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!