This happens to be one of those little things on which crofters and grazings committees are particularly touchy. I do not know why, because in some areas where they cut hardly any peat at all this is still regarded as an extremely important right, to make sure that nobody else cuts it. I have almost painful recollections of its importance in my first election campaign in 1935 when the quite unscrupulous local Liberals of those days—there are fewer Liberals today so there must be fewer unscrupulous ones too—slyly organised a propaganda scare against me that because I lived in one village if I were elected the neighbouring village would be deprived of its peat banks.

That story, spread by the Liberals had, I have no doubt, its effect. We exposed the outrageous falsehood of the whole thing; and I am convinced their chicanery over peat-cutting was part of what led to the downfall of the Liberals in the Highlands generally. Nevertheless, it is an illustration of how seriously the matter of peat-cutting rights was taken even in the higher political levels of the Liberal Party.