In Scottish Fields Author:James Logie Robertson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE REVOLUTION IN THE RURAL DISTRICTS. is difficult, if not impossible, for a son of the city to realise the changes that have taken place during the la... more »st half- century or so among the inhabitants of our remoter rural districts. These changes, indeed, have been so great as to amount in many localities to a revolution. Whole tracts of country, even in the lowlands south of the Tay, have become either absolutely depopulated, or their occupants have been thinned to the merest fraction of their former numbers. With the people have, of course, disappeared a great number and a great variety of rural industries. In at least one aspect of it, the revolution is a sad one. Where before were social hamlets and hospitable homesteads, bright with a busy and contented population, mostly dependent on each other for livelihood and happiness, arenow empty houses and dilapidated steadings, with an occasional vagrant temporarily disputing their possession with the wind and rain. In sunshine, even the homeless beggar keeps aloof from them. The fields in the neighbourhood are unenlivened by human presence; the wheel-tracks are choked with grass, and the footpaths are only distinguishable at a distance. It does not, of course, follow that the former inhabitants of those vacant areas have been lost to the nation. They have been lost to what is known (the phrase being used in a a restricted sense) as the country—the open rural parts of the kingdom. There has simply been a redistribution of the rural population, with a marked determination of the movement to the greater centres of commerce and manufacture. It would be wrong, on the general question of this migration of country folks to towns, to write it down as the enforced result of tyrannical landlordism. Neither landlord greed nor tenant gree...« less