LOCHABER NO MORE!
For a century and a half claymore and dirk have rusted all over
the Highlands, where ben and glen echo the report of breechloading
guns, and the gaff gleams and the reel whirrs by loch or river. But
peace, too, has her cruelties; and some of the misery once brought
into mountain glens by fierce raiders came again through spectacled
and moralising economists, who with more or less good intentions
displaced, shuffled, and banished a population deeply rooted in love
of their Lochabers. Dr. Johnson foresaw in part what would result from
the change of patriarchal community to business relations between
dependants of whose inveterate troubles he was ignorant, and chiefs
whom he found on the point of degenerating into “rapacious landlords.”
Another tourist, a generation later, remarked that clan loyalty hung
much on the fact of the people being tenants-at-will, and that long
leases would put an end to the old dependence. Johnson was not so
shrewd in judging that the people would haste to expatriate themselves
as soon as they saw a way open to lands “less bleak and barren than
their own.” The Celt’s love for his home and his hatred for change made
the course of improvement to run rougher here than in the Lowlands.
And the Highland “improvements,” for which the ground was cleared
by bayonets, brought little good to many of the people. They found
it harder to pay rent in money than in blood and affection. Their
chiefs proved as often selfishly exacting as the clansmen ignorant and
obstinate. The white-faced sheep that nibbled away the romance of the
Highlands were more the charge or the profit of intruding Sassenachs.
Since the price of wool went down, sheep have much given way to deer,
that profit no one but the owners of high-rented shootings, and keep
cottars sitting up all night to guard their poor fields, preserved
for the sport of absentee lords or purse-proud strangers, whose worst
service to the country has been turning the free son of the mist into
a well-fed menial, broken in to touch his hat for the tips he levies
in lieu of blackmail. It is stated that the demoralescent Celt does
not so much object to deer forests, as barring out his old enemy the
sheep farmer, and as bringing into the country a class of men who spend
freely, sometimes in the way of bribes given to secure good sport among
herds that to a sportsman of Colquhoun’s stamp seemed almost as tame as
sheep.
The Highlander asked for bread, and his masters gave him sometimes
stones and sometimes sovereigns. Not that his old masters had done much
better for him, minus the sovereigns. If the Highlands had once a
golden age, that was, as in other quarters of the world, before the day
of facts and figures. I had gathered some thorny points to prick the
bubble of an ideal state of society before the coming of the Sassenach;
but the reader will find this better done in the last chapter of Mr.
Andrew Lang’s _Companions of Pickle_, showing what tyranny and savagery
held together in that good old time of romance. The late Duke of
Argyll’s work on the former condition of Scotland, though written with
a natural bias, is not to be sneered at by sentimentalists. And if
readers wish evidence at first hand they may take a tour with Pennant
or any of the early observers, who will show them what it was to be
counted among the live stock of a paternal chief.
[Illustration: THE FALLS OF SPEAN, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
The sentimental quarrel is with civilisation, which all along has
proceeded by ascertaining and enclosing rights of property. Socialism,
which to us sounds new, is of course old as the hills, that once,
after a manner, belonged to a whole clan in their different degrees of
advantage, till some other sept could effectually evict them by fire
and sword. There never was a time when the leader of the conquering
troop did not get the best of what was going. The land held in his
name he was in the way of giving out in large portions to his captains
and kinsfolk, the “tacksmen” of Highland farms, who in turn sublet
small holdings to the inferior clansmen, rent being paid in kind or
in service to superiors, often arbitrarily oppressive, as seemed
their right. The shortcomings of this economy were made up for by
plunderings of neighbours, a feature not usually put into the
foreground of Arcadian pictures, but so common and so perilous as
to keep a regular check on prolific population. There was a general
community of interests, of manners, of sympathy which smoothed down
social differences. The humblest clansman, born or adopted into the
guild, expected to be provided for somehow or other, while the chief’s
power and dignity depended on the number of “pretty men” he could keep
about him. When the resources of plunder and blackmail were cut off,
the mass of Highlanders had to live by cultivating small patches of
poor land, as they did wastefully, idly, and unprofitably, usually on
the old system of “runrig,” by which a joint farm was tilled in common,
but each ridge had its own occupier. As a rule they were practically
tenants-at-will, holding directly or indirectly from the head of the
clan.
Badly off as they were, the tenants obstinately withstood almost all
attempts towards a better state of things. The improvements that in
a century changed the face of Scotland and multiplied its wealth,
came from lairds won over to economic science; they could hardly
have been carried out but by men who had risen above prejudices and
were in a position to risk capital in experiments. In the Highlands,
more obstinately than in the Lowlands, there was a deadlock between
the ignorant conservatism of the lower class and the enlightened
self-interest of the upper, who were sometimes so imperfectly
enlightened as to show grasping haste to be rich, whatever became
of those born to dependence on their fathers. On the other hand,
unenlightened selfishness, good neither for man nor beast, came as
natural to crofter as to laird, among a race noted for what Matthew
Arnold calls its “passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against
the despotism of fact.”
These seem to be moral and historical facts. Then come the
considerations of a science in our day much decried for dismal.
I am not going to enter into vexed economical controversies. The
subject of the Highland clearances offers a good many considerations
on both sides. Sentimental arguments are nearly all on the side of
the evicted; but the evictors have much to say for themselves. The
slovenly agriculture of the clans had to be schooled sooner or later.
The pig-headed prejudices of those backward cultivators appears in
the fact that their now indispensable potato was almost forced upon
them. The sheep farming that ousted scanty and precarious crops paid
best on a large scale. There are mountain wildernesses fit not even
for sheep-walks, where deer-runs make as profitable employment as may
be. It proved often a kind cruelty that drove thousands from their
half-starved life to a more roomy lot in pastures new. But for this
movement the Highlands would have shared the full horrors of the Irish
famine, felt here also to some extent after the potato disease of 1846.
The landlord need not be blamed for taking in cash an equivalent of
the services and the personal loyalty lost to him through operation of
law. Small tenants often did him as little good as for themselves.
The gist of the whole question, indeed, is whether the land thrives
best in the hands of any one grade of occupier, or whether there is not
more room for all when large, middle-sized, and small proprietors or
tenants are mingled as in other walks of life. That question I leave to
those who have much to say on it. But this may be said by the weakest
statistician, that the changes introduced into the Highlands were often
carried out with a haste and harshness specially painful in the case
of a race so inapt at adapting itself to new circumstances, whose poor
household gods, like Charles Lamb’s, “plant a terrible fixed foot,” and
“do not willingly seek Lavinian shores.” So, as one can now indulge
Jacobite sentiment without practical treason to the House of Hanover,
the reader may be invited to join chorus in the wail of “Lochaber no
more!” so often raised in Highland glens.
That pathetic lament seems to date back to Dutch William’s days, when
it is suspected for the work of an English officer, though another
account gives it a becomingly native origin. Emigration from the
Highlands, voluntary or enforced, set in before Culloden. The Hudson’s
Bay Company had recruited its servants from hardy Orkneymen and
Hebridean islanders. Between 1715 and 1745, while the ill-used Scots of
Ulster were knitting a chain of British outposts along the Alleghanies,
philanthropic General Oglethorpe took out a number of Highlanders to
his Georgia colony; others settled in North Carolina and in New York;
and it is said that some of these exiles still kept up their Gaelic a
generation ago, though it does not appear that the Stars and Stripes
afford a pattern for tartans. When Aberdeen bailies connived at the
kidnapping of children for the “plantations,” arbitrary chiefs like old
Lovat did not stick at getting rid of troublesome vassals by selling
them into the same servitude, to which Covenanters and other rebels had
been transported in the previous century. Proscribed rebels naturally
sought refuge in the New World, where rebellion of another stamp would
soon be in fashion; then it is notable that these exiles were apt to
take the side of the king _de facto_.
[Illustration: CROFTERS’ COTTAGES, ONICH, INVERNESS-SHIRE]
The exodus was accelerated after the crushing of the Jacobite clans,
when travellers like David Balfour could often see an emigrant ship
freighting with heavy hearts in Highland harbours, else little
frequented. Pennant, who speaks of “epidemic migrations” in other
islands, states that a thousand people had left Skye before his visit.
Soldiers who had served in America spread through their native glens
report of a distant land of milk and honey. Large bodies were led into
hopeful exile by the tacksmen who had been their immediate landlords,
or by the priests of the Catholic clans. Emigrant agents used arts of
cajolery, and in some cases, it is said, carried off youngsters by
fraud or even force. The American Revolution checked this migration
for a time, then diverted its course to Canada. Towards the end of the
century the movement could be spoken of as a “rage” or an undesirable
“spirit” which deserved curbing by law. But till after that period
the chiefs were seldom concerned to get rid of the vassals whose
hereditary attachment still gave them consequence, and by whose hands
they hoped to reap more solid advantages. One of Johnson’s hosts spoke
of emigration as deserting, a view which the sage of Fleet Street found
quite reasonable. One of Burns’s bitterest pasquinades attacks the
Highland Society as concerting means (1786) to hinder some hundreds of
Glengarry men in an “audacious” design of escape to Canada “from their
lawful lords and masters.”
It was prosperous sheep farming that gave a main impetus to the
shifting of idle hands thrown out of employment; while the pacific
settling down of the Highlands would increase the mouths to be fed, as
in India, under the _pax Britannica_, humane war against natural checks
on population has multiplied a people always tending to press upon
their means of subsistence. The lamb was in Scotland not only an emblem
but a pledge of peace. The substitution of sheep for more easily driven
cattle had in half a century or so gone to quiet and scatter the Border
clans, once as keen for booty and bloodshed as those of the Highlands;
yet no minstrel bemoans the depopulation of Ettrick and Liddesdale. The
Highlanders in historical times had small hairy sheep as well as flocks
of goats; but their best stock used to be the small black cattle, whose
blood they would sometimes draw to mix with oatmeal in seasons of
scarcity, and might starve outright when those lean herds were raided
by as hungry neighbours.
All through the eighteenth century the keeping of an improved breed of
sheep in large flocks had been spreading northward from the Borders,
largely displacing cattle in upland districts where such enterprising
drovers as Rob Roy had not to be reckoned with. Into the Highlands this
change would often be introduced by strangers placed upon forfeited
estates, a fact not recommending it to the natives. Chiefs and lairds
who followed the new system were at first laughed at as wise-acres
like to lose their money; but the clansmen found it no laughing matter
when sheep were found to pay better than humble homes, and more and
more small tenants had rough notice that their room was needed rather
than their company. Scott tells us how his first acquaintance with the
Trossachs was in leading a party of soldiers to evict a family believed
unwilling to carry out a bargain made for their removal. Between the
local Cains and the intruding Abels ill-feeling, quarrels, outrages
could not but result, which in many cases went with little notice as
but too like the state of society just passed away. In 1792 a number
of hot-headed Ross and Sutherland men proclaimed at several parish
churches that on a certain day all the sheep were to be driven out
of these two counties beyond the Beauly River. Some two hundred men
undertook to carry out this clearance, and went on for days driving
off sheep in thousands till they were encountered by the sheriff with
a military force, when most of the raiders took to their heels. A few
prisoners, tried at Inverness, were sentenced to various punishments;
but public opinion was so strong on their side that they seem to have
been helped out of jail, no great zeal for their recapture being shown
by the authorities.
This is perhaps the most remarkable ebullition of a grudge hot all over
the Highlands then, and not quite cool in our own day. Sheep-stealing
on a small scale was common, the crofters and the shepherds retorting
the blame on each other. Another sore point was the small tenants’
cattle or ponies straying on to their old pastures and being impounded
or chased off to destruction on rocky ground. A brighter feature of the
revolution came through the placing of poor farmers on hitherto barren
mosses which they were helped and guided in transforming to fertile
land. But too many landlords, in their haste to be rich, acted with a
disastrous want of consideration for those who had hitherto looked on
them as an earthly providence, bound to make up for the deficiencies of
nature, and who were naturally slow to accept Lowland conceptions of
landed property.
To many a Gael his native land seemed no longer worth living in now
that the “law had reached Ross-shire” As yet the landlords did little
to help away their dependants to New World fields. One philanthropic
nobleman, Lord Selkirk, distinguished himself by his zeal in colonising
the wilds of Canada. He began by settling some hundreds of Highlanders
in the comparatively mild climate of the St. Lawrence mouth. His more
ambitious scheme was in the Red River valley. But his agents here
served him ill; his claims were disputed by the North-Western Fur
Company; and the clansmen whom he sent to this remote wilderness found
themselves in for a petty civil war, after half a century’s want of
practice. The colony was broken up by hostile force; but Selkirk,
like a true Douglas, would not own himself beaten. He raised a small
private army from soldiers thrown out of employment at the end of the
British-American war of 1812, retook his chief station, Fort Douglas,
and there laid the foundations of what is now the flourishing province
of Manitoba. About the time of his death in 1820 there entered the
field another Scottish recruiter, Gregor MacGregor, the Venezuelan
General, who proclaimed himself Cacique of Poyais in Central America,
raising a loan on that title, granting lordships, commissions, orders
of chivalry, issuing banknotes, and promising mounts and marvels to
his future subjects. But imagination and paper money were the main
assets of his enterprise; and the few hundreds he deluded, most of
them from Scotland, reached the Mosquito shore only to perish of fever
or starvation till rescued by the authorities of Honduras. The fate
of this ill-conducted attempt, reviving memories of the older Darien
disaster, must have gone to check emigration at a time when there was
sore need of such a remedy.
The most notorious and far-spread clearing off of the population was
that carried out in Sutherland in the second and third decades of
last century. Nearly the whole of this county belonged to an infant
Countess, who grew up to marry the rich English Marquis of Stafford,
eventually created Duke of Sutherland. They resolved to improve
their vast northern estate by giving up the interior to sheep, the
inhabitants moved to a fringe of small holdings on the sea-coast, where
a small farm could be eked out by fishery. The matter seems fairly
enough stated by Hugh Miller, though a hot advocate on the popular side:
Here is a vast tract of land, furnished with two distinct sources of
wealth. Its shores may be made the seats of extensive fisheries, and
the whole of its interior parcelled out into productive sheep farms.
All is waste in its present state; it has no fisheries, and two-thirds
of its internal produce is consumed by the inhabitants. It had
contributed, for the use of the community and the landlord, its large
herds of black cattle; but the English family saw, and, we believe,
saw truly, that for every one pound of beef which it produced, it
could be made to produce two pounds of mutton, and perhaps a pound of
fish in addition. And it was resolved, therefore, that the inhabitants
of the central districts, who, as they were mere Celts, could not
be transformed, it was held, into store farmers, should be marched
down to the seaside, there to convert themselves into fishermen, on
the shortest possible notice, and that a few farmers of capital, of
the industrious Lowland race, should be invited to occupy the new
subdivisions of the interior. And, pray, what objections can be urged
against so liberal and large-minded a scheme? The poor inhabitants of
the interior had very serious objections to urge against it. Their
humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves
who had broken in their little fields from the waste; from time
immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their
mountain holdings,—they had defended them so well of old that the
soil was still virgin ground, in which the invader had found only a
grave; and their young men were now in foreign lands, fighting at the
command of their chieftainess the battles of their country, not in
the character of hired soldiers, but of men who regarded these very
holdings as their stake in the quarrel. To them, then, the scheme
seemed fraught with the most flagrant, the most monstrous injustice.
Were it to be suggested by some Chartist convention in a time of
revolution that Sutherland might be still further improved, that
it was really a piece of great waste to suffer the revenues of so
extensive a district to be squandered by one individual; that it would
be better to appropriate them to the use of the community in general;
that the community in general might be still further benefited by the
removal of the one said individual from Dunrobin to a roadside, where
he might be profitably employed in breaking stones; and that this new
arrangement could not be entered on too soon—the noble Duke would not
be a whit more astonished, or rendered a whit more indignant, by the
scheme, than were the Highlanders of Sutherland by the scheme of his
predecessor.
It is believed that the ducal couple were not fully aware of the
suffering caused by their innovations. The poor Highlanders could not
believe that it was intended to root them from their homes like weeds.
They took little notice of warnings and summonses, till in many cases
the agents of authority appeared to thrust them out by force, the most
effectual method being to pull down or set fire to their wretched
hovels, turning hundreds of families out to the mercy of the weather.
Their heath pastures had been first burned off; and they were not
always allowed time to save their small stock and crops. Violence
hastened the end of many infirm old people; and even strong men, it
is stated, lost their health through hardships that bred fever and
other diseases. Except in one or two instances there appears to have
been no attempt at forcible resistance, while the executors of such
rough policy, provoked by the passive obstinacy of the evicted, often
worked themselves up to a brutal temper of destruction. So violent
were their proceedings that one of the Sutherland factors, Mr. Sellar,
had in 1816 to stand his trial at Inverness on the charge of culpable
homicide and fire-raising. He was acquitted; and the work of eviction
went on unchecked under a new agent, Mr. Loch, who in print defended
this agrarian revolution, and gained the verdict of the voting class in
his election to Parliament. Another factor concerned in those notorious
evictions lived to tell in our time that he had received hundreds of
letters from the colonies thanking him for apparent harshness that
turned out a blessing in the end.
At the time the soreness was intense. Almost the only magistrates
in the county were those large stranger tenants, oppressors as they
seemed, who would take care to do themselves justice. The Established
Church ministers were also on the landlord’s side, as a rule, accused
by the opposite party as having been bribed through the favour of the
class to which they inclined to be subservient, and especially by
advantages given to their glebes in the redistribution of land. This
character of Erastian worldliness fastened upon the Old Kirk largely
accounted for the success of the Free Church in the Highlands, the
latter’s sympathy having commonly gone with the people, who found an
eloquent champion in Hugh Miller, ex-mason and Editor of the _Witness_.
The best-known contemporary account of the Sutherland evictions is
Donald Macleod’s _Gloomy Memories_, letters written to an Edinburgh
paper by another mason lad, who, like fellow-sympathisers, was
practically expelled from the district for denouncing the landlords’
agents. His book, reprinted at home and in Canada, and included in Mr.
Alexander Mackenzie’s _History of the Highland Clearances_, is very
angry in its tone; but impartial judgment can hardly be expected from
one who has witnessed such a sight as this:
Strong parties for each district, furnished with faggots and other
combustibles, rushed on the dwellings of this devoted people, and
immediately commenced setting fire to them, proceeding in their work
with the greatest rapidity till about three hundred houses were in
flames! The consternation and confusion were extreme; little or
no time was given for removal of persons or property—the people
striving to remove the sick or helpless before the fire should reach
them—next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects.
The cries of the women and children—the roaring of the affrighted
cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds
amid the smoke and fire—altogether presented a scene that completely
baffles description: it required to be seen to be believed. A dense
cloud of smoke enveloped the whole country by day, and even extended
far on the sea; at night an awfully grand but terrific scene presented
itself—all the houses in an extensive district in flames at once!
I myself ascended a height about eleven o’clock in the evening, and
counted two hundred and fifty blazing houses, many of the owners of
which were my relations, and all of whom I personally knew, but whose
present condition, whether in or out of the flames, I could not tell.
The conflagration lasted six days, till the whole of the dwellings
were reduced to ashes or smoking ruins. During one of these days a
boat lost her way in the dense smoke as she approached the shore; but
at night she was enabled to reach a landing-place by the light of the
flames!
The clearances carried out, the people had a fresh tale of sufferings
to bear in addition to the want and sickness engendered by their
removal. The bewildered tenants had hastily to build houses on their
new allotments, often on unsuitable or unhealthy sites; and it was some
time before, on the whole, they began to find themselves unwillingly
more comfortable than in their moorland hovels. They might have to
shake down among new neighbours, all cramped for room on thin soil. On
a rough and stormy coast, most of them had to be apprenticed to the
trade of fishing, on which for the future they must partly depend; and
at first shell-fish picked from the rocks might be their best diet.
Even after they had learned to be bold and skilful fishermen, the
herring and the harvest might fail together, as they did in one black
season, bringing the bulk of the population to starvation but for
charitable aid. It was small comfort to them to see the prosperity of
the large Lowland sheep-farmers who had supplanted them. The Duchess of
Sutherland made some generous attempts at clarifying the misery she
had shaken up; but her occasional visits could not instruct her fully
as to the state of things, and she is said to have been hoodwinked and
misled by the factors whom the people, rightly or wrongly, looked on as
their real tyrants.
‘Tis not the distant Emperor they fear,
But the proud viceroy who is ever near!
These “doers,” indeed, were often to be pitied rather, who, perhaps
against their own sympathies, had to set hand to what seemed the dirty
work of absentee proprietors. The clansmen appear never to have quite
lost their hereditary feeling for their superior, even during these few
years when three thousand families were driven from 800,000 acres of
land to make room for sheep, which in turn have largely been displaced
by deer.[5]
[5] It ought to be remembered that in a later generation the Sutherland
family sank at least a quarter of a million pounds in trying to reclaim
thousands of acres that to a great extent ran back to their native
wildness.
[Illustration: REDDIN’ THE LINE]
Forty years ago the _Economist_ stated that the same change had been
worked on two millions of acres in Scotland, where fertile as well as
unfertile land has been artificially made a wilderness, as the New
Forest was by William the Conqueror. From Glentilt, from Lochaber,
from Strathglass, from Glenorchy, from Glenelg, from Rannoch, and
from many another beloved glen and strath, the people were pressed or
driven forth by the pastoral invasion of strangers. Lairds who held
out against the movement would often be impoverished, had perhaps
themselves to emigrate; then their properties passed into the
hands of new men, not so scrupulous in ridding the land of unprofitable
human stock. In the course of last century owners grew willing to
promote the emigration which they had formerly tried to check, and
found it a cheap charity to ship off to America at their own expense
the inconvenient dependants who now showed more reluctance to seek
sunnier climes, stiffly sticking in their mud under a rainfall that
on the coast is sometimes over 100 inches per annum. Visitors to
Strathpeffer may see how the crofter has a fairer chance on the east
side of the Grampians, that fence him against Atlantic clouds.
In the wet and windy Hebrides the same change has been pushed, but not
so thoroughly in some parts, while in others very forcible means of
eviction were used both by man and by nature. The people of the isles
and on secluded stretches of the opposite coast are less touched by
the spirit of the age, more like the Highlanders who fought for Prince
Charlie. They are sprinkled, indeed, with mainlanders settled here, and
with waifs of shipwreck and fishery. Interlopers and natives throve for
a time through the kelp industry, whose decline left too many mouths
with too little provision. Some islands have passed into the hands
of philanthropic strangers, who spend large sums on ameliorating the
condition of the inhabitants, often with the proverbial result of good
intentions. Liberality seems to breed new hydra-heads of poverty among
a people satisfied with a low standard of well-being, and bent on
clinging limpet-like to a soil that will not support their increase.
Family affection, close knitted, for Donald, “in the condensation
of his focal circle,” keeps sons trying to scrape a living from the
patch of ground on which their parents could barely rear them. Thus
each of the islands makes a petty Ireland, where periodic cries of
famine go to justify the policy of clearance. The blame is loudly laid
on landlords; but it remains to be seen whether the tinkering of the
Crofters’ Commission will effectually solder all the “ifs” and “ands”
that are offered to make a Highland Arcadia. The Commissioners have
used a free hand, cutting down rents “with a hatchet,” wiping off old
scores of arrears and compulsorily marking out holdings of arable and
pasture land, which should pay if Nature be a party to the arrangement,
especially as the subdivision of holdings is forbidden, which did so
much mischief by beating out the thin lot of semi-starvation. The
Congested Districts Board has recently bought 70,000 acres in Skye, on
which may be carried out such an experiment in State landlordism as
under more favourable circumstances has not yet given new heavens and a
new earth to less congested areas of the world.
The Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886 was taken as a treaty of peace, that
seems not beyond danger of being broken between landlord and tenant.
Already in some cases where a clean sheet has been made, arrears
begin to gather again, so that we may soon hear fresh ugly stories of
eviction and riot. Unfortunately, of late years newspapers, political
agitators, and contact with more prosperous society have inflamed the
grievances of the people to a chronic sullenness, smouldering up from
time to time in inhuman outrages on cattle and futile resistance to
legal proceedings, which are only too much of a return towards the good
old times. The Celt, as wrong-headed as he is warm-hearted, much agrees
with that typical Saxon, Mr. Tulliver, in connecting lawyers with some
Ossianic variant of Old Harry. If Donald had more sense of humour he
would not make martyrs of men lightly punished for attacking sheriffs’
officers in the exercise of their duty in very trying circumstances. So
strong is clannishness still, that from all over Scotland, and beyond
the seas, come help and sympathy for the outbreaks of abuse, outrage,
and perverse stupidity, that seem the lees of the old devotion, refined
to such a noble spirit by poets. But the Highlander of our time has not
taken to Irish assassination, as at the date of a Campbell factor’s
murder by Alan Breck or James Stewart, or whom? and that remoter date
when those early “improvers,” the young Macdonalds of Keppoch, were
killed by their own kinsmen for the crime of being able to teach their
grandfathers.
Again, I have shirked all controversy as to land laws and systems
of agriculture. But, turning to facts, we can see the effect of the
evicting regime. Over the thoroughly cleared districts the people are
as well off as in other parts of Scotland, in material circumstances
at least far ahead of the dirty, starving, and quarrelling Highlanders
described by Burt, Pennant, and Johnson. What they have lost in
spirit, romance, loyalty, and other sentiments is not so easy to
estimate. Their well-being has certainly come at expense of their
numbers. While the population of Scotland has in a century nearly
tripled itself, that of the Highland counties has in several cases
remained almost stationary or even decreased, the people, too, as
elsewhere, being more concentrated in towns and villages. The question
is whether the landlords have not on the whole done no better for
themselves than for as many of the people as could here find welfare.
A further question, for the nation, relates to the fact that this
semi-civilised world of ours has not yet entered upon Herbert Spencer’s
golden age of mutual contract, since the most Christian and Catholic
potentates are still fain to settle their disputes at a game in
which Highlanders once took a willing hand. Should we not breed food
for powder rather than sheep and deer? The idea seems to be that
snug burgesses of the south might sit comfortably at home, thinking
imperially and sentimentally, while those hardy mountaineers went out
to fight for them with due applause from newspaper readers. Alas! the
Gael, whether thriving or starving, no longer shows his ancestral
readiness to go and be killed, at any king’s or chief’s bidding; and
his Free Church pastors do not recommend army life.
During the half-century or so after Culloden fifty battalions had been
raised in the Highlands to serve the Guelphs more effectively than
their fathers had served the Stuarts. Norman Macleod recalls that in
the wars of the French Revolution, besides thousands of soldiers and
scores of officers sent to the regular army, Argyll had three regiments
of Fencibles and a company of volunteers in every parish. Since the
beginning of those wars he counts up 21 generals, 48 colonels, 600
other commissioned officers, and 10,000 soldiers as sprung from the
poor island of Skye alone, where, a century ago, half the farms were
held by half-pay veterans. Another writer asserts that 1600 Skyemen
stood in the squares of Waterloo. But even some years before Waterloo
half a dozen kilted regiments had been reduced to trousers for want of
recruits; and in our day it is too seldom that the real Highlander has
heart or mind to enlist, now that—
The land, that once with groups of happy clansmen teemed,
Who with a kindly awe revered the clan’s protecting head,
Lies desolate, and stranger lords, by vagrant pleasure led,
Track the lone deer, and for the troops of stalwart men
One farmer and one forester people the joyless glen.
This poet of course rather shirks the fact that the clansmen, if
“happy,” “kindly,” and so forth, were like to be so at the expense of
other “revering” clansmen and their ineffectually “protecting head.” At
all events, they have little reverence left for “stranger lords.”
The resentful men who once made our plaided and plumed array have
passed rather into the ranks of labour in Glasgow, London, and other
large towns. Not a few of them indeed have gone into sea-service, as
shown by the Royal Naval Reserve at Stornoway. Many have sought better
fortunes in Australia, New Zealand, all over the world. I was at school
with a Highland laird’s sons, who for years went kenspeckle, like Lord
Brougham, in a succession of shepherd’s-plaid nether garments off the
same web, sent home from the plains of Otago by a loyal ex-tenant. But
for three or four generations the special promised land of Highlanders
has been Canada, a region of hills, woods, rivers, and lakes, in which
the Celt learns soon to feel at home; and when he comes in sight of
the Rocky Mountains he hails a new, a greater, a brighter Lochaber
rising up to the gates of heaven, where whole clans of angelic pipers,
tartan-winged, will welcome him at last with all their pibrochs played
in one celestial chorus.
Across the Atlantic, the sea-sick and home-sick emigrants’ troubles
were not always over at once. They had often to suffer sorely from
ill-laid plans, or from want of plans, throwing them on the charity
of a new country. The new lairds, who were glad to get rid of them,
thought they did enough in paying the passage of helpless glensmen
thrown among bewildering scenes. But every fresh Highlander landed was
a friend to those who followed his example; and in a country that has
room for half a dozen Scotlands it would be a hale and hearty man’s own
fault if he did not soon clear out for himself a home and livelihood
free from help or hindrance of chief as of factor. Their present
prosperity is attested by the fact that “Mac” seems almost a title
for Canadian statesmen, and by names of towns and counties scattered
over the Dominion—Macdonald, Mackenzie, Dundas, Lennox, Inverness,
Seaforth, Gareloch, Wallace, and of course Campbeltown. In travelling
by train through Ontario the Scottish wanderer’s heart may come into
his mouth at the familiar sound of station after station. Clans have
in some parts settled down together, the Catholic ones keeping their
priests and least forgetting the language in which they continue to
pray. Many of these exiles not only cherish their Gaelic but, it
appears, the particular dialect of their original district, handed down
to generations that never set foot on Scottish soil. To-day there is
perhaps more Gaelic spoken in Canada than in all Scotland. There is
also a clan of French-speaking Macs, descended from Highland soldiers
who married and settled among the daughters of Heth.
Those Canadians who have given in to the conquering Saxon tongue make
up for such defection by an earnest cult of bagpipes, kilts, and reels,
flaunting red knees in a clime of blue noses, and lustily singing
the songs of Caledonian Sion in what is now no strange land. The
Dominion rears battalions of kilted warriors, that skirl defiance to
the mosquitry of summer as to the snows of winter. Britain has lately
been visited by a Canadian “Kiltie” Band, three score strong, making
on Sassenach platforms such a revived show of tartan as is hardly to
be seen in all the Highlands. One of them, belonging to the MacAnak
clan, stood seven feet high, a hopeful sign of what the race may grow
to in its new home, when Old Scotland has been given up to American
millionaires, English tourists, and German waiters. Of such tuneful
transatlantic Scotians one need not inquire too curiously whether
“Annie Laurie” or “Robin Adair” would find themselves at home in kilts;
but they ought to know what a blot on their fame is the tartan of the
Gordons, my hereditary enemies, whose flagrant stripes brand them as
no better, in their beginning, than Lowland evictors. One thinks twice
about pursuing an ancestral feud against foemen seven feet high; but
I must say that if these minstrels were real Gordons, they might well
chant masses for the souls of many a Celt who never had the chance to
sing:
From the lone shieling on the misty island,
Mountains divide us and a waste of seas;
But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.