inspected twenty-seven of the most distressed parishes. During his stay in Scotland he lived at Granton House in Edinburgh. He was cofounder in 1851, with Sir Charles Trevelyan, of the Highland and Island Emigration Society which during the Highland Clearances supported an exodus of nearly 5,000 people to Australia between 1851 and 1856. Crimean War At the outbreak the Crimean War in 1854, McNeill published revised editions in French and English of his pamphlet Progress and Present Position of Russia in the East, with supplementary chapters dealing with the progress of events since 1836, and insisting on the importance to Britain and to Christendom of the autonomy of Turkey and Persia. At the beginning of 1855, when the Crimean disasters had roused public indignation, McNeill and Colonel Alexander Tulloch, an officer of great administrative experience at the War Office, were sent to the Crimea with instructions to report on the whole arrangements and management of the commissariat and the method of keeping accounts, and to the causes of the delays in unloading and distributing clothing and other stores sent to Balaklava. The commissioners started at once for the seat of war. They took no shorthand writer with them, as the remuneration sanctioned by the Treasury was insufficient to secure a qualified person. The McNeill–Tulloch inquiry was the most effective of the various inquisitions into the Crimean débâcle. It sharply criticised Lord Raglan's personal staff in the Crimea and Commissary-General Filder, and it led to many recriminations as officers sought to clear their names when the report was published in 1856. A board of general officers was convened to clear the army, but despite its protestations, the McNeill–Tulloch report led to professional reform of the commissariat by the Royal Warrant of October 1858. Very unusually, the Commons, irritated by executive obfuscation, passed a resolution in 1857 calling for special honours and McNeill soon became a Privy Councillor and Tulloch was appointed a KCB. The University of Oxford made McNeill a Doctor of Civil Law and the University of Edinburgh chose him as chairman of its amalgamated societies; his inaugural address on competitive examinations was published in 1861. Personal life McNeill married, firstly, in 1814, Innes Robinson, fourth daughter of George Robinson of Clermiston, Midlothian – she died in 1816; secondly, in 1823, Eliza Wilson, third daughter of John Wilson – she died in 1868; thirdly, in 1871, Lady Emma Augusta Campbell,