he History of the Highland Clearances 9

he History of the Highland Clearances 9

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.