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, of course, to the deer forest country, it consists of some acres of cultivated land with very often a very large common outrun in moorland and hills for the township. So that when the uninitiated see pictures of deer forests that are said to be fit for small-holding purposes, they will now understand and suppress a smile. If only men could realise what can be produced out of what might appear to be the most impossible places! It has been said that if you give a man the secure possession of a rock, he will turn it into a garden, and one has only got to visit the Highlands to see how a hard-working and industrious peasantry have sought in this way with success to fight against the ills with which they were confronted by an ungrateful landlordism. One of the worst features of the “Clearances” was the method in which they were perpetrated. Examples will be found in these pages of sick people being carried out of their houses, and left on the wayside when their houses were in flames, and the present locations of some of the crofters are grim reminders of the extreme privations suffered by the people who settled in them. Perched on the rocks and moorlands, these people were driven from the inland valleys, and had to build themselves shelters from the turf and stones of the hillside, and carve out of barren land with enormous industry, and under the constant menace of famine, the miserable patches of land which remain to-day as evidence of their labours. The others were forced to emigrate, and the sufferings of those who survived well-nigh baffle description. The horrors of the small emigrant sailing ships of these days, and particularly on these occasions when people were packed together regardless of comfort and the decencies of life, and without sufficient food, were equalled only by the terrible privations and struggle for existence that awaited those who landed on the frozen lands of the north of Canada, to be assailed by hostile Indians, the rigours of the weather, and the desolation of an unfriendly country. It is altogether a tale of barbarous action unequalled in the annals of agrarian crime.