We have exhibited the Sutherland Highlanders to the reader as
they exhibited themselves to their country, when, as Christian
soldiers,--men, like the old chivalrous knight, 'without fear
or reproach,'--they fought its battles and reflected honour on
its name. Interest must attach to the manner in which men of so
high a moral tone were reared; and a sketch drawn from personal
observation of the interior of Sutherland eight-and-twenty years
ago, may be found to throw very direct light on the subject.
To know what the district once was, and what it is now, is to
know with peculiar emphasis the meaning of the sacred text, 'One
sinner destroyeth much good.'
The eye of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little
to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had
its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch
and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring
cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty;
but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis
in which Goldsmith sums up his description of Italy,--the only growth
that had _not_ dwindled in it was man. The cottage in which we resided
with an aged relative and his two stalwart sons, might be regarded as
an average specimen of the human dwellings of the district. It was a
low long building of turf, consisting of four apartments on the ground
floor,--the one stuck on to the end of the other, and threaded
together by a passage that connected the whole. From the nearest hill
the cottage reminded one of a huge black snail crawling up the slope.
The largest of the four apartments was occupied by the master's six
milk cows; the next in size was the ha', or sitting-room,--a rude but
not uncomfortable apartment, with the fire on a large flat stone in
the middle of the floor. The apartment adjoining was decently
partitioned into sleeping places; while the fourth and last in the
range--more neatly fitted up than any of the others, with furniture
the workmanship of a bred carpenter, a small bookcase containing from
forty to fifty volumes, and a box-bed of deal--was known as the
stranger's room. There was a straggling group of buildings outside, in
the same humble style,--a stable, a barn, a hay-barn, a sheep-pen with
a shed attached, and a milk-house; and stretching around the whole lay
the farm,--a straggling patch of corn land of from twelve to fifteen
acres in extent, that, from its extremely irregular outline, and the
eccentric forms of the parti-coloured divisions into which it was
parcelled, reminded one of a coloured map. Encircling all was a wide
sea of heath studded with huge stones--the pasturage land of the
farmer for his sheep and cattle--which swept away on every hand to
other islands of corn and other groups of cottages, identical in
appearance with the corn land and the cottages described.
We remember that, coming from a seaport town, where, to give to
property the average security, the usual means had to be resorted to,
we were first struck by finding that the door of our relative's
cottage, in this inland parish, was furnished with neither lock nor
bar. Like that of the hermit in the ballad, it opened with a latch;
but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not because there were no
stores under the humble roof to demand the care of the master. It was
because that, at this comparatively recent period, the crime of theft
was unknown in the district. The philosophic Biot, when occupied in
measuring the time of the seconds pendulum, resided for several months
in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles
of France,--his imagination bearing about, if we may so speak, the
stains of the guillotine,--the state of trustful security in which he
found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. 'Here,' he
exclaimed, 'during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been
devouring herself, the door of the house I inhabit has remained open
day and night.' The whole interior of Sutherland was, at the time of
which we write, in a similar condition. It did not surprise us that
the old man, a person of deep piety, regularly assembled his household
night and morning for the purpose of family worship, and led in their
devotions: we had seen many such instances in the low country. But it
did somewhat surprise us to find the practice universal in the parish.
In every family had the worship of God been set up. One could not pass
an inhabited cottage in the evening, from which the voice of psalms
was not to be heard. On Sabbath morning, the whole population might be
seen wending their way, attired in their best, along the blind
half-green paths in the heath, to the parish church. The minister was
greatly beloved, and all attended his ministrations. We still remember
the intense joy which his visits used to impart to the household of
our relative. This worthy clergyman still lives, though the
infirmities of a stage of life very advanced have gathered round him;
and at the late disruption, choosing his side, and little heeding,
when duty called, that his strength had been wasted in the labour of
forty years, and that he could now do little more than testify and
suffer in behalf of his principles, he resigned his hold of the
temporalities as minister of Dornoch, and cast in his lot with his
brethren of the Free Church. And his venerable successor in Lairg, a
man equally beloved and exemplary, and now on the verge of his
eightieth year, has acted a similar part. Had such sacrifices been
made in such circumstances for other than the cause of Christ--had
they been made under some such romantic delusion as misled of old the
followers of the Stuarts--the world would have appreciated them
highly; but there is an element in evangelism which repels admiration,
unless it be an admiration grounded in faith and love; and the appeal
in such cases must lie, therefore, not to the justice of the world,
but to the judgment-seat of God. We may remind the reader, in passing,
that it was the venerable minister of Lairg who, on quitting his manse
on the Disruption, was received by his widowed daughter into a cottage
held of the Duke of Sutherland, and that for this grave crime--the
crime of sheltering her aged father--the daughter was threatened with
ejection by one of the Duke's creatures. Is it not somewhat necessary
that the breath of public opinion should be let in on this remote
country? But we digress.
A peculiar stillness seemed to rest over this Highland parish on the
Sabbath. The family devotions of the morning, the journey to and from
church, and the public services there, occupied fully two-thirds of
the day. But there remained the evening, and of it the earlier part
was spent in what are known in the north country as fellowship
meetings. One of these was held regularly in the 'ha'' of our
relative. From fifteen to twenty people, inclusive of the family, met
for the purposes of social prayer and religious conversation, and the
time passed profitably away, till the closing night summoned the
members of the meeting to their respective homes and their family
duties. We marked an interesting peculiarity in the devotions of our
relative. He was, as we have said, an old man, and had worshipped in
his family long ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic translation of the Scriptures
had been introduced into the county; and as he was supplied in those
days with only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only
Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the
time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into
their native tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready
fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic
work from which he was reading. It might have been supposed, however,
that the introduction of Dr. Stewart's edition would have rendered
this mode of translation obsolete; but in this and many other families
such was not the case. The old man's Gaelic was _Sutherlandshire
Gaelic_. His family understood it better, in consequence, than any
other; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible, _ad
aperturam libri_, many years after the Gaelic edition had been spread
over the county. The fact that such a practice should have been common
in Sutherland, says something surely for the intelligence of the
family patriarchs of the district. That thousands of the people who
knew the Scriptures through no other medium, should have been
intimately acquainted with the saving doctrines and witnesses of their
power (and there can be no question that such was the case), is proof
enough, at least, that it was a practice carried on with a due
perception of the scope and meaning of the sacred volume. One is too
apt to associate intelligence with the external improvements of a
country--with well-enclosed fields and whitewashed cottages; but the
association is altogether a false one. As shown by the testimony of
General Stewart of Garth, the Sutherland regiment was not only the
most eminently moral, but, as their tastes and habits demonstrated,
one of the most decidedly intellectual under the British Crown. Our
relative's cottage had, as we have said, its bookcase, and both his
sons were very intelligent men; but intelligence derived directly from
books was not general in the county; a very considerable portion of
the people understood no other language than Gaelic, and many of them
could not even read; for at this period about one-tenth of the
families of Sutherland were distant five or more miles from the
nearest school. Their characteristic intelligence was of a kind
otherwise derived: it was an intelligence drawn from these domestic
readings of the Scriptures and from the pulpit; and is referred mainly
to that profound science which even a Newton could recognise as more
important and wonderful than any of the others, but which many of the
shallower intellects of our own times deem no science at all. It was
an intelligence out of which their morality sprung; it was an
intelligence founded in earnest belief.
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 pot-herbs, such as the mugwort 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 a 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 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. We never saw scarcity in the house of our relative,
but we have seen the nettle broth in it very frequently, and the
blood-pudding oftener than once; for both dishes were especial
favourites with the Highlanders. 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 develope 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. We have never
heard the system which has depopulated this portion of the country
defended, without recurring to our two several visits to the turf
cottage in Lairg, or without feeling that the defence embodied an
essential falsehood, which time will not fail to render evident to the
apprehensions of all.
We would but fatigue our readers were we to run over half our
recollections of the interior of Sutherland. They are not all of a
serious cast. We have sat in the long autumn evenings in the cheerful
circle round the turf-fire of the ha', and have heard many a tradition
of old clan feuds pleasingly told, and many a song of the poet of the
county, Old Rob Donn, gaily sung. In our immediate neighbourhood, by
the side of a small stream--small, but not without its supply of brown
trout, speckled with crimson--there was a spot of green meadow land,
on which the young men of the neighbourhood used not unfrequently to
meet and try their vigour in throwing the stone. The stone itself had
its history. It was a ball of gneiss, round as a bullet, that had once
surmounted the gable of a small Popish chapel, of which there now
remained only a shapeless heap of stones, that scarce overtopped the
long grass amid which it lay. A few undressed flags indicated an
ancient burying-ground; and over the ruined heap, and the rude
tombstones that told no story, an ancient time-hallowed tree, coeval
with the perished building, stretched out its giant arms. Even the
sterner occupations of the farm had in their very variety a strong
smack of enjoyment. We found one of the old man's sons engaged, during
our one visit, in building an outhouse, after the primitive fashion of
the Highlands, and during our other visit, in constructing a plough.
The two main _cupples_ of the building he made of huge trees, dug out
of a neighbouring morass; they resembled somewhat the beams of a large
sloop reversed. The stones he carried from the outfield heath on a
sledge; the interstices in the walls he caulked with moss; the roof he
covered with sods. The entire erection was his workmanship, from
foundation to ridge. And such, in brief, was the history of all those
cottages in the interior of Sutherland, which the poor Highlanders so
naturally deemed their own, but from which, when set on fire and burnt
to the ground by the creatures of the proprietor, they were glad to
escape with their lives. The plough, with the exception of the iron
work, was altogether our relative's workmanship too. And such was the
history of the rude implements of rural or domestic labour which were
consumed in the burning dwellings. But we anticipate.
There is little of gaiety or enjoyment among the Highlanders of
Sutherland now. We spent a considerable time for two several years
among their thickly-clustered cottages on the eastern coast, and saw
how they live, and how it happens that when years of comparative
scarcity come on they starve. Most of them saved, when in the
interior, as we have said, a little money; but the process has been
reversed here: in every instance in which they brought their savings
to the coast-side has the fund been dissipated. Each cottage has from
half an acre to an acre and half of corn land attached to it--just
such patches as the Irish starve upon. In some places, by dint of sore
labour, the soil has been considerably improved; and all that seems
necessary to render it worth the care of a family, would be just to
increase its area some ten or twelve times. In other cases, however,
increase would be no advantage. We find it composed of a loose debris
of granitic water-rolled pebbles and ferruginous sand, that seemed
destined to perpetual barrenness. The rents, in every instance, seem
moderate; the money of the tenant flows towards the landlord in a
stream of not half the volume of that in which the money of the
landlord must flow towards the tenant when the poor-laws shall be
extended to Scotland. But no rent, in such circumstances, can be
really moderate. A clergyman, when asked to say how many of his
parishioners, in one of these coast districts, realized _less_ than
sixpence a-day, replied, that it would be a much easier matter for him
to point out how many of them realized _more_ than sixpence, as this
more fortunate class were exceedingly few. And surely no rent can be
moderate that is paid by a man who realizes less than sixpence a-day.
It is the peculiar evil produced by the change in Sutherland, that it
has consigned the population of the country to a condition in which no
rent _can_ be moderate--to a condition in which they but barely avoid
famine, when matters are at the best with them, and fall into it in
every instance in which the herring fishing, their main and most
precarious stay, partially fails, or their crops are just a little
more than usually scanty. They are in such a state, that their very
means of living are sources, not of comfort, but of distress to them.
When the fishing and their crops are comparatively abundant, they live
on the bleak edge of want; while failure in either plunges them into a
state of intense suffering. And well are these Highlanders aware of
the true character of the revolution to which they have been
subjected. Our Poor-Law Commissioners may find, in this land of
growing pauperism, thousands as poor as the people of Sutherland; but
they will find no class of the population who can so directly contrast
their present destitution with a state of comparative plenty and
enjoyment, or who, in consequence of possessing this sad ability, are
so deeply imbued with a too well-grounded and natural discontent.
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 country.