The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign / Why It Exists, and How It May Be Extinguished

by Henry Charles Carey

The reader will now be pleased to recollect that the production of food, flax, cotton, and other raw commodities requires hard labour and exposure, and it is for such labour men are fitted—that the conversion of food, flax, and cotton into cloth requires little exertion and is unattended with exposure, and is therefore especially fitted for the weaker sex—and that when the work of conversion is monopolized by people who live at a distance from the place of production, the woman and the child must be driven to the labour of the field; and therefore it is that we see the women and the children of Jamaica and Carolina, of Portugal and Turkey, of India and of Ireland, compelled to remain idle or to cultivate the land, because of the existence of a system which denies to all places in the world but one the power to bring the consumer to the side of the producer. It was time for woman to take up the cause of her sex, and it may be hoped that she will prosecute the inquiry into the causes of the demoralization and degradation of the women of so large a portion of the world, until she shall succeed in extirpating the system so long since denounced by the greatest of all economists, as "a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of man [and woman] kind."

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SCOTLAND.

Centralization tends everywhere to the exhaustion of the land, and to its consolidation in fewer hands, and with every step in this direction man becomes less and less free to determine for whom he will work and what shall be his reward. That such has been the tendency in Jamaica, India, and Ireland, has been shown, and it is now proposed to show that the same tendency exists in Scotland, the Northern part of which has become exclusively agricultural as even its home manufactures have passed away, and must look to a distance for a market for all its products, involving, of course, a necessity for exhausting the land.

The Highland tacksman, originally co-proprietor of the land of the clan, became at first vassal, then hereditary tenant, then tenant at will, and thus the property in land passed from the many into the hands of the few, who have not hesitated to avail themselves of the power so obtained. The payment of money rents was claimed by them eighty years since, but the amount was very small, as is shown by the following passage from a work of that date:—

"The rent of these lands is very trifling compared to their extent, but compared to the number of mouths which a farm maintains, it will perhaps be found that a plot of land in the highlands of Scotland feeds ten times more people than a farm of the same extent in the richest provinces."—Stewart's Political Economy, vol. i. chap. xvi.

Of some of the proceedings of the present century the following sketch is furnished by a recent English writer:—

"Even in the beginning of the 19th century the rental imposts were very small, as is shown by the work of Mr. Lock, (1820,) the steward of the Countess of Sutherland, who directed the improvements on her estates. He gives for instance the rental of the Kintradawell estate for 1811, from which it appears that up to then, every family was obliged to pay a yearly impost of a few shillings in money, a few fowls, and some days' work, at the highest.

"It was only after 1811 that the ultimate and real usurpation was enacted, the forcible, transformation of clan-property into the private property, in the modern sense, of the chief. The person who stood at the head of this economical revolution, was the Countess of Sutherland and Marchioness of Stafford.

"Let us first state that the ancestors of the marchioness were the 'great men' of the most northern part of Scotland, of very near three-quarters of Sutherlandshire. This county is more extensive than many French departments or small German principalities. When the Countess of Sutherland inherited these estates, which she afterward brought to her husband, the Marquis of Stafford, afterward Duke of Sutherland, the population of them was already reduced to 15,000. The countess resolved upon a radical economical reform, and determined upon transforming the whole tract of country into sheep-walks. From 1814 to 1820, these 15,000 inhabitants, about 3000 families, were systematically expelled and exterminated. All their villages were demolished and burned down, and all their fields converted into pasturage. British soldiers were commanded for this execution, and came to blows with the natives. An old woman refusing to quit her hut, was burned in the flames of it. Thus the countess appropriated to herself seven hundred and ninety-four thousand acres of land, which from time immemorial had belonged to the clan. She allotted to the expelled natives about six thousand acres—two acres per family. These six thousand acres had been lying waste until then, and brought no revenue to the proprietors. The countess was generous enough to sell the acre at 2s. 6d. on an average, to the clan-men who for centuries past had shed their blood for her family. The whole of the unrightfully appropriated clan-land she divided into twenty-nine large sheep-farms, each of them inhabited by one single family, mostly English farm-labourers; and in 1821 the 15,000 Gaels had already been superseded by 131,000 sheep.