‘Every man Jack of them! A set of lazy wretches! Why should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps a great deal more?’
‘But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M’Dougall, the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy instead of one. In my life I never met such people! Yes, I will say such real gentlemen and ladies; so sensible and polite; so much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so poor!’
‘And so lazy!’ said Duncan; ‘whereas in the colonies, where I have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate settlers.’
‘How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then?’ asked Kate.
‘Because in the colonies they can always better their condition by industry.’
‘But why not help them to better their condition at home? why not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour?’
‘Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and after all it would not pay,’ replied M’Dougall....
‘But surely, surely,’ she continued, ‘money is not the chief end of man.... I can’t argue’ (Kate goes on), ‘but my whole soul tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god Money is an idolatry that must perish; that the only way for a man truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M’Donald, I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the people.’
‘Might I ask your text, fair preacher?’ inquired M’Dougall, with an admiring smile.
‘Why,’ said Kate, ‘the text is the only thing about it I am certain would be good; and the one I would choose rings in my ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their very selves.’