[5] Leading articles on _Sutherland as it was and is_.
So much has been already said about these disastrous Sutherland
evictions that we greatly fear the reader is sickened with the horrid
narrative, but as it is intended to make the present record of these
atrocious proceedings, not only in Sutherland but throughout the whole
Highlands, as complete as it is now possible to make it, we shall
yet place before the reader at considerable length Hugh Miller’s
observations on this National Crime--especially as his remarks largely
embody the philosophical views and conclusions of the able and
far-seeing French writer Sismondi, who in his great work declares:--“It
is by a cruel use of legal power--it is by an unjust usurpation--that
the tacksman and the tenant of Sutherland are considered as having no
right to the land which they have occupied for so many ages.... A count
or earl has no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of
his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of
his kingdom.” Hugh Miller introduces his remarks on Sutherland by a
reference to the celebrated Frenchman’s work, and his opinion of the
Sutherland Clearances, thus:--
There appeared at Paris, about five years ago, a singularly ingenious
work on political economy, from the pen of the late M. de Sismondi, a
writer of European reputation. The greater part of the first volume is
taken up with discussions on territorial wealth, and the condition of
the cultivators of the soil; and in this portion of the work there is a
prominent place assigned to a subject which perhaps few Scotch readers
would expect to see introduced through the medium of a foreign tongue
to the people of a great continental state. We find this philosophic
writer, whose works are known far beyond the limits of his language,
devoting an entire essay to the case of the Duchess of Sutherland and
her tenants, and forming a judgment on it very unlike the decision of
political economists in our own country, who have not hesitated to
characterise her great and singularly harsh experiment, whose worst
effects we are but beginning to see, as at once justifiable in itself
and happy in its results. It is curious to observe how deeds done as if
in darkness and in a corner, are beginning, after the lapse of nearly
thirty years, to be proclaimed on the house-tops. The experiment of
the late Duchess was not intended to be made in the eye of Europe. Its
details would ill bear the exposure. When Cobbett simply referred to
it, only ten years ago, the noble proprietrix was startled, as if a
rather delicate family secret was on the eve of being divulged; and yet
nothing seems more evident now than that civilised man all over the
world is to be made aware of how the experiment was accomplished, and
what it is ultimately to produce.
In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or
the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which
the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of
Sutherland is an argument at which proprietors may afford to smile.
In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners,
and old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat
formidable,--sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in an
unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the class
who would be able in such circumstances to urge it with most effect.
It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and
reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of argument runs thus:--
Under the old Celtic tenures--the only tenures, be it remembered
through which the Lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their
lands,--the _Klaan_, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of
the soil--“the whole of Sutherland,” says Sismondi, belonged to “the
men of Sutherland.” Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute
monarch he was. “He gave the different _tacks_ of land to his officers,
or took them away from them, according as they showed themselves
more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a military
sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in the least
the property of the clan itself;”--he was a chief, not a proprietor,
and had “no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of
his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of
his kingdom.” “Now, the Gaelic tenant,” continues the Frenchman, “has
never been conquered; nor did he forfeit, on any after occasion, the
rights which he originally possessed;” in point of right, he is still a
co-proprietor with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law
of property as it has existed among us, in even the Highlands, for the
last century, and everywhere else for at least two centuries more, the
view may seem extreme; not so, however, to a native of the Continent,
in many parts of which prescription and custom are found ranged, not
on the side of the chief, but on that of the vassal. “Switzerland,”
says Sismondi, “which in so many respects resembles Scotland,--in its
lakes, its mountains, its climate, and the character, manners, and
habits of its children,--was likewise at the same period parcelled out
among a small number of lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg,
of Hapsburg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English
laws, they would find themselves at the present day precisely in the
condition in which the Earls of Sutherland were twenty years ago. Some
of them would perhaps have had the same taste for _improvements_, and
several republics would have been expelled from the Alps, to make room
for flocks of sheep. But while the law has given to the Swiss peasant
a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird that it has
extended this guarantee in the British empire, leaving the peasant in
a precarious situation. The clan,--recognised at first by the captain,
whom they followed in war, and obeyed for their common advantage, as
his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals,
then as his farmers,--he has come finally to regard as hired labourers,
whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common
country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so
soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them.”
Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their force may be
felt on the Continent, would be formidable at home, as we have said,
in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society
would be unfixed, and opinions set loose, to pull down or re-construct
at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the
course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the
Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland
chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of
Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalising remedy along with it.
Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this
northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by means
for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance, in the
history of the Irish massacre.
But though the interior of the county was thus improved into a desert,
in which there are many thousands of sheep, but few human habitations,
let it not be supposed by the reader that its general population was
in any degree lessened. So far was this from being the case, that
the census of 1821 showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more
than two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland exceeds,
by a thousand, its population before the change. The county has not
been depopulated--its population has been merely arranged after a new
fashion. The late Duchess found it spread equally over the interior
and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances;--she left
it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering that
fringes the county on its eastern and western shores, and the law which
enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights
of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own
clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The southern kingdom
must and will give us a poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep
poverty which fringes the sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the titled
proprietor of the county both his mother’s error and his own. If our
British laws, unlike those of Switzerland, failed miserably in her day
in protecting the vassal, they will more than fail, in those of her
successor, in protecting the lord. Our political economists shall have
an opportunity of reducing their arguments regarding the improvements
in Sutherland, into a few arithmetical terms, which the merest tyro
will be able to grapple with.
There is but poor comfort, however, to know, when one sees a country
ruined, that the perpetrators of the mischief have not ruined it to
their own advantage. We purpose showing how signal in the case of
Sutherland this ruin has been, and how very extreme the infatuation
which continues to possess its hereditary lord. We are old enough to
remember the county in its original state, when it was at once the
happiest and one of the most exemplary districts in Scotland, and
passed, at two several periods, a considerable time among its hills; we
are not unacquainted with it now, nor with its melancholy and dejected
people, that wear out life in their comfortless cottages on the
sea-shore. The problem solved in this remote district of the kingdom
is not at all unworthy the attention which it seems but beginning to
draw, but which is already not restricted to one kingdom, or even one
continent.
But what, asks the reader, was the economic condition--the condition
with regard to circumstances and means of living--of these Sutherland
Highlanders? How did they fare? The question has been variously
answered: much must depend on the class selected from among them as
specimens of the whole,--much, too, taking for granted the honesty
of the party who replies, on his own condition in life, and his
acquaintance with the circumstances of the poorer people of Scotland
generally. The county had its less genial localities, in which, for a
month or two in the summer season, when the stock of grain from the
previous year was fast running out, and the crops on the ground not
yet ripened for use, the people experienced a considerable degree of
scarcity--such scarcity as a mechanic in the South feels when he has
been a fortnight out of employment. But the Highlander had resources
in these seasons which the mechanic has not. He had his cattle and
his wild potherbs, such as the mug-wort and the nettle. It has been
adduced by the advocates of the change which has ruined Sutherland, as
a proof of the extreme hardship of the Highlander’s condition, that at
such times he could have eaten as food broth made of nettles, mixed
up with a little oatmeal, or have had recourse to the expedient of
bleeding his cattle, and making the blood into a sort of pudding. And
it is quite true that the Sutherlandshire Highlander was in the habit
at such times, of having recourse to such food. It is not less true,
however, that the statement is just as little conclusive regarding his
condition, as if it were alleged that there must always be famine in
France when the people eat the hind legs of frogs, or in Italy when
they make dishes of snails. With regard to the general comfort of the
people in their old condition, there are better tests than can be
drawn from the kind of food they occasionally ate. The country hears
often of dearth in Sutherland now. Every year in which the crop falls
a little below average in other districts, is a year of famine there,
but the country never heard of dearth in Sutherland then. There were
very few among the holders of its small inland farms who had not
saved a little money. Their circumstances were such, that their moral
nature found full room to develop itself, and in a way the world has
rarely witnessed. Never were there a happier or more contented people,
or a people more strongly attached to the soil; and not one of them
now lives in the altered circumstances on which they were so rudely
precipitated by the landlord, who does not look back on this period of
comfort and enjoyment with sad and hopeless regret.
But we have not yet said how this ruinous revolution was effected in
Sutherland,--how the aggravations of the _mode_, if we may so speak,
still fester in the recollections of the people,--or how thoroughly
that policy of the lord of the soil, through which he now seems
determined to complete the work of ruin which his predecessor began,
harmonizes with its worst details. We must first relate, however, a
disastrous change which took place, in the providence of God, in the
noble family of Sutherland, and which, though it dates fully eighty
years back, may be regarded as pregnant with the disasters which
afterwards befell the county.
The marriage of the young countess into a noble English family was
fraught with further disaster to the county. There are many Englishmen
quite intelligent enough to perceive the difference between a smoky
cottage of turf, and a whitewashed cottage of stone, whose judgments on
their respective inhabitants would be of but little value. Sutherland,
as a county of men, stood higher at this period than perhaps any other
district in the British Empire; but, as our descriptions have shown, it
by no means stood high as a county of farms and cottages. The marriage
of the countess brought a new set of eyes upon it,--eyes accustomed
to quite a different face of things. It seemed a wild, rude county,
where all was wrong, and all had to be set right,--a sort of Russia on
a small scale, that had just got another Peter the Great to civilize
it,--or a sort of barbarous Egypt, with an energetic Ali Pasha at its
head. Even the vast wealth and great liberality of the Stafford family
militated against this hapless county! It enabled them to treat it as a
mere subject of an interesting experiment, in which gain to themselves
was really no object,--nearly as little so, as if they had resolved
on dissecting a dog alive for the benefit of science. It was a still
farther disadvantage, that they had to carry on their experiment by
the hands, and to watch its first effects with the eyes, of others.
The agonies of the dog might have had their softening influence on
a dissecter who held the knife himself; but there could be no such
influence exerted over him, did he merely issue orders to his footman
that the dissection should be completed, remaining himself, meanwhile,
out of sight and out of hearing. The plan of improvement sketched out
by his English family was a plan exceedingly easy of conception. 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 sea-side,
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 sub-divisions 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 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.
The reader must keep in view, therefore, that if atrocities unexampled
in Britain for at least a century were perpetrated in the clearing
of Sutherland, there was a species of at least passive resistance
on the part of the people (for active resistance there was none),
which in some degree provoked them. Had the Highlanders, on receiving
orders, marched down to the sea-coast and become fishermen with the
readiness with which a regiment deploys on review day, the atrocities
would, we doubt not, have been much fewer. But though the orders
were very distinct, the Highlanders were very unwilling to obey; and
the severities formed merely a part of the means through which the
necessary obedience was ultimately secured. We shall instance a single
case as illustrative of the process.
In the month of March, 1814, a large proportion of the Highlanders
of Farr and Kildonan, two parishes in Sutherland, were summoned to
quit their farms in the following May. In a few days after, the
surrounding heath on which they pastured their cattle and from which,
at that season, the sole supply of herbage is derived (for in those
northern districts the grass springs late, and the cattle-feeder in
the spring months depends chiefly on the heather), were set on fire
and burnt up. There was that sort of policy in the stroke which men
deem allowable in a state of war. The starving cattle went roaming over
the burnt pastures, and found nothing to eat. Many of them perished,
and the greater part of what remained, though in miserable condition,
the Highlanders had to sell perforce. Most of the able-bodied men
were engaged in this latter business at a distance from home, when
the dreaded term-day came on. The pasturage had been destroyed before
the legal term, and while in even the eye of the law it was still the
property of the poor Highlanders; but ere disturbing them in their
dwellings, term-day was suffered to pass. The work of demolition then
began. A numerous party of men, with a factor at their head, entered
the district, and commenced pulling down the houses over the heads of
the inhabitants. In an extensive tract of country not a human dwelling
was left standing, and then, the more effectually to prevent their
temporary re-erection, the destroyers set fire to the wreck. In one day
were the people deprived of home and shelter, and left exposed to the
elements. Many deaths are said to have ensued from alarm, fatigue, and
cold.
Our author then corroborates in detail the atrocities, cruelties, and
personal hardships described by Donald MacLeod and proceeds:--But to
employ the language of Southey,
“Things such as these, we know, must be
At every famous victory.”
And in this instance the victory of the lord of the soil over the
children of the soil was signal and complete. In little more than
nine years a population of fifteen thousand individuals were removed
from the interior of Sutherland to its sea-coasts or had emigrated to
America. The inland districts were converted into deserts through which
the traveller may take a long day’s journey, amid ruins that still bear
the scathe of fire, and grassy patches betraying, when the evening
sun casts aslant its long deep shadows, the half-effaced lines of the
plough.
After pointing out how at the Disruption sites for churches were
refused, Hugh Miller proceeds:--We have exhibited to our readers,
in the _clearing_ of Sutherland a process of ruin so thoroughly
disastrous, that it might be deemed scarcely possible to render it
more complete. And yet with all its apparent completeness, it admitted
of a supplementary process. To employ one of the striking figures
of Scripture, it was possible to grind into powder what had been
previously broken into fragments,--to degrade the poor inhabitants
to a still lower level than that on which they had been so cruelly
precipitated,--though persons of a not very original cast of mind
might have found it difficult to say how the Duke of Sutherland has
been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one proper expedient
for supplementing their ruin. All in mere circumstance and situation
that could lower and deteriorate had been present as ingredients in
the first process; but there still remained for the people, however
reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that consoles
and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with their humanising influences;
and, under the teachings of the gospel, the poor and the oppressed
looked longingly forward to a future scene of being, in which there
is no poverty or oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery,
something positively good, of which it was impossible to deprive
them; and hence the ability derived to the present lord of Sutherland
of deepening and rendering more signal the ruin accomplished by his
predecessor.
These harmonise but too well with the mode in which the interior of
Sutherland was cleared, and the improved cottages of its sea-coasts
erected. The plan has its two items. No sites are to be granted in
the district for Free Churches, and no dwelling-houses for Free
Church ministers. The climate is severe,--the winters prolonged and
stormy,--the roads which connect the chief seats of population with the
neighbouring counties, dreary and long. May not ministers and people
be eventually worn out in this way? Such is the portion of the plan
which his Grace and his Grace’s creatures can afford to present to the
light. But there are supplementary items of a somewhat darker kind.
The poor cotters are, in the great majority of cases, tenants-at-will;
and there has been much pains taken to inform them that, to the crime
of entertaining and sheltering a Protesting minister, the penalty
of ejection from their holdings must inevitably attach. The laws of
Charles have again returned in this unhappy district, and free and
tolerating Scotland has got, in the nineteenth century, as in the
seventeenth, its intercommuned ministers. We shall not say that the
intimation has emanated from the Duke. It is the misfortune of such
men that there creep around them creatures whose business it is to
anticipate their wishes; but who, at times, doubtless, instead of
anticipating misinterpret them; and who, even when not very much
mistaken, impart to whatever they do the impress of their own low and
menial natures, and thus exaggerate in the act the intention of their
masters. We do not say, therefore, that the intimation has emanated
from the Duke; but this we say, that an exemplary Sutherlandshire
minister of the Protesting Church, who resigned his worldly all for the
sake of his principles, had lately to travel, that he might preach to
his attached people, a long journey of forty-four miles outwards, and
as much in return, and all this without taking shelter under cover of a
roof, or without partaking of any other refreshment than that furnished
by the slender store of provisions which he had carried with him from
his new home. Willingly would the poor Highlanders have received him at
any risk; but knowing from experience what a Sutherlandshire removal
means he preferred enduring any amount of hardship rather than that the
hospitality of his people should be made the occasion of their ruin.
We have already adverted to the case of a lady of Sutherland threatened
with ejection from her home because she had extended the shelter of her
roof to one of the Protesting clergy,--an aged and venerable man, who
had quitted the neighbouring manse, his home for many years, because
he could no longer enjoy it in consistency with his principles; and we
have shown that that aged and venerable man was the lady’s own father.
What amount of oppression of a smaller and more petty character may not
be expected in the circumstances, when cases such as these are found to
stand but a very little over the ordinary level?
The meannesses to which ducal hostility can stoop in this hapless
district, impress with a feeling of surprise. In the parish of Dornoch
for instance, where his Grace is fortunately not the sole landowner,
there has been a site procured on the most generous terms from Sir
George Gunn Munro of Poyntzfield; and this gentleman, believing himself
possessed of a hereditary right to a quarry, which, though on the
Duke’s ground, had been long resorted to by the proprietors of the
district generally, instructed the builder to take from it the stones
which he needed. Never had the quarry been prohibited before, but on
this occasion a stringent interdict arrested its use. If his Grace
could not prevent a hated Free Church from arising in the district, he
could at least add to the expense of its erection. We have even heard
that the portion of the building previously erected had to be pulled
down and the stones returned.
How are we to account for a hostility so determined, and that can stoop
so low? In two different ways, we are of opinion, and in both have
the people of Scotland a direct interest. Did his Grace entertain a
very intense regard for Established Presbytery, it is probably that he
himself would be a Presbyterian of the Establishment. But such is not
the case. The church into which he would so fain force the people has
been long since deserted by himself. The secret of the course which
he pursues can have no connection therefore with religious motive or
belief. It can be no proselytising spirit that misleads his Grace. Let
us remark, in the first place, rather however in the way of embodying
a fact than imputing a motive, that with his present views, and in
his present circumstances, it may not seem particularly his Grace’s
interest to make the county of Sutherland a happy or desirable home
to the people of Scotland. It may not be his Grace’s interest that
the population of the district should increase. The clearing of the
sea-coast may seem as little prejudicial to his Grace’s welfare now
as the clearing of the interior seemed adverse to the interests of
his predecessor thirty years ago; nay, it is quite possible that his
Grace may be led to regard the clearing of the coast as the better
and more important clearing of the two. Let it not be forgotten that
a poor-law hangs over Scotland,--that the shores of Sutherland are
covered with what seems one vast straggling village, inhabited by an
impoverished and ruined people,--and that the coming assessment may
yet fall so weighty that the extra profits accruing to his Grace from
his large sheep-farms may go but a small way in supporting his extra
paupers. It is not in the least improbable that he may live to find the
revolution effected by his predecessor taking to itself the form, not
of a crime,--for that would be nothing,--but of a disastrous and very
terrible blunder.
There is another remark which may prove not unworthy the consideration
of the reader. Ever since the completion of the fatal experiment which
ruined Sutherland, the noble family through which it was originated
and carried on have betrayed the utmost jealousy of having its real
results made public. Volumes of special pleading have been written
on the subject,--pamphlets have been published, laboured articles
have been inserted in widely-spread reviews,--statistical accounts
have been watched over with the most careful surveillance. If the
misrepresentations of the press could have altered the matter of fact,
famine would not be gnawing the vitals of Sutherland in a year a
little less abundant than its predecessors, nor would the dejected and
oppressed people be feeding their discontent, amid present misery, with
the recollections of a happier past. If a singularly well-conditioned
and wholesome district of country has been converted into one wide
ulcer of wretchedness and woe, it must be confessed that the sore has
been carefully bandaged up from the public eye,--that if there has been
little done for its cure, there has at least been much done for its
concealment. Now, be it remembered that a Free Church threatened to
insert a _tent_ into this wound and so keep it open. It has been said
that the Gaelic language removes a district more effectually from the
influence of English opinion than an ocean of three thousand miles,
and that the British public know better what is doing in New York
than what is doing in Lewis or Skye. And hence one cause, at least,
of the thick obscurity that has so long enveloped the miseries which
the poor Highlander has had to endure, and the oppressions to which he
has been subjected. The Free Church threatens to translate her wrongs
into English, and to give them currency in the general mart of opinion.
She might possibly enough be no silent spectator of conflagrations
such as those which characterised the first general improvement of
Sutherland,--nor yet of such Egyptian schemes of house-building as
that which formed part of the improvements of a later plan. She might
be somewhat apt to betray the real state of the district and thus
render laborious misrepresentation of little avail. She might effect
a diversion in the cause of the people, and shake the foundations of
the hitherto despotic power which has so long weighed them down. She
might do for Sutherland what Cobbett promised to do, but what Cobbett
had not character enough to accomplish, and what did he not live even
to attempt. A combination of circumstances have conspired to vest in a
Scottish proprietor, in this northern district, a more despotic power
than even the most absolute monarchs of the Continent possess; and it
is, perhaps, no great wonder that that proprietor should be jealous of
the introduction of an element which threatens, it may seem, materially
to lessen it. And so he struggled hard to exclude the Free Church, and,
though no member of the Establishment himself, declares warmly in its
behalf. Certain it is that from the Establishment as now constituted
he can have nothing to fear and the people nothing to hope.
After what manner may his Grace the Duke of Sutherland be most
effectually met in this matter, so that the case of toleration and
freedom of conscience may be maintained in the extensive district which
God, in his providence, has consigned to his stewardship? We are not
unacquainted with the Celtic character as developed in the Highlands
of Scotland. Highlanders, up to a certain point, are the most docile,
patient, enduring of men; but that point once passed, endurance ceases,
and the all too gentle lamb starts up an angry lion. The spirit is
stirred and maddens at the sight of the naked weapon, and that in its
headlong rush upon the enemy, discipline can neither check nor control.
Let our oppressed Highlanders of Sutherland beware. They have suffered
much; but, so far as man is the agent, their battles can be fought only
on the arena of public opinion, and on that ground which the political
field may be soon found to furnish.
Let us follow, for a little, the poor Highlanders of Sutherland to the
sea-coast. It would be easy dwelling on the terrors of their expulsion,
and multiplying facts of horror; but had there been no permanent
deterioration effected in their condition, these, all harrowing and
repulsive as they were, would have mattered less. Sutherland would
have soon recovered the burning up of a few hundred hamlets, or the
loss of a few bed-ridden old people, who would have died as certainly
under cover, though perhaps a few months later, as when exposed to the
elements in the open air. Nay, had it lost a thousand of its best men
in the way in which it lost so many at the storming of New Orleans, the
blank ere now would have been completely filled up. The calamities of
fire or of decimation even, however distressing in themselves, never
yet ruined a country; no calamity ruins a country that leaves the
surviving inhabitants to develop, in their old circumstances, their old
character and resources.
In one of the eastern eclogues of Collins, where two shepherds are
described as flying for their lives before the troops of a ruthless
invader, we see with how much of the terrible the imagination of a poet
could invest the evils of war, when aggravated by pitiless barbarity.
Fertile as that imagination was, however, there might be found new
circumstances to heighten the horrors of the scene--circumstances
beyond the reach of invention--in the retreat of the Sutherland
Highlanders from the smoking ruins of their cottages to their
allotments on the coast. We have heard of one man, named Mackay,
whose family at the time of the greater conflagration referred to by
Macleod, were all lying ill of fever, who had to carry two of his
sick children on his back a distance of twenty-five miles. We have
heard of the famished people blackening the shores, like the crew of
some vessel wrecked on an inhospitable coast, that they might sustain
life by the shell-fish and sea-weed laid bare by the ebb. Many of
their allotments, especially on the western coast, were barren in the
extreme--unsheltered by bush or tree, and exposed to the sweeping
sea-winds, and in time of tempest, to the blighting spray; and it was
found a matter of the extremest difficulty to keep the few cattle which
they had retained, from wandering, especially in the night-time, into
the better sheltered and more fertile interior. The poor animals were
intelligent enough to read a practical comment on the nature of the
change effected; and, from the harshness of the shepherds to whom the
care of the interior had been entrusted, they served materially to add
to the distress of their unhappy masters. They were getting continually
impounded; and vexatious fines, in the form of trespass-money, came
thus to be wrung from the already impoverished Highlanders. Many who
had no money to give were obliged to relieve them by depositing some of
their few portable articles of value, such as bed or bodyclothes, or,
more distressing still, watches, and rings, and pins--the only relics,
in not a few instances, of brave men whose bones were mouldering under
the fatal rampart at New Orleans, or in the arid sands of Egypt--on
that spot of proud recollection, where the invincibles of Napoleon went
down before the Highland bayonet. Their first efforts as fishermen
were what might be expected from a rural people unaccustomed to the
sea. The shores of Sutherland, for immense tracts together, are
iron-bound, and much exposed--open on the Eastern coast to the waves
of the German Ocean, and on the North and West to the long roll of the
Atlantic. There could not be more perilous seas for the unpractised
boatman to take his first lessons on; but though the casualties were
numerous and the loss of life great, many of the younger Highlanders
became expert fishermen. The experiment was harsh in the extreme,
but so far, at least, it succeeded. It lies open, however, to other
objections than those which have been urged against it on the score of
its inhumanity.