SUTHERLAND AS IT WAS AND IS;[1]
OR,
HOW A COUNTRY MAY BE RUINED.
CHAPTER I.
There appeared at Paris, about five years ago, a singularly ingenious work on political economy, from the pen of the late M. de Sismondi, a writer of European reputation. The greater part of the first volume is taken up with discussions on territorial wealth, and the condition of the cultivators of the soil; and in this portion of the work there is a prominent place assigned to a subject which perhaps few Scotch readers would expect to see introduced through the medium of a foreign tongue to the people of a great continental State. We find this philosophic writer, whose works are known far beyond the limits of his language, devoting an entire essay to the case of the late Duchess of Sutherland 389 and her tenants, and forming a judgment on it very unlike the decision of political economists in our own country, who have not hesitated to characterize her great and singularly harsh experiment, whose worst effects we are but beginning to see, as at once justifiable in itself and happy in its results. It is curious to observe how deeds done as if in darkness and a corner, are beginning, after the lapse of nearly thirty years, to be proclaimed on the house-tops. The experiment of the late Duchess was not intended to be made in the eye of Europe. Its details would ill bear the exposure. When Cobbett simply referred to it only ten years ago, the noble proprietrix was startled, as if a rather delicate family secret was on the eve of being divulged; and yet nothing seems more evident now than that civilised man all over the world is to be made aware of how the experiment was accomplished, and what it is ultimately to produce. It must be obvious, further, that the infatuation of the present proprietor, in virtually setting aside the Toleration Act on his property, must have the effect of spreading the knowledge of it all the more widely, and of rendering its results much more disastrous than they could have possibly been of themselves.
In a time of quiet and good order, when law, whether in the right or the wrong, is all-potent in enforcing its findings, the argument which the philosophic Frenchman employs in behalf of the ejected tenantry of Sutherland, is an argument 390 at which proprietors may afford to smile. In a time of revolution, however, when lands change their owners, and old families give place to new ones, it might be found somewhat formidable,––sufficiently so, at least, to lead a wise proprietor in an unsettled age rather to conciliate than oppress and irritate the class who would be able in such circumstances to urge it with most effect. It is not easy doing justice in a few sentences to the facts and reasonings of an elaborate essay; but the line of the argument runs somewhat thus.
Under the old Celtic tenures––the only tenures, be it remembered, through which the lords of Sutherland derive their rights to their lands––the Klaan, or children of the soil, were the proprietors of the soil: ‘the whole of Sutherland,’ says Sismondi, belonged to ‘the men of Sutherland.’ Their chief was their monarch, and a very absolute monarch he was. ‘He gave the different tacks of land to his officers, or took them away from them, according as they showed themselves more or less useful in war. But though he could thus, in a military sense, reward or punish the clan, he could not diminish in the least the property of the clan itself;’––he was a chief, not a proprietor, and had ‘no more right to expel from their homes the inhabitants of his county, than a king to expel from his country the inhabitants of his kingdom.’ ‘Now, the Gaelic tenant,’ continues the Frenchman, ‘has never been conquered; nor did he forfeit, on any after occasion, the rights which he originally possessed;’––in point of right, he is still a co-proprietor with his captain. To a Scotchman acquainted with the law of property as it has existed among us, in even the Highlands, for the last century, and everywhere else for at least two centuries more, the view may seem extreme; not so, however, to a native of the Continent, in many parts of which prescription and custom are found ranged, not on the side of the chief, but on that of the vassal. ‘Switzerland,’ 391 says Sismondi, ‘which in so many respects resembles Scotland––in its lakes––its mountains––its climate––and the character, manners, and habits of its children––was likewise at the same period parcelled out among a small number of lords. If the Counts of Kyburgh, of Lentzburg, of Hapsburg, and of Gruyeres, had been protected by the English laws, they would find themselves at the present day precisely in the condition in which the Earls of Sutherland were twenty years ago. Some of them would perhaps have had the same taste for improvements, and several republics would have been expelled from the Alps, to make room for flocks of sheep.’ ‘But while the law has given to the Swiss peasant a guarantee of perpetuity, it is to the Scottish laird that it has extended this guarantee in the British empire, leaving the peasant in a precarious situation.’ ‘The clan––recognised at first by the captain, whom they followed in war and obeyed for their common advantage, as his friends and relations, then as his soldiers, then as his vassals, then as his farmers––he has come finally to regard as hired labourers, whom he may perchance allow to remain on the soil of their common country for his own advantage, but whom he has the power to expel so soon as he no longer finds it for his interest to keep them.’
Arguments like those of Sismondi, however much their force may be felt on the Continent, could be formidable at home, as we have said, in only a time of revolution, when the very foundations of society would be unfixed, and opinion set loose, to pull down or reconstruct at pleasure. But it is surely not uninteresting to mark how, in the course of events, that very law of England which, in the view of the Frenchman, has done the Highland peasant so much less, and the Highland chief so much more than justice, is bidding fair, in the case of Sutherland at least, to carry its rude equalizing remedy along with it. Between the years 1811 and 1820, fifteen thousand inhabitants of this 392 northern district were ejected from their snug inland farms, by means for which we would in vain seek a precedent, except, perchance, in the history of the Irish massacre. But though the interior of the county was thus improved into a desert, in which there are many thousands of sheep, but few human habitations, let it not be supposed by the reader that its general population, was in any degree lessened. So far was this from being the case, that the census of 1821 showed an increase over the census of 1811 of more than two hundred; and the present population of Sutherland exceeds, by a thousand, its population before the change. The county has not been depopulated––its population has been merely arranged after a new fashion. The late Duchess found it spread equally over the interior and the sea-coast, and in very comfortable circumstances;––she left it compressed into a wretched selvage of poverty and suffering, that fringes the county on its eastern and western shores. And the law which enabled her to make such an arrangement, maugre the ancient rights of the poor Highlander, is now on the eve of stepping in, in its own clumsy way, to make her family pay the penalty. The evil of a poor-law can be no longer averted from Scotland. However much we may dislike compulsory assessment for the support of our poor, it can be no longer avoided. Our aristocracy have been working hard for it during the whole of the present century, and a little longer; the disruption of the Scottish Church, as the last in a series of events, all of which have tended towards it, has rendered it inevitable. Let the evidence of the present commissioners on the subject be what it may, it cannot be of a kind suited to show that if England should have a poor-law, Scotland should have none. The southern kingdom must and will give us a poor-law; and then shall the selvage of deep poverty which fringes the sea-coasts of Sutherland avenge on the titled proprietor of the county both his mother’s error and 393 his own. If our British laws, unlike those of Switzerland, failed miserably in her day in protecting the vassal, they will more than fail, in those of her successor, in protecting the lord. Our political economists shall have an opportunity of reducing their arguments regarding the improvements in Sutherland into a few arithmetical terms, which the merest tyro will be able to grapple with.
We find a similar case thus strongly stated by Cobbett in his Northern Tour, and in connection with a well-known name:––‘Sir James Graham has his estate lying off this road to the left. He has not been clearing his estate––the poor-law would not let him do that; but he has been clearing off the small farms, and making them into large ones, which he had a right to do, because it is he himself that is finally to endure the consequences of that: he has a right to do that; and those who are made indigent in consequence of his so doing, have a right to demand a maintenance out of the land, according to the Act of the 43d of Elizabeth, which gave the people a COMPENSATION for the loss of the tithes and church lands which had been taken away by the aristocracy in the reigns of the Tudors. If Sir James Graham choose to mould his fine and large estate into immense farms, and to break up numerous happy families in the middle rank of life, and to expose them all to the necessity of coming and demanding sustenance from his estate; if he choose to be surrounded by masses of persons in this state, he shall not call them paupers, for that insolent term is not to be found in the compensation-laws of Elizabeth; if he choose to be surrounded by swarms of beings of this description, with feelings in their bosoms towards him such as I need not describe,––if he choose this, his RIGHT certainly extends thus far; but I tell him that he has no right to say to any man born in his parishes, “You shall not be here, and you shall not have a maintenance off these lands.’” 394
There is but poor comfort, however, to know, when one sees a country ruined, that the perpetrators of the mischief have not ruined it to their own advantage. We purpose showing how signal in the case of Sutherland this ruin has been, and how very extreme the infatuation which continues to possess its hereditary lord. We are old enough to remember the county in its original state, when it was at once the happiest and one of the most exemplary districts in Scotland, and passed, at two several periods, a considerable time among its hills; we are not unacquainted with it now, nor with its melancholy and dejected people, that wear out life in their comfortless cottages on the sea-shore. The problem solved in this remote district of the kingdom is not at all unworthy the attention which it seems but beginning to draw, but which is already not restricted to one kingdom, or even one continent.