[17] _The Days of the Fathers in Ross-shire_, 1861, pp. 15, 16.
Dr. John Kennedy, the highly, deservedly respected, and eminent
minister of Dingwall so long resident among the scenes which he
describes, and so intimately acquainted with all classes of the people
in his native county of Ross, informs us that it was at a time when
the Highlanders became most distinguished as the most peaceable and
virtuous peasantry in the world--“at the climax of their spiritual
prosperity,” in Ross-shire--“that the cruel work of eviction began to
lay waste the hill-sides and the plains of the North. Swayed by the
example of the godly among them, and away from the influences by which
less sequestered localities were corrupted, the body of the people in
the Highlands became distinguished as the most peaceable and virtuous
peasantry in Britain. It was just then that they began to be driven off
by ungodly oppressors, to clear their native soil for strangers, red
deer, and sheep. With few exceptions, the owners of the soil began to
act as if they were also owners of the people, and, disposed to regard
them as the vilest part of their estate, they treated them without
respect to the requirements of righteousness or to the dictates of
mercy. Without the inducement of gain, in the recklessness of cruelty,
families by hundreds were driven across the sea, or gathered, as the
sweepings of the hill-sides, into wretched hamlets on the shore. By
wholesale evictions, wastes were formed for the red deer, that the
gentry of the nineteenth century might indulge in the sports of the
savages of three centuries before. Of many happy households sheep
walks were cleared for strangers, who, fattening amidst the ruined
homes of the banished, corrupted by their example the few natives who
remained. Meanwhile their rulers, while deaf to the Highlanders’ cry of
oppression, were wasting their sinews and their blood on battle-fields,
that, but for their prowess and their bravery, would have been the
scene of their country’s defeat.”
_INVERNESS-SHIRE._