CHAPTER III.
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. 406 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 407 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 408 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 409 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 410 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 411 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 412 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. 413
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 414 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. 415