The History of the Highland Clearances 2

The History of the Highland Clearances 2

Well has my friend Mackenzie MacBride expressed it:--

 

“Ye remnant of the brave!

Who charge when the pipes are heard;

Don’t think, my lads, that you fight for your own,

’Tis but for the good of the land.

 

And when the fight is done

And you come back over the foam,

‘Well done,’ they say, ‘you are good and true,

But we cannot give you a home.

 

‘For the hill we want for the deer,

And the glen the birds enjoy,

And bad for the game is the smoke of the cot,

And the song of the crofter’s boy.’”

 

The silence with which men of that calibre met these hardships and

cruelty might well remain an enigma to one who does not know the

Highlands. They knew that for centuries their ancestors had tilled

those lands and lived free and untrammelled. By every moral law, if not

by the law of the land, they had a right to the soil which had been

defended with their own right arm and that of their ancestors. These

were the days when they were useful to the chief, who assumed some

indefinable right to the land. But the day came after the “Forty-Five”

when men were no longer assets to the chief. His territorial

jurisdiction was broken. He wanted money, not men, and the lonely

silences of the hills instead of merry laughter and prattle of children

singing graces by the wayside. And these men bore the change which

meant so much to them with patience. Why? The Highlands were permeated

then as now with a deep religious sense. They lent a willing ear to the

teachings of the ministers of the Gospel, who wielded the power of the

iron hand which left its deep impress on the social life and even the

literature of the Highlands. They regarded the minister as the stern

oracle of truth, and the strict interpreter of the meaning of the ways

of God to man. What happened was right. And a perusal of the pages that

are to follow will show what a mean use many of these ministers made

of the power which their faithful flock believed was vested in them.

These men were--with a noble exception or two--in reality the servile

tools of the “estate” whose powers they feared, and whose support they

received. In their own interests and in those of their earthly lord

and master, they assured the people that all their troubles were but

part of the punishment inflicted on them by Providence in the course

of working out their redemption! This attitude of the ministers had

another significance. In many parishes they were the only persons

who were educated enough to write, and so able to express the wrongs

which their people were called upon to endure. But their voices were

silent and their pens were idle, except, indeed, when they were used

to ennoble the character, the prestige, and the benevolence of the

evicting tyrant!

 

If they were thus comparatively passive in their “white-washing,” there

were others openly active. In Hugh Miller’s words. “Ever since the

planning of the fatal experience which ruined Sutherland, the noble

family through which it was originated and carried on, had betrayed

the utmost jealousy in having its real result 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 utmost

surveillance. If the misrepresentations of the press could have altered

the matter of fact, famine would not now 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.” And then he goes on to

say, “It has been said that the Gaelic language removed 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 so the

House of Sutherland inveigles Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, fresh from

her literary triumphs in the American environment of “Uncle Tom’s

Cabin,” with no knowledge of the Gaelic language which “separated so

effectually the district in which it was spoken” from English public

opinion, but in which language alone grievances were likely to be

expressed, to write a grovelling apology. This she does, forsooth,

in “Sunny Memories,” when the hearts and the spirits of the people

outside the circle in which she was receiving well-merited, if short,

hospitality were broken! Readers of the “Clearances” will notice

how completely Donald M’Leod, whose name every lover of nobility of

character, courage, and justice will ever honour, demolishes her

insipid table-talk. An even worse type of white-washer was James Loch,

who is now put forward as an unbiassed and disinterested observer of

the gracious benevolence and marvellous generosity of the House of

Sutherland. It was not mentioned that he was the factor for the then

Duke!

 

The most notorious of all the evictions were the Sutherlandshire

ones, and though there are many accounts of them in this volume, the

gruesomeness of which has become a bye-word, they do not tell the

whole tale. Since this question was revived during these last few

months, I have had letters from descendants of the evicted from all

over the colonies with new and conclusive proofs of the recklessness

and severity which characterised them. A factor visited a township in

western Sutherland, and went towards the house of the great grandmother

of one correspondent. He met her as she was returning from milking the

cows carrying a wooden vessel of milk. Brutally he snatched it from

her, and to use his words, “drowned for ever the fire of her hearth

with it,” and then drove her and her children to search through great

privation for some foothold on rugged ground beside the western sea.

When this factor died, his body was carried through another township.

The sympathy of the people was but slight, for they remembered his

cruelty. An old woman expressed the general, but hitherto suppressed,

feeling of the community when she said, “Cha deach am maor rìamh troimh

na bhaile cho samhach sa chaidh e an duigh” (“The factor never went

through this township so peacefully as he went to-day”).

 

If, as Hugh Miller says, there has been no lack of professional

white-washers, there has equally been no lack of testimony, straight

and true, from the hearts of the people, in bitter lamentation over

the cruelty that befel the race at the hands of mercenary landlords.

This testimony does not come from one class nor from one county. I have

shown in another place how even Dr. Johnson, who loved neither the

Scots nor their traditions, found himself “full of the old Highland

spirit, and was dissatisfied at hearing of rack rents and emigration,”

and was compelled to remark, “A rapacious chief would make a wilderness

of his estate;” how unprejudiced writers like Mrs. Grant of Laggan

bemoaned the rapacity of those who drove away the descendants of men

whom their fathers led; and how bitterly a scholar like Professor

Blackie viewed the depopulated glens where once heroes lived and

fought. The bitterest note of all, as well as the truest, is sung by

the Gaelic bards. They were of the people, and lived among them. They

knew their feelings, none better, and it was their right to express

that feeling with truth and with fearlessness in the language of the

people. And I know of no bard in any county in the Highlands who has

not vigorously denounced in some way the cruelty to which his people

were arbitrarily subjected. It was a blow to them to find that chiefs

of the old school had departed, that a change--in Gaelic, change is

the best word for death--had taken place from the spirit of the chief

who said, “I would rather drink punch in the house of my people than

be enabled by their hardships to drink claret in my own.” Well might

a good Celt of a later day have written of the new type of so-called

chief:

 

“See that you kindly use them, O man

To whom God giveth

Stewardship over them in thy short span,

Not for thy pleasure;

Woe be to them who choose for a clan

Four-footed people.”

 

Take the Islay bard. He seeks to arouse our indignation because of

glens and hillsides reft of men to work and fight and of children who

might sing to Nature and her God. Clearly his patriotic soul is sorely

burdened: the cold iron that has entered into it has made his soul

terribly bitter. “Facit indignatio versus.” When he looks around and

thinks of the days that were, his spirit is that of blood and carnage.

He describes the hills that he loves with wonderful grace of diction;

he hears a song or two--shieling songs--of marvellous beauty, and

“shieling songs contain many soft, siren strains, which were believed

to have their source in fairyland,” for their airs came from the good

folk of the hills. But these things do not tempt him long; he is soon

back again to the point that was sorest of all to him--the desolate

glens and the hillsides “left to be garrisoned by the lonely shepherd.”

Some of the poets were sportsmen like Duncan M’Intyre. Their grievance

was always against the sheep, and the lowland shepherds, who desecrated

for filthy lucre the hills which were their birthright and who spoke an

alien tongue which frightened even the echoes!

 

Deer and sporting rights (after game laws were enacted) soon became

more profitable than sheep, and it is amusing to find controversialists

of to-day attempting to show that evictions never took place on account

of deer forests. It was not the fault of the landlords that they did

not. Evictions took place for the object that was at the moment most

profitable. The Napoleonic wars made sheep runs temporarily more

profitable; but the moment there was more profit to be obtained from

sport and deer forests, then deer forests were to a large extent

substituted for sheep runs. To-day there are over three million acres

in Northern Scotland alone devoted to these preserves; and in 1892

the Deer Forest Commission scheduled over one million seven hundred

thousand acres as being fit for small-holding purposes. The casual

reader must beware, and must notice that this vast number of acres

includes grazing lands also, otherwise critics who “avowedly represent

the landlord interests” may feel aggrieved. But it will also be

remembered that evictions primarily took place for grazing purposes;

and further, that a small holding in Scotland is not quite the same

as a small holding in England. In England it consists of a number

of acres which are under cultivation; in Scotland, I am referring,