The crofter is a slave not only to landlord and factor, but often to the merchant. The Englishman, when he finds the truck system far from home, cannot too strongly revile it. A report has but come from Newfoundland declaring that because of it a Newfoundlander is no more master of his own destiny than was a mediæval serf or a Southern negro in 1860. The writer need not have gone 1600 miles to the colonies to expose an evil which exists in the British Isles but 600 miles from London.[I] The Duke of Argyll regrets that it is employed in Tiree. His power as proprietor, the one power for good on his estates, stops short most unaccountably where other people might think it could be exercised to best advantage. Many Western Islanders, like Newfoundlanders, are bound hand and foot to the merchant. The latter provides them on credit with all the necessaries of life, often the poorest in quality, but always the highest in price. In return the crofter's earnings, before he has gained them, belong to the merchant, who, moreover, is at times his employer as well as his creditor. In Harris the women support their families by weaving the famous Harris cloth. To Edinburgh and London tailors it brings good profit; to them, starvation wages, paid in tea or sugar or meal. No money is in circulation on the island. Harris people have given their consent to emigrate, and then at the last moment have been kept prisoners at home because of a debt of years against them.
As we lay by the island of Scalpa, not far from Tarbert, a man came on board from one of the boats. He had a roll of cloth under his arm. He gave it to Mrs. Thomas, and asked if some one on board would buy it. As we looked at it he said nothing, but the pitiful pleading of his eyes, and their more pitiful disappointment as he turned away with his cloth, told the story. She tried to dispose of their cloth for them, Mrs. Thomas said; and we have since heard that she buys more from them than even the local merchant.
THE "DUNARA CASTLE."
The Dunara Castle finally anchored at
TARBERT.
The principal building in the village was the large white manse, half hidden in trees. A parson's first care, even if he went to the Cannibal Islands, would be, I fancy, to make himself, or have made for him at somebody else's expense, a comfortable home. There were also on the outskirts of the village two or three new, well-built cottages for men in Lady Scott's, the landlord's, direct service, and a large, excellent hotel, the only place in Tarbert where spirits could be bought. The rich may have their vices, though the poor cannot. Beyond was misery. Wherever we went in the island we found a rocky wilderness, the mountains black as I have never seen them anywhere else, their tops so bare of even soil that in the sunlight they glistened as if ice-bound. Here and there, around the lochs and sloping with the lower rocky hills, were weed-choked patches of grain and huts wreathed in smoke, their backs turned hopelessly to the road. Near Tarbert there was one burrowed out like a rabbit-hole, its thatched roof set upon the grass and weeds of the hill-side. Just below, in the loch, Lady Scott's steam-yacht came and went. Beyond, her deer forest, a range of black mountains, stretched for miles. Within sight and low on the water were the thick woods, in the heart of which stands her shooting-lodge. The contrast gave the last bitter touch to the condition of the people. They starve on tiny crofts, their only homes; their landlord holds broad acres as play-ground for a few short weeks.
The hovels were as cheerless within as without. I do not know why it is that one takes liberties with the poor which one would not dare take with the rich. It is no small evil of poverty that it is everybody's privilege to stare at it. The people of Harris are hospitable, and receive the stranger with courtesy, but you can see that they resent the intrusion. It is not, I fear, to our credit that curiosity got the better of our scruples. We knocked at a cottage door, one Sunday afternoon, J——, as an excuse, asking for a light. As we drew near we heard the voice of some one reading aloud. Now it was silenced, and a tall old man in his shirt-sleeves came to the door with an open Bible in his hands. Within, on the left, was the dwelling-room of the household; on the right, the stable, cattle, and family share the only entrance. Into the room, through a single pane of glass, one ray of daylight fell across the Rembrandt-like shadows. On the mud floor, at the far end, a fire of peat burned with a dull red glow, and its thick, choking smoke curled in clouds about the rafters and softened the shadows. We could just make out the figures of two women crouching by the fire, the curtained bed in the corner, the spinning-wheel opposite. All other details were lost in gloom and smoke. Until you see it for yourself, you could not believe that in our nineteenth century men still live like this. Miss Gordon Cumming says that to the spinning and weaving of the women "is due much of such comfort as we may see by a peep into some of their little homes." But our peep showed us only that women weave and men work in vain, and that to speak of comfort is mockery in a cottage of Harris, or, indeed, in any cottage we saw in any part of the islands, for all those we went into were alike in their poverty and their darkness. As a rule, the fire burned in the centre on a circle of stones, and over it, from the roof, hung chain and hook for the kettle. They have not changed one jot or tittle since, a century ago, they moved Pennant to pity.