In his work on the Nationalisation of Land, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace,
in the chapter on “Landlordism in Scotland,” says to the English
people:--
“The facts stated in this chapter will possess, I feel sure, for many
Englishmen, an almost startling novelty; the tale of oppression and
cruelty they reveal reads like one of those hideous stories peculiar
to the dark ages, rather than a simple record of events happening upon
our own land and within the memory of the present generation. For a
parallel to this monstrous power of the landowner, under which life
and property are entirely at his mercy, we must go back to mediæval,
or to the days when serfdom not having been abolished, the Russian
noble was armed with despotic authority; while the more pitiful results
of this landlord tyranny, the wide devastation of cultivated lands,
the heartless burning of houses, the reckless creation of pauperism
and misery, out of well-being and contentment, could only be expected
under the rule of Turkish Sultans or greedy and cruel Pashas. Yet these
cruel deeds have been perpetrated in one of the most beautiful portions
of our native land. They are not the work of uncultured barbarians
or of fanatic Moslems, but of so-called civilised and Christian men;
and--worst feature of all--they are not due to any high-handed exercise
of power beyond the law, but are strictly legal, are in many cases the
acts of members of the Legislature itself, and, notwithstanding that
they have been repeatedly made known for at least sixty years past,
no steps have been taken, or are even proposed to be taken, by the
Legislature to prevent them for the future! Surely it is time that
the people of England should declare that such things shall no longer
exist--that the rich shall no longer have such legal power to oppress
the poor--that the land shall be free for all who are willing to pay a
fair value for its use--and, as this is not possible under landlordism,
that landlordism shall be abolished....
“The general results of the system of modern landlordism in Scotland
are not less painful than the hardship and misery brought upon
individual sufferers. The earlier improvers, who drove the peasants
from their sheltered valleys to the exposed sea-coast, in order to
make room for sheep and sheep farmers, pleaded erroneously the public
benefit as the justification of their conduct. They maintained that
more food and clothing would be produced by the new system, and that
the people themselves would have the advantage of the produce of
the sea as well as that of the land for their support. The result,
however, proved them to be mistaken, for henceforth the cry of Highland
destitution began to be heard, culminating at intervals into actual
famines, like that of 1836-37, when £70,000 were distributed to keep
the Highlanders from death by starvation. ... just as in Ireland, there
was abundance of land capable of cultivation, but the people were
driven to the coast and to the towns to make way for sheep, and cattle,
and lowland farmers; and when the barren and inhospitable tracts
allotted to them became overcrowded, they were told to emigrate. As the
Rev. J. Macleod says:--“By the clearances one part is depopulation and
the other overpopulated; the people are gathered into villages where
there is no steady employment for them, where idleness has its baneful
influence and lands them in penury and want.
“The actual effect of this system of eviction and emigration--of
banishing the native of the soil and giving it to the stranger--is
shown in the steady increase of poverty indicated by the amount spent
for the relief of the poor having increased from less than £300,000 in
1846 to more than £900,000 now; while in the same period the population
has only increased from 2,770,000 to 3,627,000, so that pauperism has
grown about nine times faster than population!... The fact that a whole
population could be driven from their homes like cattle at the will
of a landlord, and that the Government which taxed them, and for whom
they freely shed their blood on the battle-field, neither would nor
could protect them from cruel interference with their personal liberty,
is surely the most convincing and most absolute demonstration of the
incompatibility of landlordism with the elementary rights of a free
people.
“As if, however, to prove this still more clearly, and to show how
absolutely incompatible with the well-being of the community is modern
landlordism, the great lords of the soil in Scotland have for the
last twenty years or more been systematically laying waste enormous
areas of land for purposes of sport, just as the Norman Conqueror laid
waste the area of the New Forest for similar purposes. At the present
time, more than two million acres of Scottish soil are devoted to the
preservation of deer alone--an area larger than the entire Counties
of Kent and Surrey combined. Glen Tilt Forest includes 100,000 acres;
the Black Mount is sixty miles in circumference; and Ben Alder Forest
is fifteen miles long by seven broad. On many of these forests there
is the finest pasture in Scotland, while the valleys would support a
considerable population of small farmers, yet all this land is devoted
to the sport of the wealthy, farms being destroyed, houses pulled
down, and men, sheep, and cattle all banished to create a wilderness
for the deer-stalkers! At the same time the whole people of England
are shut out from many of the grandest and most interesting scenes of
their native land, gamekeepers and watchers forbidding the tourist or
naturalist to trespass on some of the wildest Scotch mountains.
“Now, when we remember that the right to a property in these unenclosed
mountains was most unjustly given to the representatives of the
Highland chiefs little more than a century ago, and that they and their
successors have grossly abused their power ever since, it is surely
time to assert those fundamental maxims of jurisprudence which state
that--“No man can have a vested right in the misfortunes and woes
of his country,” and that “the Sovereign ought not to allow either
communities or private individuals to acquire large tracts of land
in order to leave it uncultivated.” If the oft-repeated maxim that
“property has its duties as well as its rights” is not altogether a
mockery, then we maintain that in this case the _total_ neglect of
all the duties devolving on the owners of these vast tracts of land
affords ample reason why the State should take possession of them for
the public benefit. A landlord government will, of course, never do
this till the people declare unmistakably that it must be done. To
such a government the rights of property are _sacred_, while those of
their fellow-citizens are of comparatively little moment; but we feel
sure that when the people fully know and understand the doings of the
landlords of Scotland, the reckless destruction of homesteads, and the
silent sufferings of the brave Highlanders, they will make their will
known, and, when they do so, that _will_ must soon be embodied into
law.”
After quoting the opinion of the Rev. Dr. John Kennedy of Dingwall,
given at length on other pages, Mr. Wallace next quotes from an
article in the _Westminster Review_, in 1868. “The Gaels,” this writer
says, “rooted from the dawn of history on the slopes of the northern
mountains, have been thinned out and thrown away like young turnips
too thickly planted. Noble gentlemen and noble ladies have shown a
flintiness of heart and a meanness of detail in carrying out their
clearings, upon which it is revolting to dwell; and after all, are
the evils of over-population cured? Does not the disease still spring
up under the very torture of the knife? Are not the crofts slowly and
silently taken at every opportunity out of the hands of the peasantry?
When a Highlander has to leave his hut there is now no resting-place
for him save the cellars or attics of the closes of Glasgow, or some
other large centre of employment; it has been noticed that the poor
Gael is even more liable than the Irishman to sink under the debasement
in which he is then immersed.” The same writer holds:--“No error could
be grosser than that of reviewing the chiefs as unlimited proprietors
not only of the land, but of the whole territory of the mountain, lake,
river, and sea-shore, held and won during hundreds of years by the
broad swords of the clansmen. Could any Maclean admit, even in a dream,
that his chief could clear Mull of all the Macleans and replace them
with Campbells; or the Mackintosh people his lands with Macdonalds, and
drive away his own race, any more than Louis Napoleon could evict all
the population of France and supply their place with English and German
colonists?” Yet this very power and right the English Government, in
its aristocratic selfishness, bestowed upon the chiefs, when, after
the great rebellion of 1745, it took away their privileges of war and
criminal jurisdiction, and endeavoured to assimilate them to the nobles
and great landowners of England. The rights of the clansmen were left
entirely out of consideration.[28]
[28] _Land Nationalisation, its Necessities and Aims; being a
Comparison of the System of Landlord and Tenant with that of Occupying
Ownership, in their influence on the well-being of the People_, by
Alfred Russel Wallace, author of “The Malay Archipelago,” “Island
Life,” &c. London: Trübner & Co., 1882.