; the boys trained to the rifle from a tender age, and taught to take their place at the loophole in case of need. The pastimes of the frontier consisted of shooting-matches, shortcourse races on the lean, hardy little nags which every man possessed, and last, but not least, wrestling contests. These often degenerated into those savage mauls of biting and 'gouging that for some inexplicable reason obtained among all types of the common people throughout the Middle and Southern States, and are referred to with horror by English travellers of the period. But such documentary evidence is superfluous. For within my own memory the backwoodsmen of the Southern Alleghanies occasionally indulged in these brutal contests, which seemed so paradoxical among men of British stock. They went out of fashion with the introduction of the revolver after the Civil War. But in the seventies there was still here and

there a veteran champion in the remoter counties, who bragged of his prowess in these appalling rough-and-ready fights. For some were quasi-friendly contests, though only terminating with insensibility, and often the permanent disfigurement of the vanquished. The traditional procedure of a competitor for honours at this brutal business was to leap on a stump, crack his heels, flap his arms, and crow in imitation of a rooster (for cock-fighting too was popular), proclaiming at great length, and in a sort of bastard imitation of the boastful Indian brave chanting his war-song, the frightful punishment he would. administer to anyone foolhardy enough to accept his invitation.

The most wholesale catastrophe that ever befel the ScotchIrish frontier was after Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela in 1755. This sheep-like slaughter of the first British regular force ever seen in America was a moral disaster, and brought the Indians, egged on and often led by the French, in their whole strength against the frontier, which was rolled back along its northern half in an orgie of blood, fire, and massacre-upon the terrified outer belt of civilisation behind them. Even the planters of the Maryland and Virginia low country began to quake in their beds; for they weren't fond of fighting at that time, as their deplorable apathy throughout this whole French war conspicuously demonstrated. Their Legislature had rather grudgingly supplied young Colonel Washington, himself of backwoods experience, with a thousand mutinous militiamen and equally inefficient officers. The father-to-be of his country, then stationed in the Shenandoah Valley, speaks of them, and indeed of the whole attitude of his own colony, with scorn and indignation. The sight of the fugitive settlers drove Washington half frantic in his impotency to advance with such a ragged and ill-found regiment, mumbling property and liberty' at every touch of discipline. Hundreds of families were flying eastward through the passes, with heartrending tales of the desolation, death, and worse they had left behind them. The smug Quaker Legislature of Pennsylvania for long declined to provide a man or a dollar. They were safe themselves, and war was against their principles. The Scotch-Irish borderer within the limits of that colony, raging at the ruined homesteads and mangled corpses of his compatriots, threatened to ride on Philadelphia. After infinite delay and one ludicrous panic that the wild frontiersmen were actually upon them with immediate designs on the peaceful burghers' scalps, some tardy measures for defence were taken. It was not, however, till the French were driven out of the Ohio Valley two years later that the fiendish work was entirely stayed, and peace restored upon the extreme northern frontier, hitherto the less dangerous section. The Quakers had always cherished a

particular antipathy to the Presbyterians. Henceforward we may be sure it was returned with interest.

It seems just possible that the reader may have formed an impression that these borderers were mere nomads, advancing as it were en bloc. If so, I must hasten to correct it. The advance was made gradually from position to position by the more adventurous souls and the surplus youth. The rough clearings remained in their owners' hands, to become in time smiling fields, and the log cabins to be replaced by comfortable homesteads. The wave of colonial civilisation in the rear gradually swept in. New counties were formed, with their Court-houses. Churches and schools arose, and the Scotch-Irish belt became by degrees absorbed into the normal life of the colony. But it never lost its racial flavour, and of this vitality the beautiful Shenandoah Valley in Virginia is to-day an admirable illustration. It is the most ornate and best-farmed region of that State, lying between the lofty narrow wall of the Blue Ridge and the main Alleghany chain, and containing four counties and probably 150,000 souls. The dominant racial note is still Scotch-Irish, and The Valley' is regarded in Virginia by its mainly English-descended and easygoing people as a Scotch-Irish district, and distinguished for certain characteristics not shared by the typical Virginian of the slave districts, as many years spent near its edge gives me good reason to know. A superiority in farming, in thrift, and the fullest measure of all the essential virtues were always frankly conceded to the Scotch-Irishman. Indeed, his comparatively well-tilled fields, his roomy substantial barn and modest but neat dwelling, were in sufficient contrast to the slovenly farming, the poor out-buildings but more pretentious dwelling, of his eastern neighbour. He had not, as a rule, cared to own many slaves before the War, for practical not conscientious reasons, and showed his sense thereby. But his neighbours were accustomed to qualify their encomiums by certain criticism of his hardness at a bargain, his lack of gratuitous hospitality to the casual wayfarer, his reserve and other traits inscrutable to the more expansive soul of the Anglo-Southerner. Indeed, in the hearing one might almost fancy the latter a Kilkenny squireen discussing the farmer of Down or Antrim, for their temperamental antipathies were of much the same nature.

About 1772 came another great flight of Presbyterians from Ulster. Though their civil disabilities still remained, this later dislodgement was mainly provoked by large and sweeping evictions on several great estates. To be precise, numbers of long leases terminated about this time, and, with but slight regard for the thrifty, long-seated tenant, the farms were relet virtually to the highest bidder, and the Celtic population of optimistic

temperament, and not as yet of the emigrating habit, entered joyfully into the competition. According to Dr. Reid, a fourth of the rural Presbyterian population of Ulster now crossed the seas —a certain nobleman of large possessions, and a commoner of great estate, seem to have been the chief offenders, followed by many other landlords. This provoked riots and counter-riots, and created the 'Peep o' Day Boys' and 'Catholic Defenders,' and no end of that turbulence familiar to the miserable annals of Irish history. 'It is rare,' says Mr. Froude, 'that two private persons have power to create effects so considerable as to assist in dismembering an empire and provoking a civil war [the Irish rebellion of '98]. One was rewarded with a marquisate, the other with a viscountcy. If rewards were proportioned to deserts, a fitter retribution to both of them would have been forfeiture and Tower Hill.' For this last exodus is commonly credited by historians with contributing in great abundance to Washington's armies. This is probable, as numbers of these 30,000 exiles would have scarcely yet settled down, and so be ripe and ready for an adventure that must have marched at the moment with their embittered feelings. The real borderers, however, took no great part in the War of Independence. Their sympathies would have been almost to a man anti-British, but they were too remotely situated to feel strongly about questions which they neither understood nor were directly affected by. Above all, they had the Indian danger ever present at home. The Shenandoah Valley sent numbers of riflemen, while a thousand mounted men from the much remoter settlements in the North Carolina mountains made in 1780 one flying march into the zone of war, fought on their own account the dramatic and victorious battle of King's Mountain against Ferguson and his Tory militia from the Carolinas, and went back again to fight for their own homes against fresh Indian attacks. The crowning achievement, however, of the Ulster immigrants was the leading part they took in the perilous settlement and peaceful occupation of Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee at the close of the century. Of all the older stocks who helped to make the United States, it is quite certain that none in proportion to its numbers has deserved better of the Republic, or produced in after years more men of mark in every department of life. No other, perhaps, has proved in this respect its equal.

A. G. BRADLEY.

RIVAL LAND POLICIES

IN a recent debate in the House of Lords the Duke of Marlborough appealed to the Government to make a full statement of their land policy, to which Lord Crewe replied that it was sufficiently indicated in the measures which the Government had passed into law. It seems to me a much more pertinent question to ask what is the land policy of the Unionist party. There is no lack of material from which an answer to that question might be deduced, ranging from Mr. Jesse Collings' Purchase of Land Bill to the suggestions of Sir Gilbert Parker and the Small Ownership Committee, not to mention Mr. Ellis Barker's drastic proposals for the compulsory expropriation of the existing race of landlords and the establishment in their place of 5,000,000 small freeholders. But when we look more closely into the matter, two points of interest emerge. In the first place, it is instructive to notice that the specific proposals which are put forward emanate mainly from men who cannot be regarded as specially representative of the landed interest or of agriculture. I believe that the late Lord Salisbury was once irreverent enough to describe Mr. Jesse Collings as an inveterate Cockney, and certainly neither Sir Gilbert Parker nor Mr. Ellis Barker have hitherto been recognised as agricultural experts. I should be the last person to say that for that reason their proposals are unworthy of serious consideration, but it is at least permissible to note that the Unionist party, who have always affected to jeer at the Liberals for their alleged lack of practical knowledge of land and agriculture, are now being led on these questions by a trio of townsmen. There are some interesting comments on this point by a Unionist writer in the April number of the Fortnightly Review, who speaks of a vast and ridiculous scheme for peasant proprietorship,' and appeals to Mr. Bonar Law to refuse to allow urban members to impose their theoretical views on the agricultural members of the party.' In the second place, it is worthy of notice that the official leaders of the Unionist party have been extremely cautious in their endorsement of the details of the policy that they are being pressed to adopt. It is true that Sir Gilbert Parker extracted a commendatory letter from Mr. Balfour, which is printed in the introduction to his book, The Land, the People, and the State, but the