LOCHABER NO MORE!
For a century and a half claymore and dirk have rusted all over the Highlands, where ben and glen echo the report of breechloading guns, and the gaff gleams and the reel whirrs by loch or river. But peace, too, has her cruelties; and some of the misery once brought into mountain glens by fierce raiders came again through spectacled and moralising economists, who with more or less good intentions displaced, shuffled, and banished a population deeply rooted in love of their Lochabers. Dr. Johnson foresaw in part what would result from the change of patriarchal community to business relations between dependants of whose inveterate troubles he was ignorant, and chiefs whom he found on the point of degenerating into “rapacious landlords.” Another tourist, a generation later, remarked that clan loyalty hung much on the fact of the people being tenants-at-will, and that long leases would put an end to the old dependence. Johnson was not so shrewd in judging that the people would haste to expatriate themselves as soon as they saw a way open to lands “less bleak and barren than their own.” The Celt’s love for his home and his hatred for change made the course of improvement to run rougher here than in the Lowlands. And the Highland “improvements,” for which the ground was cleared by bayonets, brought little good to many of the people. They found it harder to pay rent in money than in blood and affection. Their chiefs proved as often selfishly exacting as the clansmen ignorant and obstinate. The white-faced sheep that nibbled away the romance of the Highlands were more the charge or the profit of intruding Sassenachs. Since the price of wool went down, sheep have much given way to deer, that profit no one but the owners of high-rented shootings, and keep cottars sitting up all night to guard their poor fields, preserved for the sport of absentee lords or purse-proud strangers, whose worst service to the country has been turning the free son of the mist into a well-fed menial, broken in to touch his hat for the tips he levies in lieu of blackmail. It is stated that the demoralescent Celt does not so much object to deer forests, as barring out his old enemy the sheep farmer, and as bringing into the country a class of men who spend freely, sometimes in the way of bribes given to secure good sport among herds that to a sportsman of Colquhoun’s stamp seemed almost as tame as sheep.
The Highlander asked for bread, and his masters gave him sometimes stones and sometimes sovereigns. Not that his old masters had done much better for him, minus the sovereigns. If the Highlands had once a golden age, that was, as in other quarters of the world, before the day of facts and figures. I had gathered some thorny points to prick the bubble of an ideal state of society before the coming of the Sassenach; but the reader will find this better done in the last chapter of Mr. Andrew Lang’s Companions of Pickle, showing what tyranny and savagery held together in that good old time of romance. The late Duke of Argyll’s work on the former condition of Scotland, though written with a natural bias, is not to be sneered at by sentimentalists. And if readers wish evidence at first hand they may take a tour with Pennant or any of the early observers, who will show them what it was to be counted among the live stock of a paternal chief.
THE FALLS OF SPEAN, INVERNESS-SHIRE
The sentimental quarrel is with civilisation, which all along has proceeded by ascertaining and enclosing rights of property. Socialism, which to us sounds new, is of course old as the hills, that once, after a manner, belonged to a whole clan in their different degrees of advantage, till some other sept could effectually evict them by fire and sword. There never was a time when the leader of the conquering troop did not get the best of what was going. The land held in his name he was in the way of giving out in large portions to his captains and kinsfolk, the “tacksmen” of Highland farms, who in turn sublet small holdings to the inferior clansmen, rent being paid in kind or in service to superiors, often arbitrarily oppressive, as seemed their right. The shortcomings of this economy were made up for by plunderings of neighbours, a feature not usually put into the foreground of Arcadian pictures, but so common and so perilous as to keep a regular check on prolific population. There was a general community of interests, of manners, of sympathy which smoothed down social differences. The humblest clansman, born or adopted into the guild, expected to be provided for somehow or other, while the chief’s power and dignity depended on the number of “pretty men” he could keep about him. When the resources of plunder and blackmail were cut off, the mass of Highlanders had to live by cultivating small patches of poor land, as they did wastefully, idly, and unprofitably, usually on the old system of “runrig,” by which a joint farm was tilled in common, but each ridge had its own occupier. As a rule they were practically tenants-at-will, holding directly or indirectly from the head of the clan.
Badly off as they were, the tenants obstinately withstood almost all attempts towards a better state of things. The improvements that in a century changed the face of Scotland and multiplied its wealth, came from lairds won over to economic science; they could hardly have been carried out but by men who had risen above prejudices and were in a position to risk capital in experiments. In the Highlands, more obstinately than in the Lowlands, there was a deadlock between the ignorant conservatism of the lower class and the enlightened self-interest of the upper, who were sometimes so imperfectly enlightened as to show grasping haste to be rich, whatever became of those born to dependence on their fathers. On the other hand, unenlightened selfishness, good neither for man nor beast, came as natural to crofter as to laird, among a race noted for what Matthew Arnold calls its “passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.”
These seem to be moral and historical facts. Then come the considerations of a science in our day much decried for dismal. I am not going to enter into vexed economical controversies. The subject of the Highland clearances offers a good many considerations on both sides. Sentimental arguments are nearly all on the side of the evicted; but the evictors have much to say for themselves. The slovenly agriculture of the clans had to be schooled sooner or later. The pig-headed prejudices of those backward cultivators appears in the fact that their now indispensable potato was almost forced upon them. The sheep farming that ousted scanty and precarious crops paid best on a large scale. There are mountain wildernesses fit not even for sheep-walks, where deer-runs make as profitable employment as may be. It proved often a kind cruelty that drove thousands from their half-starved life to a more roomy lot in pastures new. But for this movement the Highlands would have shared the full horrors of the Irish famine, felt here also to some extent after the potato disease of 1846. The landlord need not be blamed for taking in cash an equivalent of the services and the personal loyalty lost to him through operation of law. Small tenants often did him as little good as for themselves. The gist of the whole question, indeed, is whether the land thrives best in the hands of any one grade of occupier, or whether there is not more room for all when large, middle-sized, and small proprietors or tenants are mingled as in other walks of life. That question I leave to those who have much to say on it. But this may be said by the weakest statistician, that the changes introduced into the Highlands were often carried out with a haste and harshness specially painful in the case of a race so inapt at adapting itself to new circumstances, whose poor household gods, like Charles Lamb’s, “plant a terrible fixed foot,” and “do not willingly seek Lavinian shores.” So, as one can now indulge Jacobite sentiment without practical treason to the House of Hanover, the reader may be invited to join chorus in the wail of “Lochaber no more!” so often raised in Highland glens.
That pathetic lament seems to date back to Dutch William’s days, when it is suspected for the work of an English officer, though another account gives it a becomingly native origin. Emigration from the Highlands, voluntary or enforced, set in before Culloden. The Hudson’s Bay Company had recruited its servants from hardy Orkneymen and Hebridean islanders. Between 1715 and 1745, while the ill-used Scots of Ulster were knitting a chain of British outposts along the Alleghanies, philanthropic General Oglethorpe took out a number of Highlanders to his Georgia colony; others settled in North Carolina and in New York; and it is said that some of these exiles still kept up their Gaelic a generation ago, though it does not appear that the Stars and Stripes afford a pattern for tartans. When Aberdeen bailies connived at the kidnapping of children for the “plantations,” arbitrary chiefs like old Lovat did not stick at getting rid of troublesome vassals by selling them into the same servitude, to which Covenanters and other rebels had been transported in the previous century. Proscribed rebels naturally sought refuge in the New World, where rebellion of another stamp would soon be in fashion; then it is notable that these exiles were apt to take the side of the king de facto.
