minister would not, or perhaps we might say more correctly, could not accede,
as he had the whole banking interest against the measure. Matters went on
as before, and thus the calamity, which Sir John foresaw, and had striven to
prevent, returned in 1797, when the country was compelled to impose restrictions on cash payments. Sir John once more interposed to establish the system
of licensing country bankers, but was again defeated, through the selfishness of
those whose interests were bound up in the old system of unlimited banking.
In looking back upon the preceding events of Sir John Sinclair's life, it is impossible not to be struck with the energy that could plan, and activity that could execute such a variety of important undertakings. He was the Napoleon of peace—if such an epithet may be permitted—incessantly daring, doing, and succeeding, and always advancing in his career, but leaving at every step a token of his progress in the amelioration of some general evil, or the extension of a public benefit. The welfare of his numerous tenantry in Caithness, the improvement of British wool, the improvement of agriculture, the drawing up of the "Statistical Account of Scotland," all these labours pressing upon him at one and the same time, and each sufficient to bear most men to the earth, he confronted, controlled, and carried onward to a prosperous issue. And with all these duties, his senatorial avocations were never remitted, so that his attendance upon the House of Commons was punctual, and his support of no little weight to the great leading statesmen of the day. He had to add to his many avocations that of a soldier also. In 1794, when the wars of the French revolution were shaking Europe with a universal earthquake, and when Britain was summoned to rally against the menaces of invasion, it was necessary that every one who could raise a recruit should bring him to the muster. Sir John's influence in this way as a Highland landlord was justly calculated, and accordingly it was proposed to him, by Mr. Pitt, to raise a regiment of fencibles among his tenantry, for the defence of Scotland. Sir John acceded at once, and agreed to raise, not a regiment, but a battalion, and that, too, not for service in Scotland only, but in England also. He accordingly raised, in the first instance, a regiment of 600 strong, consisting of the tall and powerful peasantry of Caithness, clothed in the full Highland costume, and headed by officers, nineteen of whom were above six feet high, and, therefore, called among their countrymen the Thier-nan-more, or "Great Chiefs," with himself for their colonel. This was the first regiment of the kind that served in England, such services having hitherto been confined to Scotland alone. In the spring of the following year, he raised a still larger regiment, consisting of 1000 men, equally well appointed, who were destined for service in Ireland. Sir John's post was Aberdeen, in command of the encampment raised there in 1795, for the purpose of defending the town against the threatened invasion from Holland. A camp life is idle work at the best; but Sir John contrived to find in it the materials of activity, by the care which he took of the health, comfort, and efficiency of his soldiers. After studying the modes of living in his own encampment, and making these the data of his arguments, he also drew up a tract suggesting improvements in the mode of camp-living in general. The alarm of invasion passed away, but owing to the dearth by the failure of the crops in 1795,. the services of Sir John and his agricultural board, in their proper capacity, were called into full exercise in the following year. He recommended in parliament the cultivation of waste and unimproved lands, and procured the passing of a bill by which linseed or oil cake, and rape cakes, were allowed to be imported
